With João de Deus, Brazilian Psychic Surgeon

On the high plateau of central Brazil, the village of Abadiânia, one and a half hours drive from Brasilia, would have nothing to set it apart from any other small rural town, in the state of Goias, if it weren’t for the fact that, João Teixeira de Faria has his healing sanctuary there. João, also known as João de Deus or John of God, is one of the worlds most powerful spiritual healers and psychic surgeons. He is an unconscious medium who channels more than 33 spirit guides or entities, as they are known at the Casa, who do the actual healing work. Over the past, nearly 30 years, João built up his unique spiritual healing centre, The Casa de Dom Inácio, where he performs spiritual healing and psychic surgery, free of charge, for the hundreds of thousands of people who flock there annually, from all over Brazil, South America and from many many other countries around the world. Almost all diseases and conditions, the human race is afflicted by, have been successfully treated at the Casa de Dom Inácio, named after Saint Ignatious of Loyola, who is one of the main healing entities, at the Casa.

I first came to the Casa de Dom Inácio at the end of 1998, when I had painful glaucoma in my right eye, a result of an accident years before, in rural Southwest France, where I'd been living for some time. This condition had been confirmed on a visit to Morfields Eye Hospital, in London, in the Autumn of 1998 and I'd been given eye drops, which did little to diminish the pain and pressure in my eye. Soon after my consultation at the hospital, I found a book, 'The Miracle Man', by Robert Pellegrino-Estrich in a New Age book store in London and was so taken by what I read about João de Deus that nothing could have kept me from going to meet him, even if I hadn't had a health problem. Within a few weeks I was on the plane to Brazil, a country that held many mysteries and which I'd never expected to visit. Everything just seemed to fall into place to enable me to make the trip. Once at the Casa, I found a unique and wonderful environment of

love, light and friendly happy people. Very unlike the often sad hopeless atmosphere I'd previously experienced in some London hospitals, where I'd worked as a therapist for patients in cancer and other wards. Soon after my arrival, at the Casa, I noticed that the flu I'd been unable to throw off for weeks in the UK, just seemed to disappear and I felt totally at home in Abadiânia. I had no idea, at that time, that this was to become my second home for years to come.

Since those early days much has changed for me and my life has been permanently and beneficially altered. I have now visited the Casa 18 times up to Feb 2004 making three or four trips a annually taking groups, of others seeking healing and spiritual guidance and development, many of them with serious, life threatening conditions. I became the first person, based in the UK, to take regular groups to the Casa and spent half of each of my first 2 years actually living there in the town of Abadiânia where the Casa is Located. During this time, I have learned Portuguese, the beautiful language of Brazil. I have seen many, many physical operations done under similar conditions to the two I myself had my and personally know numerous people who have been healed, at the Casa, of cancers, spastic colon, ME, toxic shock syndrome and many other illnesses and disabilities. I have seen a filling materialize in a tooth, been given an operation by the Entity, Dom Inácio, from across the room, seen incisions appear on people with no one near them and much much more.

João de Deus spent many years travelling from village to village in the states of Goias and Minas Gerais healing people and administering the local herbs to whomever turned up wherever he stopped. These states are in the larger area of Brazil called the Cerrado, which is one of the oldest areas in the world and has stayed relatively unchanged, geologically, for over 600 million years. At 1000 metres above sea level and with a very pleasant climate year round, this area is one of the nicest in Brazil. João's wandering existance barely kept him alive and clothed and fed, but this young man, who'd had no more than two years formal schooling, had a determination to continue with this work, despite constant persecution, beatings by the police and poverty. He later spent a number of years living on the local army base in the national capital, Brasilia, where he was protected from further persecution and was given his basic necessities in exchange for his healing work on members of the military there. To this day he fights a constant battle against persecutors and enemies of the Casa who would like to end his wonderful work and the healing mission he has vowed to continue with as long as he lives.

João only began doing psychic surgery at about the age of 15, when a vision of a Brazilian saint led him to a spirtualist centre where they told him they had been expecting him. He spontaneously fell into trance and performed over 20 psychic operations. Afterwards, out of trance, when he was told what he had done, he was horrified and initially refused to believe these surgeries could have been done by or through him by discarnate healing entities. Inspite of this, he stayed on for some months with the spiritualist group, doing more psychic surgeries and healing and was taught, for the first time, about spiritualism. Eventually João was told by his spirit guides that he must expand his work to reach more people, so he left the protected life at the army base where he'd lived for years. He visited his friend, the late Chico Xavier, one of Brazil's most celebrated healers, clairvoyant mediums, and prodigious author of numerous books on spirituality, including 'The Astral City'. Chico told him he should go to the small Goias town of Abadiânia where he was meant to fulfil his healing mission. In the early days when João first did his healing work there, he just sat outdoors in a chair near the main road where people soon began to arrive seeking cures for their various illnesses and conditions. Gradually the numbers increased to thousands a day and slowly he developed his centre, The Casa de Dom Inácio, to what it is today. The north side of Abadiânia, where the Casa is located, was, and still is, like a separate village, set apart from the rest of the town by the wide Brasilia-Goiania state road. There have been as many as 50 coaches parked outside the gates of the Casa, which carried people as much as 45 hours to visit the Casa, from the distant states of Rio Grande do Sul, Parana and Santa Catarina, amongst others. They often wait for hours at a time for the chance to pass by João- in- Entity, in hope of cures and healing. For people visiting the Casa at the moment, the lines are shorter, partly due to the Brazilian economy having gone into a slump, preventing many, less well off Brazilians, from travelling the often great distances to the Casa.

I had been in Abadiânia less than a week, attending some of the twice daily sessions, which occur on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, every week of the year at the Casa, when I found myself about to have a psychic operation for the glaucoma in my right eye. Martin Mosquera, one of the Casa translators, had asked me a number of times if I wanted and was willing to have a 'visible', ie physical, surgery and I had repeatedly answered, 'yes, why not.' Considering whether to have a physical surgery, it seemed to me that apart from the obvious benefits of successful treatment on my eye, having a visible operation was a unique opportunity to experience something very few people in the world would get the chance to undergo. At this time, there were only a handful of non-Brazilians at the Casa and even fewer received visible operations, so I wanted to take advantage of the situation to find out what this would actually be like. I had no fear or uncertainty about doing this, as I'd already watched a number of visible operations performed by the João-in-Entity on the stage in the main Casa hall and had seen many more videoed ones on the TV screen there. These included operations for breast cancers, brain tumours, gangrene, mobility problems, heart troubles, etc. etc.

Although I have had various invisible surgeries during my 18 visits to the Casa, over a period of more than five years, I had a second physical operation on 23 Nov. 2001. I was meditating in the Entity's current room when he fetched me from the bench I was sitting on and, with a surgical scalpel, performed an operation on my lower right abdomen for a hernia of long standing. I was placed, standing up, in front of the Entity's chair and was told to lean back to back, for support, against Catarina Pellegrino, wife of Robert Pellegrino, author of 'The Miracle Man' book about the life of João de Deus. I felt a slight 'sting' from the first cut, but no pain at all after that. The scalpel was drawn across 3 or 4 times, deeper with each movement of the blade. After he'd finished making the incision, the Entity had two medically trained American visitors check for the hernia, but they could find no sign of it. It had instantly disappeared! Then he closed the wound with two stitches, which produced no unpleasant feelings; at all, only a painless sensation of the suture thread being drawn through. I was told I had also received internal stitches (performed by the unseen entities). It has been documented that stitches and other signs of internal operations have been discovered in medical scans and x-rays, even in cases of invisible surgeries where no external indications, of entry into the body, can be found. During the approximately 15 minutes of my hernia operation, I had been totally conscious and lucid, talking with the Entity and trying to watch the proceedings. At the very end, after the stitches had been inserted, I suddenly felt as if all the spiritual anaesthetic hit me at once and thought I was going to pass out if I hadn't been supported on both sides and then sat down in a chair. After a time in the recovery room, I walked back to my pousada (hotel), unaided, feeling amazingly good and energized. This operation healed very quickly with no medication accept the Entities charged water and 8 days later the stitches were removed by the Entity himself, during my 'review' with him. There has been no indication of the hernia during in all the time since the operation.

Celebrities, polititions, doctors and other well known and notable people have come for healing at the Casa de Dom Inácio, over the years. Shirley MacLain had a large tumour removed from her stomach at the Casa, after unsuccessful treatments in the Philippines by psychic surgeons there. The actress Janet Leigh also visited the Casa for treatment. The president of Peru was healed of problems with his hands and his son of another condition, when João made a visit to Peru some years ago. He gave João the highest military honours in gratitude. More recently a sheik from Lebanon has been successfully treated for eye and other problems, at the Casa.

I have met many people during my various visits to the Casa who have related their healing stories to me. A Sao Paulo lawyer, Maria Luiza, whom I met on my first Casa visit, told me she'd been diagnosed with spastic colon and was scheduled to have a medical operation to have part of her colon removed. She had no desire to have this operation and the possible permanent consequences, so when she heard of the Casa de Dom Inácio, she went to Abadiânia and in one treatment the condition was removed. Her doctors back in Sao Paulo later cancelled the planned operation, as they had to admit there was no longer any need for it.

Liliana dos Reis, a 19 year old Brazilian girl, from Sao Leopoldo, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, told me her amazing story one day in 1999, while we were sitting together in a small 'launchenette' over a freshly made orange juice. She is now a medical student, but when she was 15, she said she'd been in hospital with lymphatic cancer and had woken up one night to find one of the Casa entities sitting on her bed next to her. At that time she knew nothing of the Casa or João de Deus, so was confused to find this very physical being in her room, who told her to go see João in Abadiânia and that she would be healed of her cancer in three months. Before leaving he 'signed' her right shoulder. Somehow the letters J-O-A-O, inside an oval about four inches across, were caused to appear as an impression in the skin on her shoulder, leaving a very clear and apparently permanent mark. This was created without any sort of pigmentation or colouring and with no direct contact with this Entity. It was now two years later and after having visited the Casa, as she was instructed to do, Liliana's cancer had disappeared as was predicted and the 'signature', which was shown to me and others, was still clearly visible on Liliana's shoulder. In 2003 on a visit to the Casa I saw Liliana againa and she was in fine health and again showed me João's "signature" was still on her shoulder.

Francy, a beautiful and angelic looking American woman, wanted no more risk of pregnancy, so had her fallopian tubes tied in a US hospital in the usual medical operation for this. By the time she came to the Casa, in 2000, she said she'd been through 5 years of daily severe toxic shock symptoms accompanied by frequent 'comas'. Her doctors could find no cause nor cure for this, so when she heard of João de Deus and his 'miracle' healings, she came to Brazil at the first possible opportunity. She was told by João-in-Entity that all her symptoms were a result of her having had her tubes tied and was given an invisible operation to undo the original medical operation. When she returned home to the States, she soon became pregnant, but lost the baby early in the pregnancy. Though sad in a way, she and her husband had wanted no more children at that stage in their lives, so this was interpreted as a clear proof that her tubes had been untied in the operation at the Casa. Since the operation the toxic shock and comas ceased and have never returned.

In spite of the fact that there are still some small minded people who continue to cause problems for João and the Casa de Dom Inácio, it has to be said that Brazil is an amazingly open minded and future oriented country. Over 400 different groups from Hare Krishna and the Findhorn Community, to UFO cults and villages of hundreds of mediums all exist in the area around Brasilia, mostly in the state of Goias, where the Casa de Dom Inácio is located. Social and religious experimentation flourishes here and many interesting ways of living have developed as a result. Most Brazilians have some sort of spiritualist affiliation, no matter what religion they may also follow and nowhere else have I ever experienced the same degree of openness and acceptance of a wider spiritual reality, the existence of extraterrestrial beings, life after life, the possibility of a better world and love between people, as I have amongst the people of Brazil.

In 1883, the Italian priest and educator, Dom Bosco, prophesied that a great new civilization would arise 'in a land of milk and honey' on the present day site of Brasilia. In the early 1950's, the creators of this city, including the president at the time, Juscelino Kubitschek, and Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, one of thepresent day Casa Entities, had many spiritual ideas and ideals when they planned and designed the city, following on from the vision of Dom Bosco and others who also believed this would be a world centre. It has been predicted that this area of Brazil will be one of the safest places on earth if there is a world cataclysm and that most of the country will survive intact. The fact that there are probably more UFO sightings in Brazil than in any other country must also contribute to the open mindedness of many Brazilian people and their acceptance of the unusual and miraculous, such as the work of João Teixeira Da Faria and other mediums and healers in this vast and wonderful country. All these factors put together could partly account for Brazil's wealth of spiritualist healers, mediums, psychic artists and many other strange and unexplainable phenonomena, which can be found throughout the country. Add to this the disparate mix of cultural influences, a melange of the indigenous Indians, the African slaves, Portuguese colonists and, more recently, German and Japanese and middle eastern immigrants and you find a people of great tolerance, sense of fun and love of life. There is such an abundance of the 'miraculous' to be found permeating society in tiny remote Brazilian villages, as well as in urban areas such as Sao Paolo with its18 million inhabitants. I feel I have only scraped the mere surface of what Brazil has to offer, but if the only thing I ever experienced in this huge South American country was the Casa de Dom Inácio and the work of João de Deus, I would have no regrets what-so-ever!

* * * * * * * * * * *

Rupert Drew leads regular groups to the Casa de Dom Inácio for healing and spiritual development. He is an official medium of the Casa de Dom Inácio has been sanctioned and certified by João de Deus to be a Casa guide to bring groups to visit the Casa de Dom Inácio. Rupert has a therapy practice in North London, England and holds diplomas in Bowen Technique, Reiki, Holistic Massage and Reflexology. He is experienced in Fasting for health and spirituality, wholistic nutrition and natural living lifestyles. He is available for talk/slide show presentations about his groups, João de Deus, the Casa de Dom Inácio. He also gives talks on Fasting and Wholistic Living.