Some of Julie’s early work from 1986 where Micciah discusses:
• Physical reality as a reflection of the luminous realm: You must learn to live in “the paradox of absolute permanency and absolute transparency.” View Section
• Why is it difficult it maintain happiness and pleasure in life? When fear of the involuntary occurs, aliveness is thwarted. This culture suppresses the involuntary, encourages each of us to become “the inner Nazi.” The pleasure of pleasing our parents, the culture, etc., by suppressing aliveness substitutes for real pleasure. We may stimulate “aliveness” with horror, pain and dangerous excitement. In this culture it is not acceptable to spontaneously express love, but we do relate around horror. Learn to trust the involuntary. View Section
• How does our culture define pleasure? This culture displaces true aliveness and pleasure with displacement of personal pleasurable feelings onto outer manifestations - power, ego gratifications. View Section
• What did the Buddha mean when he said that all life is suffering? He was speaking about attachment to the physical world; as long as we are attached, we suffer. View Section

   Micciah: We greet you all, dear friends.

   Julie: We do greet you, indeed. This is Micciah Channel, and I’m Julie Winter. Micciah is an energy entity who works with me while I’m in trance, and while I’m in the trance state I have access to a point of view that seems to come from a non-physical realm. This series of programs is drawn primarily from videotapes taken during my regular classes. We want to expand our circle, and include your energy and interest in our work.

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   Julie: In this session we're going to discuss the paradox of solidity and transparency. Although objects in life and bodies in the physical world seem solid and dense, they are actually created from the luminous realms and carry with them luminosity or transparency, and also changeability. We're going to talk about the loss of pleasure, how we lose pleasure by cutting ourselves off from the involuntary. That is, in our fear, we stop allowing ourselves to follow or to fall into the natural rhythm of our body and the natural rhythm of our intuition; and gradually cut off our channels for experiencing pleasure, and then seek pleasure through (again paradoxically) danger and through painful situations, because that danger and pain pull at the quick of our being. And last but not least, we are going to talk about suffering, and the way in which attachment - to thoughts, to bodies, to people - causes suffering.

   Micciah: Yes, we do greet you. We would like to remind you that everything that you see with your physical eyes, that you touch and taste and feel, is a manifestation of the luminous, or nonphysical, realm. That those things which seem the most dense and solid have construed themselves out of the intention of the ephemeral. And that this world as you know it is woven together with other realms that you choose not to perceive — although we are pleased to be invited as a representative, an ongoing representative of one other realm. And that there is absolute permanence and absolute transparency.
   In this realm, you, by creating a physical body, address yourself, through choice, to the dilemma — apparent dilemma — of eternity and impermanence, of solidity and transparency. And the chief illuminator is compassion for the whole of it. And the power is your willingness to inquire. To look at reality and say, “Is this really the all of it? Is this really the whole of the whole? Are these knees really as solid as they seem?” (Well, they are and they aren't.) And how deeply you integrate the compassion and the inquiry and the reverence that comes from that, the depth of the way you integrate this affects everything you touch.
   If you touch a flower... — We don't want to give away the last... We don't want to give everything away in one shot. — If you touch a flower and you are entranced by its beauty, if you are reverent, in a humorous way, about it, and then you want to hold onto it, the pain will come in the holding, in the attachment.
   So, we can hear you thinking, “Yes, we know this. Everybody knows this.” But you are not fully aware of it in your being. If you embrace the flower in its living, its apparent living and its apparent dying, then there is no attachment, and you loosen the pain, you can blow it away.

   Richard: On the day-to-day level, why is it so difficult to keep happiness and pleasure in our lives? What causes one to choose discomfort or pain?

   Micciah: To become addicted to the pain. Yes, this is a very complicated issue.
   One of the elements that creates an addiction to pain — this will sound very strange — is your aliveness. When aliveness is thwarted, when there is a great fear of the involuntary, which there is in your culture... You are very frightened, as a group, of the apparent chaos of the spontaneous movement of the involuntary. It's one of the reasons — we don't like reasons, but — it's one of the reasons that birth is very painful, because you think it is a disease, you treat it as a disease, and women are taught — so are men — to disconnect from and to do violence to the involuntary, to shut it off, to punish it, to repress it. We will explain what we mean by involuntary.
   If you reach for the flower, that is volitional. If you are overcome with a feeling, that comes from the involuntary. If you have an orgasm, that comes from... At some point, to let yourself have an orgasm, you need to plunge, even if only for a moment, into the involuntary, yes? You have to let it, let it go through you. As a group you are very frightened of involuntary process. So the parent transmits to the child, emotional body to emotional body, talking mind to talking mind, “No, child, your excitement is dangerous. Your life energy is frightening me. Shut it down. Learn control. Learn to be the violent leader in charge of your own involuntary process. Learn to be the inner Nazi.” You are very preoccupied with housebreaking children, yes? Children will housebreak themselves. And much younger than you think, at a much earlier age, at any rate. So you are frightened of the involuntary. And you shut if off. So then, the surest, natural avenue to pleasure starts to be damaged. You can change it also, you're not stuck with this forever. Sometimes the abstract pleasure of being good, or the emotional reward — think we'll stick with the housebreaking example, that ought to keep everyone's attention — “You be a good child and do what your mother wants, or your father wants, and we will reward you. If you do violence to your own involuntary process, in the way we want you to, we will reward you.”
   So the somewhat abstract pleasure of having your parents approval, of looking at their pleasure that you have done this, starts to replace a natural connection with your own involuntary movements. (No pun intended.) The less there is available, in terms of plunging into the involuntary, the more becomes substitute pleasure, the pleasure of pleasing the other person, of doing a good job. If even that is not available, you try to stimulate your aliveness, your spontaneous pleasure, with horror and with pain. And, you notice, you relate very easily to people — we have talked about this before — around horror.
   One of the ways that involuntary liveliness is permitted to come out, voluntary caring about someone, for instance. It is not approved of in ordinary situations, being sociable with people, touching them, you never even look at anyone undressed, hardly. That all becomes murky and clouded and sexual and dangerous. All these avenues are cut off. To spontaneously express your love, to run towards someone and hug them. You learn you are not supposed to do that. That is shameful, it is foolish. So one of the only avenues for aliveness and and spontaneous expression of the involuntary movement of aliveness through your body is crisis and pain. Do you understand? It is a series of displacements. So dangerous excitement, for instance, riding a motorcycle in a very dangerous way, or doing something that is deliberately dangerous, pulls at the quick of your being, becomes necessary to stimulate, because all of the other avenues have been cut off.
   You notice that animals do not engage in that kind of negative excitement. So in order to reclaim your own pleasures, you must be able to plunge into the involuntary and trust it. You also have as a group distrust of the earth, yes?, relative to some of the native people of this continent — not all of them, some of them — who had a loving relationship with the earth and its involuntary processes — storms, and rains, and burning heat, and so forth. Your cultural bent has been to conquer the earth, to be the harsh leader, to be in control. Just as you do to your own bodies, you do to the earth. You create the mirrors in your leaders. You can very gently reorient yourself toward life-affirming pleasure. When too much of the involuntary is out of reach, greater and greater stimulation may be needed, which becomes apparently a search for pleasure but actually has a frantic quality where no satisfaction ever penetrates. If you trust the involuntary and move with it, you are quite safe. And eventually your body would be carried safely into death. And you fight death, you fight death, it is the ultimate failure. In your culture. Death. And yet, paradoxically, you cause so much death. Unnecessary.
   So, Richard, does this answer the question?

   Richard: Yes.

   Micciah: You need to look individually at the ways in which you are either trusting of or mistrustful of your involuntary levels and your spontaneity. People very spontaneously will express concern in a crisis. It is one of the few arenas you have left for yourselves. There are people who remember the blitzes in London — that is the right word? blitz? — with great affection. Not because of the danger. Because that allowed them to contact each other, to express what is simply the natural caring. You don't have to wait for a disaster. So, it is the same in leadership. United States did volunteer its help to Russia, yes? On the one hand build bombs to destroy them, and on the other hand, in the crisis, in the midst of the quote accident, spontaneous help was forthcoming. Of course they might have wanted to send in a few spies while they were at it.

   Lois: Our designation of what pleasure is is not just personal, it is cultural. And I'm just wondering how culture designates what is pleasure.

   Micciah: Your culture confuses... A lot of what you imagine... This is directly tied in, Lois. With the mistrust of the involuntary, which connects. The involuntary and the intuitive level connect very directly to each other. You start to miss out, to lose contact with what is really satisfying. When trust is withheld from the natural beingness and its rhythm, you lose your sensing about what is pleasureful for you. And then there is a progressive displacement, as we described with this previous question from Richard, progressively abstract in terms of what will give pleasure, progressively more disconnected with one's own sensing, feeling, knowing. So satisfaction is sought, for instance, in your culture — it seems to be all about your culture today... The designation is around power. Worldly power. Not power from within. Power over. Gratification of an ego that has been shaped in a particular way.
   You behave as if the ego were, uh, immutably structured, like a cabinet. You have shaped your ego in a particular way. Then what satisfies the ego part of the self is designated as pleasurable. It becomes increasingly abstract. The most abstract is your imagining that things, that a — sometimes a thing can be very beautiful and satisfying — but that a multiplicity, a proliferation of things would be intensely satisfying. And you know for a fact that's not so.
   Cultures designate pleasure around what they revere, and you revere the mind in its abstract and somewhat disconnected existence. You revere things that can be made — objects. Things that are exclusive. The exclusive car. A car is just a pile of metal. Who cares? What good will it do your soul? So, the contact between all the levels of being, the involuntary at the physical level, the involuntary at the emotional level, inspiration, which is involuntary movement at the level of the mind, intuition, all of those associations with pleasure get narrowed down and refocused onto abstractions which are not pleasurable, not satisfying. You can redesignate. You, on the continent of you, can redesignate your own pleasures by eliminating the ones that you understand are life-thwarting, or at least not life-supporting.
   You really have choices. Really. Really. You can relearn. You are not stuck with your developmental patterns. You are always in the process of developing. So you could reorganize the whole thing. And you might take delight in things with no attachment. Then you would be free with them. Then you could give them away, yes. Then you wouldn't mind sharing.

   Amielle: I've always wondered what the Buddha meant when he said all life is suffering.

   Micciah: The suffering to which the Buddha referred was attachment. That life in the physical world always bumps your nose up against attachment. Attachment to your body, to your thoughts, to your feelings, to your objects, to your partners, to your homes, to your spiritual work. The attachment is the suffering. So all... It is misinterpreted to mean life is woe. It is an unfortunate quote, quoted out of context. Casts an unfortunate light.
   Things decay. It is possible to take delight in the decay if you are not fixated on permanence in physical form. You can plan on it, the physical forms are going to decay. There are whole billion-dollar industries devoted to your wish that the physical world did not decay. But it couldn't grow without decaying. It's not decay that's the problem. It's the attachment. If we keep this tulip until the next time we meet again in this form — perhaps we should do that — it will not look the way it looks now. And that is the way it is. If you are enamored of the whole process, all of it, eating and shitting, being born and dying, then a great deal of the suffering is ameliorated.
   So, we will leave you. We very much appreciate being with you and all of your devotion and commitment. And also of “this one” in her willingness to use her physical self. And for Jon and for Courtney and for all of you who watch through television. We bid you a very good afternoon.

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    Julie: I want to remind you that the channeling that I do with Micciah is really an ongoing exploration; in watching and listening, you're part of the exploration. So the work is here and it is our intention to share it with those of you who watch. You need to evaluate it for yourselves, to go over the information, to assess what feels right to you, use what feels right and let the rest go.