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John of God

by Ross Bishop

I have received a number of questions about my recent trip to see John of God. Most people want to know if he is real, and if so, what the implications are for their own healing process. Over the years, I have heard many stories about Joao (his real name), so that I was fairly certain he was legitimate. And, having been with him, I can report that yes, he is for real. I can understand people's skepticism because I've been with Philippine and Hindu psychic "healers" who were great showmen, but complete frauds. So, healthy skepticism in these matters is always wise.

Besides, when Western doctors put cancer patients through long bouts of agonizing and debilitating chemotherapy and radiation, one has to wonder about some guy from Brazil who is reported to cure cancer with a look or the wave of his hand. Joao's work stands in stark contrast to what we are taught to believe about disease and healing. Then too, to describe this experience I feel as Alice must have felt after she came back through the looking glass, and someone asked, “What was it like?” How do I describe an experience that by its very nature defies the realities of normal existence? The answer is, I can't. I'll describe as best I can what took place, but the experience itself is beyond what language can convey.

Joao is a trance-channel, meaning that John the man is essentially set aside while entities occupy his body to accomplish the healing work. John has little knowledge or awareness of what happens when he is in the trance state. Entities, (and there are a group of them) can then more directly affect what happens in this domain. The entities can accomplish what we consider miracles because they operate from a different reality. We tend to think that we are the only game in town and forget that we share the universe with beings and forces that are not constrained by the limitations of three dimensional time and space.

Shamans are drawn to work with Joao because the entities share the realms we regularly work in. That was one of the reasons I wanted to witness Joao at work. I'll speak about Joao in a bit, but first I would like to offer a view of disease and healing that is probably different from the one you grew up with. It will give you a context against which to view what Joao does.
This might seem off-topic, but the first thing we need to consider is why we are here. We are on earth in my belief to learn to love and respect ourselves. How many people do you know that really love themselves? Do you? Sure, some people do it better than others do, but self-love is pretty rare as a human commodity, and that is not accidental.

I believe you are here to change the negative (and damaging) beliefs you hold about yourself. This happens through life experiences. Look at every painful event that has ever happened to you, and you will find that the pain was not from the event itself. Your pain was created from your feelings about what happened. You hurt because you were not honoring and loving yourself. This is not mere coincidence - it is true in every situation, for every human being all over the planet. The reason this is important is that the conflicts that result from our not loving ourselves are the origin of our illnesses and disease

Most people spend a good part of their lives experiencing and eventually learning from, their pain. This happens because we run our lives from our egos. The ego is a mental structure that substitutes fear-based beliefs for the Truth. It is an expression of our lack to love for ourselves.
Leading from the ego instead of the Truth, we are bound to experience difficulties in life. We must because the Universe will not allow disharmonious patterns to remain. Our difficulties are the Universe's way of pointing out to us that we are out of alignment. So, we will have "a life experience" which is a nice way of saying that we got a kick in the butt.

The kick in the butt is really an opportunity to move away from our egos and to grow and change into a more compassionate space, but most of the time we are not in a position to do that. We focus on being kicked and miss the opportunity that is being presented. We experience fear, anger, and pain and take our life experiences as evidence of our unworthiness. The impetus may come from a partner, a friend, or a parent, but these people do not create your pain, you do. Aside from physical violence, other people cannot hurt you. Your beliefs, especially about yourself, determine what you will feel badly about and how much. Your pain came because you made a choice that they were right and that you deserved to be treated that way, even as much as you hated it.

Otherwise, if you didn't agree with them, you wouldn't like what they said, but you would pass it off as obviously untrue and that would be the end of it. Other people just give us reasons to justify shooting ourselves. The interesting thing about this is if you were in a place of self-love, you couldn't be kicked! It is the dominance of the ego (the absence of self-love) that creates the conditions that allow you to be kicked in the first place!
Holding on to shame and guilt for 20, 30 and sometimes 40 years, is not being ashamed, it is clinging to shame because you believe you deserved it. That is not loving yourself. The pain isn't there to punish you; it is there to make you aware of what you are doing.

It is very difficult to step away from our emotions and see our problems as learning gifts from a loving and caring Creator. It is a lot easier to feel hurt and angry than to look at what we have been doing. Bartholomew is a channeled entity brought through by my friend Mary Margaret Moore. In a session one day, Bartholomew said, "When you choose love when you have every reason to choose other, then you truly become the master."

Faced with an emotional assault, we react by contracting, both physically and emotionally. It is this resistance that ultimately leads to mental dysfunction and disease. When we contract around an "assault,” we tighten our muscles and contract our organs. We also “tighten” our thought processes. Our breathing and circulation become impaired. Toxicity levels in our tissue increases as the natural flow of nutrients and waste removal is restricted. Cell function is impaired and cell reproduction becomes abnormal. Stressed organs affect the entire body. It is the same for our thoughts. The entire body contracts when the mind rigidifies. Rigid, fear based, contracted thoughts are damaging to the body. These are the first small steps in the process we know as disease.

Western medicine sees heart failure or cancer as organ or tissue problems. It's not that this view is incorrect; it is just that it is incomplete. And, yes, your heart has failed, or yes, you have breast cancer, but those conditions are the result of years of resisting the pressures from the Universe to change the beliefs and attitudes you hold about yourself. The heart, lungs, or nerves have failed for important reasons that in traditional belief systems have to do with your disharmonious attitudes toward yourself and toward life. Until those beliefs are addressed, real healing is not possible. Yes, you can fuse the spine and replace the heart and remove the tumor, but you will not heal what is really troubling you by doing that. But, can't a heart just fail? Can't a liver or kidney become toxic on its own? Aren’t there accidents? The answer is no. It may look like a genetic failure or a virus, or a collision, but that's just the process. These failures cannot occur without an opening created by years of stress and contraction. Often these conditions will generate a crisis in order to break through resistance and bring on a healing, but that's a somewhat different subject.

Let’s look at openings for a moment. Think about a typical hospital surgical suite and how much effort is taken to prevent infection. Now consider that John of God has done visible surgeries – scalpel wielding, tissue cutting surgery - in a contaminated, open air environment, with the germs of hundreds of observers, most of them ill, further contaminating the area. Yet, in 25 years of visible surgeries, there has never been a secondary infection to one of Jao's patients. When no opening is created, there can be no infection. From the conventional Western point of view, John is the anomaly.

Let me put you into the scene: You are in a line of hundreds of people seeking help, slowly walking up an aisle between rows of people who are meditating in support of Joao's process. It’s a hot day, the windows are closed tight, and the room is stifling. This is "The Current Room." When it’s your turn, an entity occupying John's body looks at you with incredibly loving and piercing eyes for maybe 6 seconds. The feeling of the entity's love sweeps though your body. It’s incredible!

Then you are ushered into an adjoining area. You can feel the entity continuing to work on you, while he works with the hundred other people remaining in line. Sometimes people who are waiting in line just collapse from being worked on. There are plenty of assistants to help them.

Joao commands a crippled man stand without his crutches, and the man does, with difficulty. Joao then tells the man to walk, and muscles that have not supported weight for 36 years, clumsily respond. The man walks for the first time since a childhood injury crippled him. The whole process takes perhaps a minute and a half, and then Joao moves on to the next person. He will do visible surgery on a few people, but these are exceptions.

When Joao has finished seeing everyone, and they come to see him by the busloads, Joao leaves, and you go to stand up. You quickly realize that something powerful has happened to you. You don't know what, but you know that whatever it was, it was profound. Your body feels different.

Over the next few days, you rest because your body is processing significant change. You see Joao several more times and he continues the work. You can feel the impact of the changes. Some people feel things happening to them at night. The explanation is that sutures from the psychic surgeries are being removed. Subsequent X-rays show visible suture marks.
People have returned home report that their tumors have shrunk or that their vision is now normal. Traumatized hearts beat regularly, kidneys no longer need dialysis, leukemias go into remission, and AIDS has magically disappeared. Skeptical physicians are forced to accept, reluctantly, the truth told them by their blood tests, X-rays and MRIs.

By any healing standard, if a Western doctor could do these things, the media would be raving about "miracle cures." Bring any four of the hundreds of cases I saw each morning into the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins and the networks would be doing news specials about the "Miracles of Modern Medicine." But, Joao cannot bring his healing to America. He would be arrested and prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. In fairness to the media, The Discovery Channel is airing a multi-part series about Joao's work in July.

Not everyone who comes to see the entities is healed. Some people feel nothing and return home crestfallen, angry, and defeated. Others need to return and repeat the process in order to complete. Some people go into remission for a time and then relapse. I will speak of these things in a moment.

So what does this former Brazilian farmer and his entities have that trillions of dollars of medical research and the best trained doctors and manufactured drugs that Western science can create, cannot duplicate? What is the secret of Joao's healing? And, what does that say about Western science and medicine?

It goes back to my point about why we are here. Remember that my original premise was that we came because we did not love ourselves. Inherent in that concept is the idea of separation from the Creator. If you love yourself, you love God, and vice-versa. And, this is where the entity’s healing comes in.

When you reach the head of the line in the Current Room, look into those eyes, and feel that love, you know that you are loved by God. You simply cannot be in that space and not feel it. Experiencing that, it is difficult to continue feeling unlovable and defective. In that moment, the potential is there to drop years of pain and suffering, self-doubt and self-recrimination. But, you must be willing to accept it because after all, we do have free will.
Many people accept being loved and being lovable, and in that brief experience, begin a process of unwinding years of pent-up pain and frustration. In the healing time that follows, their physical, emotional and psychic systems begin to reorient and reorganize in greater alignment with the Truth. Years of tension, pain and dysfunction melt away because the disharmony that created them is no longer dominant. I watched as the entities worked to bring each person's physical structure in harmony with the deeper psychic truth they were experiencing. For someone who does my kind of work, it was remarkable to observe. I am simplifying a complex process, but I think you get the idea.

Are these people healed? The answer is partly. What is important is that the critical component to their healing has been affected. Their bodies and psyches have been re-introduced to the Truth, and that feeling will remain with them as an anchor or a beacon to guide them home. Like a rubber band, their physical system has been encouraged to return to its natural, normal state. It's where it wants to be anyway.

Now it's up to the person to work with their interfering inner beliefs and attitudes, but that job will be much easier now. I wish that Joao would provide a process for people to do that, but regrettably, he does not and it is forbidden to practice any outside modality in the Casa.

When some people were presented with the truth, they simply could not embrace it. They could not accept being loved unconditionally. They were so invested in being defective and unworthy that they could not accept another way of thinking or being. Centuries of pain and frustration had backed them into a deep corner from which they could not easily emerge. They came, having resisted every other healing modality, desperate for a magic bullet that would save them.

These are the people who, for the most part, went away angry, frustrated and unhealed. But, if you observed the energy of their systems, you realized that this was exactly the challenge that their rock-hard beliefs needed. Eventually their frustration would dynamite them to surrender and change. It is a rough process, but that is the path that they are on.

Occasionally the entity would recognize that one of these "hard case" people was actually ready to give up their resistance and let go. The entity would then lovingly split them open like a ripe coconut and then create a safe space for their old anger and pain to be deposited. The cancer and AIDS cases were wonderful to see cured, but for me, these hard case people were the real miracles that happened in the Casa.

Seeing this, you realize once again, the perfection of the process we participate in. It isn't perfect from our point of view, but each of us, whatever our circumstance, receives exactly what we need to bring us home. And, it does not matter one whit what we think about the process. Watching it all I was reminded of something Ram Dass had written years ago in Grist For The Mill:

. . .” And the moment when there is that little bit of giving up, whether you're blown out of your rational mind by whatever techniques you have available, or some traumatic experience happens in your life which shakes you out of it, or you have just lived long enough that you've despaired of ever getting it the way you thought you were going to. Whatever the genesis of it, at that moment you experience the presence of another set of possibilities of who you are and what it's all about. It is like the moment depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the hands of God and man are just about to touch, it's just at the moment when the despair is greatest, when you reach up, that the grace descends and you experience the knowledge or the insight or the remembrance that it all isn't in fact the way you thought it was. If it happens too violently you decide you've gone insane. And there are people who are all too willing to reassure you that you have” . . .

I do not want to give you the impression that any part of this process is easy. It's not. Healing is difficult. The body and the psyche must undergo significant change in order to heal, and change is not something we humans do easily. The human body is a dense energy system and it does not generally let go of an old way of being without difficulty. And, as much as we say we want it, each of us has our own reluctance to being unconditionally loved. And, at this stage in our development, it is difficult to receive openly. It brings up a lot of old issues!

There is another curiosity about the process in the Casa that you might find interesting. The entities give herbal prescriptions to many of the people who see them, and also for many of the remote healings they do - people bring pictures of loved ones and friends who need help. Anyway, others have reported that in the Casa pharmacy, the clerks seemed to hand out the same herbal prescription regardless of the person's illness! Curious, I observed and found this to be true. So, I sat down with my herbs and those prescribed for others in our group. They were the same herbs, and yet each prescription had a significantly different energy! They were matched, I presume to the needs of each individual.

I watched over the next few days as each person's herbs (science would say the same herbs), created completely different effects in each person, depending upon what needed to be healed. It was another extraordinary occurrence in a place where the extraordinary happens every day! It speaks again to the sort of things that are possible outside our normal reality. Wouldn't Walgreen's love to have a pharmacy like that!

Several of you have asked me if John the man was enlightened. The thing about being a trance-channel, and believe me it's not an easy thing to do, is that you basically need to get yourself out of the way so that the entities can come through. It's tough physically, but you don't have to possess great spiritual light to do it. Twenty-five years ago, John walked into a church, fell into a trance, and when he came out was told that he had performed some miraculous healings.

Things just built from there and John found himself in the position of a rock star thrown unprepared into the international limelight. He has had to deal with the traditional medical establishment, thousands of critics and a naturally skeptical public. It has made things difficult for the man. If you watch the videos of Joao’s visible surgeries, you can’t help but see some of John coming through and playing to the audience. I consider it a small price to pay for the incredible work he does.

The only contact we had with John outside of the trance state was on the Friday we left. After a long day of healing he was exhausted and bless his heart, he still came out for photos and to be with us. In talking with him, I found John the man, to be a deeply spiritual person with some significant, unresolved emotional issues, which have been naturally magnified by his unique circumstance.

Is John enlightened? No. He suffers from his unresolved personal issues and the very difficult role he has been asked to play. It's somewhat interesting to see this magnificent work being done by this obviously human person. It demystifies the guru thing. But, I am certainly glad that he is here, helping people to heal!

The one thing John requested of me was to ask you to send him your prayers. You have no idea how much your prayers could impact the work he does in Brazil. John is now in my prayers several times each day, and I ask that you regularly include him in your prayers as well. Do it for this man who charges nothing for any of the work that he does, and also for the many people that he heals every year.

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