Some of Julie’s early work in channel from 1987 where Micciah discusses Death and the Dying Process:
• Earthly existence is a great opportunity and is full of possibility. “To be immersed in the great ocean of the body is a precious time.” Much of the work here is to learn about choice. View Section
• Letting go of fear and preparing for death; and assisting the dying: Our culture treats death like a shameful secret and a failure. Let out your feelings about death. Work to transmit the experience that death is safe. Some people in other ancient cultures were trained to be “midwives into the next world,” to assist in the dying process. You can “live your life with death at your side,” so that you are always complete. View Section
• The meaning of suicide: There are many different kinds. War is one culturally-accepted form. Fatal illness is another. Suicide is often motivated by desperation and anger; sometimes it is a release from great pain. After suicide, the Great Self can go back and contemplate other possibilities. 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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   Micciah: We greet you all, dear friends. We are so happy to be here; and as you meet together and work together and meditate together and share the seasons and your selves, there are other beings who organize their calendars to be here with you because it is not so, at least in our opinion, that the earth is a very lowly realm into which souls are tossed because their general level of development is so poor. We do not consider this realm, the earth, to be a place to get out of, develop out of, as quickly as possible. It is, uh, a most precious opportunity to dive into the waves of the physical; to be immersed in the great ocean of the body is a precious time. And as we have said before, one of the tasks on the earth is to choose, to learn how to choose, because as you view life, things seem to be in opposition to each other, yes? Life to death, sickness to health, youth to age. And it seems as if choices come from what you call the outside world. It is outside and you have to choose. This career or that. This lover or that. This rug or that. And the mind, the thinking mind, the linear mind, gets very caught up in whether it is the right choice: “Are you stupid? And making the wrong choice! The wrong rug, the wrong lover, the wrong guru. Stupid!” Really, the celebration is in the process of your being able to align yourself not with the rising and falling of circumstances, which is the wave, but with that impulse that creates the wave in the first place.
   So, please, what questions have you?

   Ken: When someone is imminently facing death, how does one let go of the fears and best prepare for a smooth transition out of the body? How can an attendant help and guide the dying person to accept the change with love?

   Micciah: Good question. You are very badly informed about death in your culture. This is not true for every culture, but it is true for you, although it is changing. And death in its mystery, the mystery you give to it, has become like a shameful secret.
   Sometimes in hospitals or within a family the very person who is dying is not confronted, is not... “Shall we tell him that he is dying?” Don’t you think people know when they are dying? So death is shrouded with mystery, with fear, and with shame. The medical... The attitude often in the medical profession, but not always, is that they are shamed when they lose the patient. And even in healing, in the more holistically oriented teachings there is something like an infection; so the false thinking is if you just meditated rightly, if you just cleaned up your consciousness act, you wouldn’t be dying now, would you? Must be something distasteful in that consciousness that you would want to leave your body.
   This is a crazy and destructive attitude. Dying, that is completing one’s tenancy in the physical form, or in what appears in the way that you have constructed time to be physical — for all intents and purposes that’s part of the, of the carnival — to imagine that it is a shameful and terrifying thing to leave that body is destructive. So, one important attitude to examine are the feelings of the individual and the feelings of the people surrounding the individual, the doctors or the family or the shaman or whatever. This is not something you can just change your mind about. You know, “Oh well, I’m not afraid of death any more.” Baloney. The feelings go very deeply, the hypnosis that has created the fear goes very deeply, so it takes work, Ken, for people to be with people who are dying. And much more work is being done now with Stephen Levine and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ram Dass. Many people speaking about death.
   So first is to go for the feeling level, to let out the feelings, the fears, the concerns and begin to learn, emotionally and intellectually and physically, how to reframe them. We... First of all — or second of all — death is not the same for every person. The consciousness surrounding death, in what you would call the after-death state, is different for different people, just as the conditions upon entering the physical world — although they have an underlying similarity, you are all in small bodies, you are all helpless, etcetera, etcetera — there are also very very different circumstances. Some babies are born into igloos, some babies are born in the balminess of the tropics. Some babies are born into frozen emotional atmospheres, full of fear, into wartime, into torment. Some babies are born and cuddled right away.
   So when you exit your body, you meet different circumstances, none of them... or all of them offer the possibility of immense love, because in some ways when your body goes, some of the restrictions that you may have had, that you may never have penetrated, the duality that you may never have penetrated, drops away. And the stories that people tell of moving toward a light or being engulfed with love are true. So the education is toward safety. But you can’t just teach it from thinking, although that’s a start. You can only really teach it by transmitting it, and you can only transmit it by working with yourself and working in groups and letting people speak the truth. And it is.... Unless the person wishes to be alone, which some people do, at the moment of leaving the body — really it’s not a moment, it’s a series of moments — many more people if they could be would be held, just like when you are born. Held, and rocked, and sung to, and then escorted from this world into the other world.
   Now, we are going to digress a bit. But it’s important. There were times, and cultures — Atlantis was one, and some of the time in Egypt, and some of the early Christians, some of the Jewish mystics, many of the Native American people, many of the native New Zealand people — trained people to be what we will call walkers between the worlds. So, these people, priests and teachers, were like midwives into the next dimension. And they could actually loosen their own attachments to their bodies and escort their friends, their loved ones, across the river, across into the other worlds. See to their well-being, and then come back. It was not always as rigid and as terrifying a division as it is in your culture. Does this make sense?
   Children, if left to their own devices, are far less afraid of dying. You know, if you read the work of Doctor Jampolsky, who has worked with children, terminally ill children, they are more afraid for their parents than they are for themselves.
   So, the big move now would be to get it out of the closet, yes? And to prepare as you would prepare for any great journey, for a great adventure.
   And also, to work with people in the sense of working with them in a practical way. To speak of death and of dying and of the celebration, the release, the fear, the loneliness, the isolation, whatever, and to complete in this life what needs to be completed before you make the journey. In many spiritual practices you are asked to live your life with death at your side, not meaning it in a morbid sense but to bring such a fullness of awareness into each moment, that each moment that you live is complete, all of your acts are complete. So you are ready to go at any time. Do you understand this? Generally?

   Class: Yes.

   Ken: This brings me to a continuation of the question.

   Micciah: Yes.

   Ken: What are the ramifications of suicide at the moment and also in the greater self?

   Micciah: Ah. Suicide. The voluntary choice. The voluntary choice to end physical life. Although you refer to all suicide by a single word, it is really the intention and the purpose of the suicide that is important, because like all being born and dying, one person’s intentionality and another’s can be so different that, that to describe it with the same code word puts you in a false relationship to that person’s act. So, there are many kinds of suicide. There is the suicide of going to war, a practice which has been very much rewarded with ribbons and medals and plaques and statues. So to enter into a war is an accepted way, if not of committing suicide at least of seriously courting death, yes? And to [pause] create an illness in the body....
   See, all death is voluntary. You make... It’s a matter of degree. And the degree, it’s necessary to talk about the degree to which one is responsible. But we would like to say that in terms of consciousness, all death, all death is voluntary. It’s never an accident. So... If you choose to leave your body because the body is filled with pain and with disease, that is very different from choosing to leave your body because of financial failure and shame. It is a different intention, yes? Sometimes it is a measure of desperation. Sometimes it is an act the intention of which is very angry. The general psychological trend is to say that all suicide is angry, but we feel that that is not so. Some suicide is protective. Because you have created such exquisite drugs, therapies and so forth, that can keep you in your body while the body is in horrible pain, then you can use another drug to release yourself from that suffering. That can be a protective measure, a statement. “I don’t want to live another three months in blinding pain.” So, that is very different. There is no... So, in evaluating it, you can... It is not possible to say, well, suicide in general is bad karma. In each individual’s working through.... again we are talking about choosing, yes? At what level is the choice made? How conscious is it? For each individual’s unfolding and development, the intentionality is what has an impact in the blossoming of the soul. What was the intention of the act?
   It would be easier for us to say it is just right or it is just wrong. But from this point of view that is not so. Sometimes, when there has been deep torment, not in the physical body but the emotional body, you are much less ready in your culture to accept suicide for that reason. Then when the body is gone, when the.... the great self, if you will, or the wiser self, or whatever you would like to call it, contemplates that situation, they can see probable realities, pathways you did not take and, since time is all simultaneous, you can go back. You think you can’t go back. But they can go back and follow other probabilities, try out what would have happened if you had taken this course rather than that one. And the whole panorama of the choices is contemplated with compassion. From our point of view, you will not consign yourself to thousands of lifetimes of suffering because you could not stay in your body for one reason or another in this life. Although you may view it compassionately and see the roads you didn’t travel. But we could say the same for a young boy brought up in a nationalistic culture who volunteers to fight the quote enemy, loses his body in a battle, and looks at the whole panorama and says, in linear terms, “I think I won’t do that again.” [laughter] So, in what you conceive of as time, perhaps that entity will be pacifist. Hard to talk about time as being simultaneous and time in the linear sense all at the same time. So...
   We thank you very much for being here. We thank those of you who watch and listen. And we bid you all a most joyful afternoon. And [patting the cat] our Zoe, also.

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   Julie: That’s all for the moment. At the end of class, we discuss the information that Micciah has shared and talk about how to use it in ordinary life since all of this information was given to be used.