The Mystical Dance of Miracles
 

                            Richard J. Sandore, MD

It was eight o’clock Wednesday morning when I stepped out of the rustic Pousada where I was staying, took a deep breath of the warm, misty Brazilian air, and gazed down the street. 

Three busses which were not here the night before were lined up along the dusty avenue. Spotted street dogs were chasing the roosters which had taken up home underneath one of the busses, and a cow looked at me looking at her as she casually strolled by. Within the tender embrace of this sublime scene the white-clad hopeful were making their way north along the road. Most of the people were walking, many were being pushed in wheelchairs, others struggled along on crutches. One blind man was cautiously poking his way along the worn, brittle curb. I quickly tucked my white shirt into the white pants I had bought for this trip-I had been told the entity prefers white-and joined the mass of people making their way the last couple of hundred yards to the sanctuary. This was no ordinary healing sanctuary we were walking towards. We were heading to Casa de Dom Inacio, home of the Miracle Man of Brazil.

Six months before I was in Peru at a multinational conference on cross-cultural shamanism and to lead a medical trip to the Q’ero villages in the remote Andes. I began discussing healing with one of the conference presenters. "There is a video you have to see," he told me. "Then we’ll talk about healing and reality." I saw the video and immediately knew I was going to visit a small town in rural Brazil where miracles are everyday occurrences.

Now I was walking down a red clay road in Abadiania to see a man and healer know as Joao de Deus, John of God. I had learned as much as I could about the man reported to be able to raise the dead, make the lame walk and the blind see. I had learned that his birth name is Joao Teixeira da Faria and that he has been putting his consciousness aside for the majority of his fifty or sixty years in this world so that spirit entities can use him as a vehicle for their healing. I learned that without fail he sees patients at the sanctuary every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and that up to 3000 people a day is not uncommon. I learned that the persecution heaped upon him by established medicine and religion was balanced by plaques and letters of thanks by celebrities and heads of state. I had prepared myself by watching a video of him doing surgeries without anesthesia and scraping on the eyes of a patient with a knife to remove a tumor. I had done my homework. But nothing prepared me for the terrifying beauty I encountered within the eyes of the fellow seekers I met when I arrived in Abadiania.

There was Nada from Slovenia with metastatic cancer. Maria Teresa from Brazil with a degenerative muscular disease similar to cerebral palsy. William from Australia with a tracheostomy.  Shirley from New Zealand with breast cancer.  Mary Beth from New York with a congenital hip disease. The list goes on. Every person there with their own story, yet each story the same.  Each pair of eyes filled with an energy containing a strange mix of despair and hope, faith and longing, knowledge and uncertainty. I wondered exactly what I was doing there, able bodied, no physical problems which could compare with those of the people with whom I was walking. No physical problems, yet the healing I was searching for, belief in and the experience of a reality far greater than the one we take for granted was no different than what anyone stepping through the gates of the sanctuary was looking for.

I walked silently onto the grounds of Casa de Dom Inacio, a group of five variously sized buildings set on about five acres of crisp lawns and flowered gardens overlooking the rolling hills of the lush Brazilian countryside. In the largest building is the room where the audience of seekers gathers in front of a small stage to watch the visible operations. Behind this room is an infirmary where people who have had operations can rest, and two current rooms where mediums sit in meditation focusing healing energy to those who require it. When Joao is in entity he sits in the second of these current rooms and the faithful walk past as they seek their individual cures and healings.

My mind was a flurry of thoughts and conflicting emotions while I waited in the main room with about four hundred other people for the morning session to begin. I had not seen so many people with serious maladies gathered in one place since my medical training at a tertiary care hospital. Yet the feeling, the energy, the emotion of this group was so very different. People here knew. They knew without any doubt that they were going to be healed. And they knew that the healing might not be what we in the west would consider a cure. There was an undeniable all-pervasive sense of wholeness and acceptance of life, all of life, all of the duality of life, that we rarely see in western cultures. The people in this room knew that they were becoming whole, that they were in the presence of a creative force which cared for them and loved them. In a most salient way this alone was all that was needed.

By nine o’clock the energy was palpable. At nine-fifteen one of the children of the house, a volunteer who is there every week, came out and asked that everybody who was requesting operations come into the back room. About 50 people formed a line and disappeared through the door to the right of the stage. Then the man who guided the people through the door stepped onto the stage and began giving instructions about how to address the entity and proper conduct at the house. After about fifteen minutes the door opened again. A small group of people filed out. There were three assistants holding trays of instruments, a woman who had entered with the group asking for surgeries, and another man holding Joao’s hand. But it was no longer Joao. He was now in entity, and as he entered the crowded room there was no question, not a shred of doubt that a consciousness which had transcended the material world was present with us at this singular moment in linear time.

Joao Teixeira da Faria realized he had a gift at a very early age. But it wasn’t until he was in his twenties that he fully accepted the gift, gave up a good portion of his own life because he has no conscious recollection of what happens when he is in entity, and began the healing work he does now. He eventually settled in Abadiania, a sleepy town in rural central Brazil that comes to life the middle of each week, and in 1978 built the sanctuary where he now works.

By embodying at various times some 33 different entities Joao de Deus heals. He performs visible operations, surgeries with a knife yet without the need for anesthesia for those who come who have difficulty believing. The majority of the operations are done invisibly, without physical contact, by the spirits who work with him. A simple scanning of the audience by the entity’s watchful gaze completes all of the surgeries. These are surgeries verified in case over case by trained physicians, and pathologic and radiographic studies.

The entity stepped up onto the stage and scanned the crowd. As his gaze touched mine I knew that I was being seen. I felt as if I was being looked through and all of the private corners of myself, those things we don’t share with anyone from either embarrassment or because they are so sacred, were on display. Yet it was all right. Everything was perfectly all right.

There was a love present, a love unlike any perceptions we usually have of the world, which encompassed all that was, and said, you’re fine, you’re lovable just as you are.

The entity turned to the woman who was to have the operation. The assistants positioned her, still standing, facing the crowd.  As Joao reached out to touch her a loud murmur to my left drew everybody’s attention. Someone in the crowd had fainted. Three of the children of the house rushed over and carried him to the infirmary. I later found out that he had had an operation right then and there. Our attention turned back to Joao. He was talking to the woman as he lifted her shirt. She spoke with him as he produced a scalpel and proceeded to make an incision in her left breast. With some gentle palpation a tumor popped out. She sighed and was taken to the recovery after he pronounced her cured.

I was still immersed in this mystical dance when a young man was guided onto the stage where the woman had been. The entity said he was going to remove tumors from the man’s stomach through his nose. In a flash, while the man was perfectly conscious and coherent, the entity placed a six inch instrument all the way into the man’s nose, turned it, then removed it with a small piece of tissue on the end. By this time all of my notions of reality and healing had been tested, released, and new ones, much more encompassing than the old were taking their place.

The entity walked off the stage and people lined up to walk past him. I joined the line with Martin, a young Argentina man who received a healing from the entity three years ago. After that healing he moved to Abadiania and now helps at the house every week translating the Portuguese speaking entities words into English. Martin asked me if I had any questions for the entity. I told him I needed to know about my work and my path. He smiled knowingly.

As I approached Joao my heart raced. To meet spirits in a meditation or journey or dream is one thing, to walk up to a physical manifestation of a consciousness which has no physical form is quiet another. I stepped up and he took my hand in his. The unconditional acceptance and understanding I felt caused me to weep. A feeling of holiness and completeness, and the sensation of at-one-ment which we hear talked about so much blanketed me. Martin asked him my question. He nodded acceptingly, rattled off a few words to Martin, then gazed at me and gently squeezed my hand. Martin led me away.

"He said for you to sit in the current," Martin told me. "You have to sit in the current." He motioned to the benches across and next to where the entity was sitting. I found a place and within minutes entered into the deepest, most profound meditation I have ever experienced. Visions as real as the room I am sitting in now swirled past me in a kaleidoscope as my life, past and future, melted together into a whole where everything made perfect sense and was exactly as it should be. I had found my healing.

The session ended when all of the people present had walked past the entity. He was led out of the room and the rest of us followed and walked to the kitchen where hot soup was served to all of the patients. The sense of community within the sharing of the meal, a sacred meal no different from the sacred sharing of a meal of bread and wine at a Christian mass or sacred food in any other tradition was as healing as being with the entity.

After the meal Martin came up to me and said there was someone who I should talk to. He introduced me to a Brazilian man in his late sixties. The man told me about his stomach cancer.  He had been through chemotherapy and the cancer was still growing. He had come to the sanctuary two years ago, had an invisible operation, and was told he was cured. He smiled as he described how he went back to his regular doctor who took an x-ray of his abdomen. On the x-ray were stitches within his stomach. There has been no return of the cancer and he now returns to the sanctuary regularly for help with the ravages the chemotherapy has done to his body.

The miracles continued. When the afternoon session began the entity came out, looked at me and rattled off a few word in Portuguese. Doctor Agusto, one of the entities Joao embodies, wanted to do some work on me I was told. I was taken back into the current room where the next two hours passed by like two minutes. I met Doctor Agusto, in spirit, and felt the luminous architecture of my energy body being rearranged. Later that afternoon a Brazilian woman staying at the same Pousada I was showed me a passage in a book she was paging through. The book was written in Portuguese but the passage she had wanted me to see was in English. It was about Dr. Agusto. She had not been in the room when the entity spoke to me earlier in the afternoon.

During the time I spent in Abadiania I witnessed eight visible operations, things that can’t be done in the reality where most of us live. I saw the certificates of honor given to Joao from heads of state and dignitaries displayed on walls in a room right next to a room stacked from floor to ceiling with crutches and wheel chairs left by people who were healed by Joao. And I spoke to many, many people. People cured, people healed, and people still searching.

In many ways I left Casa de Dom Inacio and the sleepy little town of Abadiania where busses have to make way for stray horses and people from across the globe arrive with duffel bags filled with their native clothing tucked alongside white shirts and pants, where the rich and the destitute stand side by side in the same line in search of what they have not been able to find anywhere else in the world, with more questions than I had arrived. I had witnessed miracles, everyday for three days, and my version of the reality of our world changed forever. There is no doubt left in me that consciousness extends far beyond us and the realm of physical matter we have learned to take for granted. Yet I was still haunted by the questions of, Why everyone who comes to the sanctuary seeking a cure does not find one? Why doesn’t every cancer dissolve as quickly as the one in the man’s stomach? Why don’t all of the blind see as they walk past the entity? Why isn’t every wheel chair rolled through the gates of Casa de Dom Inacio left there?

I have asked many wise people from various traditions across the world these questions, and received many, many answers. Some talk about karma with many different interpretations of that word. Others mention free will decisions. The entity itself speaks about the importance of a person believing that they can be healed. I have found no consensus as to why everyone doesn’t get cured. Yet the common thread running through all of these answers and traditions is that there is a difference between healing and curing. Everyone who passes through the gates of Casa de Dom Inacio receives a healing. Everybody who visits the sanctuary takes a step towards wholeness and completeness and tastes without any doubt the sweetness of the radiant divinity within themselves. Everybody is healed, and everybody understands what that healing means for them and the significance of it within the context of their own magnificent lives.

The South American medicine tradition handed down through the descendants of the Inca talks about the coming of the sixth sun. This is the age we are now entering, and a similar theme is seen in the majority of the world’s native traditions. The Andean shamans say that with the coming of the sixth sun will be the birth of medicine people and healers who will heal, and cure, everyone who passes by them. The why’s we ask will no longer apply, we will have recognized the divinity that is transparent to us now as we walk through our daily lives, and what we now call miracle cures will be as commonplace as the glow in the morning sky in front of the sunrise, or the singing of morning doves that we now accept as mundane.

Perhaps the child who is this healer is clinging longingly to its mother’s breast right now anticipating the moment when he or she will step into their destiny. Or perhaps, just perhaps, that man or woman is working quietly, in some remote corner of the world where the can’t be dones and doubts which we live with don’t exist.

Maybe, just maybe, he or she is doing their work at this very moment, without fanfare and notoriety, fulfilling the prophecy, healing everybody who walks past them. Why not?

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