Some of Julie’s early work in channel from 1990 where Micciah discusses:
• To be in the rhythm of ongoing prayer alters one’s being and has “enormous impact” throughout all time. View Section
• Specificity of prayer: Detailed visualization is useful for the personality but does not invoke “the massive power [of] pure, undiluted Spirit.” To hold something in sacred regard creates “a kind of union with the One” that unleashes Spirit’s power. View Section
• Has prayer more effect when need is greater? With humans, a call for healing has less drawing force if one feels okay and is unwilling to undergo “a healing crisis” or “breakdown period.” View Section
• “Prayerfulness of language”: Conscious speech, “where you call upon the power of Spirit to weave itself into the words,” is powerful; “routinized” language is not. View Section

   Micciah: We greet you all, dear friends.

   Julie: My Name is Julie Winter, and this program is called Micciah Channel.
   And what you are going to see is me, going into an altered state of consciousness, a non-ordinary state of awareness. And what I believe happens when I am in that state is that I enter an expanded geography of the self, and that there is an overlap between what I know (my intelligence, my awareness, my experience) and something that is larger than my ordinary awareness. It may indeed be that it is all part of my awareness and that would be fine. What’s produced is a personality that is a product of this overlapping, and the personality is called Micciah.
   My voice is going to change and it is my own voice. The variations in speech have to do with my being in an altered state.
   The program is created from my classes. My students bring questions in. We encourage you to ask questions, to ask questions about channeling, about my channeling, whatever. And use your discernment in evaluating the information that comes through.

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   Micciah: We greet you all, dear friends. And we are most pleased to be among you.
   When you become one who is in the habit, the rhythm, of ongoing prayer — heartfelt prayer — and mindfulness, then you literally alter the biochemistry and the bioelectrical nature of your being. You as a small planet, you as an environment of consciousness, are altered substantially and permanently — going both backwards, what you would call backwards, and what you would call forwards, in time.
   Since it is so that the apparent present is composed of bits and pieces of awareness, a creation that is seemingly very solid yet in the greater sense permeable and nonlocal (the nonlocal present), so not only does your mindfulness and the ongoing nature and the power of your prayer, and your awareness of the sacred, affect you as an environment (and the immediate environment — the room, the city) it affects the environment of what you call time. And when you create a healing in this present life, its effects ripple down and out through all time.
   And when you are tempted to say (as it is so tempting in the way the world is, in the midst of such suffering, to say), “I can do nothing! What can I do? My offering is so small!” we say to you: This is not the truth. This is not the truth. The offering of your life, given to reverence and celebration, has enormous impact. Everywhere. That is the truth.
   [Whisper.] So. [Aloud.] Please — what are your questions?

   Sheldon: We’ve been talking about the specificity of prayer. In terms of our unconscious and conscious yearning, if it is there, then in our meditation should we just openly meditate and trust that the yearning will create its own appropriate shape?

   Micciah: Yes. Yes. And it is — it is necessary to be able to hold the entire situation — let us say, the entire city of New York — to hold it all ... in sacred regard. So that you are not meditating or praying toward, “Oh, let us — let us heal those benighted people who are not awakened”; or, “Let us heal the homeless.” No, no, hold the entirety of the life of the city itself within the love of Spirit, the love of God. So that you have that union in consciousness with the totality. That is the most potent way to do it, rather than saying, “Heal this. Heal this.”
   Please continue.

   Claudia: Micciah, I’d like to ask you a question. We’ve recently read that open-frame prayer has a more potent effect than specifically guided prayer or affirmation, and I’d just like to ask if you agree with that, and —

   Micciah: We do! And we will explain why.
   Hmmm — we will talk about this in two parts. Let us say you have hurt your knee, and you are asking for healing; and you imagine all of the ligaments and the muscles and so forth losing the swelling if they have been swollen, coming to their normal size, aligning rightly around the kneecap, around the patella. You do that part for your own personality self, to go through the directions of what to do. But that alone does not invoke the massive power that is available through pure, undiluted Spirit.
   When you ask for those very specific things, you are not calling upon Spirit’s power — you are simply directing the physical pieces to come together aright. And that has an effect. It is useful. But it is like a drop of water compared with a thousand times Niagara Falls.
   Do you understand the distinction we are making? When you say to your white blood cells, let us say, “Now, we must reduce your, or increase your number; reduce your number; whatever.” And you visualize it. That is for the personality self. It is an exercise that is often very useful for the personality because it feels involved and competent. It is not wrong to do that, or undesirable to do that.
   However, that is very different from calling upon the magnificence of Spirit in which you bathe yourself, or the situation or the person — because when you do that you call upon everything that has every been known, everything that has ever been said, felt, expressed, about Spirit. From the nonlocal present you call upon eternity when you open your heart to that and yield to it. Do you understand?

   Students: Mm-hmm.

   Micciah: But we would like to say to you as well: it is a good exercise for the personality to think about healing, or to think about a plan to be put into action, but — but don’t meditate on it that way. Use it as a way of clarifying and as a way of involving the thinking self. But not as a basis for meditation or prayer.
   It is like asking for this much when you could ask for — a miracle. You limit it to what you know about healing knee caps or blood. What you know is far less than what Spirit knows.
   Is that clear?

   Claudia: Yes.

   Micciah: What does it mean to hold something — to be in the practice, in the skill, of holding something — in sacred regard? It is a kind of union with the One; and in that the forces of Spirit are unleashed through your faith and your capacity and willingness to be in the liveliness of surrender.
   The other is much more controlling, yes? “Spirit do this, do this, do this.”

   Gwen: Also coming out of that same reading is the idea that prayer may be more effective when there is apparent need or suffering — and what do you think of that?

   Micciah: Hmmmm ... Nnnno, not exactly. Prayer — the effect of prayer is more overtly noticeable when, as we said before, there is the magnet of true yearning. Not this kind of yearning [hands clutching] — THIS kind of yearning. [hands open] When that is a force, a drawing force, then the situation or the entity are open to — is opened to the inrush of healing forces.
   In the case of a person, of a — a two-legged creature: when you ask in prayer ... around a situation that is going quite well (you experience it as being vital and harmonious, pleasurable, or difficult but wonderful), then, you see, in order for big change, great growth, you must also be willing to perhaps lose the equilibrium of the situation — which you often are not.
   We will give you an example. Let us say you are going along all right, and your body feels well, and you pray over the health and the vitality of your body. Yes?
   And, ah — in order for your body to be still more healthy you would have to undergo a healing crisis, because the things that are out of balance would start to show up in order to be healed. And you don’t really have the desire to do that. So — not much cooks in the prayer.
   In order for the situation to show profound change, it would have to undergo — most likely — some breakdown period. And you do not have a genuine desire for that, do you see? So you are not really calling out. Whereas once you are already in difficulty, then the cry — there is more surrender into it.
   But what about plants, or something that seems less conscious? Why would prayer be more powerful toward an ailing plant than toward a well one? It is as if the torn elements, let us say, in the energy field of the plant if it is diseased, have their own magnitude of yearning, and, ah — will draw to themselves a greater amount from all that is available. Whereas the plant that is well ... hmmm ... it has no place, no valence, for the prayer to come in.
   However, this is not completely true, because you can use prayer in a garden, let us say, where things are quite healthy, and create an astonishing garden. It’s not quite true — the experiments are not quite right. [Pause.] Not quite right.
   We think the experiments were somewhat affected by the believing of the participants and their — their own consciousness about what would happen. Ah — it’s not quite true. But in human beings there is sometimes a resistance to change when something is going apparently well; and if the prayer activity were to flourish within you, you would get sometimes a lot of bumping and thumping as you broke ground for the change. Do you understand that part?

   Students: Um-hmm.

   Micciah: Also, sometimes things don’t need to be “better” than they are. They are the way they are, and that — all you need to do is appreciate the magnificence of the way it is; you don’t have to — and bless it — there is no necessity for it to be larger this way instead of this way, this way instead of this way. It’s not necessary. It’s not desirable or important.
   Things can flourish as breakdown — not only as growth but as breakdown. In the midst of breakdown ... the breakdown can represent a flourishing.

   Sheldon: I believe that in the connection between the spiritual realm and the material realm this thing called consciousness is not very clear and efficient; and it seems that the act of prayer gets distorted, to some degree, by our conscious participation —

   Micciah: Yes.

   Sheldon: — even the way we use language. Words no longer have their meaning and power because we’ve twisted them so often.

   Micciah: Yes.

   Sheldon: So how do we get the conscious out of it — or how do me make the conscious more accurate and useful?

   Micciah: You remember a number of sessions ago we spoke about the Silence — being able to enter into the Silence. The Silence which is — which contains all sound.
   When you enter into the Silence, you expand your prayerfulness. But it is also true, Sheldon, that when you ... recapture the prayerfulness of language, that that is very potent. They are both potent. To use language in its ordinary form — in the way that it has indeed become distorted and routinized — is not powerful. But to recapture what — what the word is ... is powerful. And so is sounding and chanting and singing.
   Sheila?

   Sheila: What do you mean by the prayerfulness of language [and] “what the word is”?

   Micciah: Conscious speech ... threads together ... big elements of consciousness, and enters into other dimensions.
   When someone goes on a vision quest and receives a sacred name, that name has meaning because it weaves together; it is — it is the weaving, the representation, the sound representation, of this person’s vision. And that is different from simply screaming, “Hey, Joe!”
   Poetry, song, music, are all ways of attempting (and often succeeding) to do that kind of weaving — where you call upon the power of consciousness, the power of Spirit, to weave itself into words.
   It is one of the reasons that language is — that it is important to pay attention to the mantras you use. What do you use as a mantra? “Oh, this is driving me crazy! Oh, this is driving me crazy! Oh, this is dri-” — you just keep saying it.
   This is a very large topic: the nature of sound and the sound — the sounds you make as beings, and the ways in which words, when they are used as expressions of deep reverence, affect what we spoke of in the beginning of the session: the bioelectrical field, the biochemistry of the body.
   If you think of someone — the difference between someone’s deep expression of loving you, either expressing it silently or with deep feeling through words, or simply saying on the phone, “Well love ya honey!” and hanging up — that’s what we are getting at.
   If you pay attention to your speaking for one whole day, pay attention to what you are really saying, you will open many doors.
   So. We will leave you now.
   We want to say that you can come back to the question of prayer, because we have just scratched a little bit of the surface of it.

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   Julie: That’s the end of this particular segment... of this particular adventure. And this channeling is meant to be a spiritual, emotional, intellectual, heartful, mindful journey that I share with another realm, that I share with my classes and that we all share with you.
   Please go over the material, evaluate it for yourself, and know what it is that you think about it.