I am a Reiki Master in two traditions of Usui Reiki and have taken dozens of students from beginner through Master Teacher certification in Reiki at the Ministry of Sophia. A not unusual question from those who first experience the flood of energy through their hands that apparently does good things to improve the health of their clients is: “Was Jesus doing Reiki? Is this how he healed people?”

Since I never say Yes or No to a question whose answer, if there is one, needs historical background, this is the sort of thing I might tell them over a couple of cups of their favorite brew at my favourite coffee shop in Richton Park. It may interest anyone concerned with alternative methods of healing.

Every year more and more people are turning away from what is called orthodox medicine to try therapies that actually work instead of their becoming life long cash cows for the pharmaceutical companies. They try remedies, sometimes thousands of years old that don’t have terrible side effects, are not likely to bankrupt the family and have proven track records that can be traced back through history.

Many very effective methods use some form of what is called the ‘laying on of hands.’

For thousands of years people from every country and ethnic group have been healed by someone who seemed to be able to transfer by touch whatever was lacking in the sick person, who then recovered normal health.

This practice has been a part of every major religion at some time. I know that some of my readers are Reiki practitioners who were surprised when the ignorant celibates of the Council of Catholic Bishops called Reiki a diabolical practice and forbade the nuns who ran successful healing centers from using it. Their reasoning, if it can be so-called was the usual spurious, theological nonsense. They didn’t say that the real reason was that Reiki works, and non-Christians can do it, therefore it must be the work of the Devil, one of their favourite and invented scapegoats.

It will interest you to know how the practice of hands on healing was eliminated from Western Christianity, when it had been widely regarded and highly valued for centuries as being due to the healer having received the blessing of the Holy Spirit.

EVERY major leader of the Western Church up to about the year 600 regarded healing as the first fruits of having the Holy Ghost within. They thought that the ability to heal came directly from the Holy Ghost and was available to all who embodied that spirit.

Putting it another way, the early Christians took a healing ability as a first proof of success in spiritual practices. It was a spiritual ID card that proved genuineness. It was one of the inherited attributes of all the Merovingian kings of France who claimed descent from the family of Jesus. Even the Church admitted to that before betraying them. But that’s for another day. Suffice it to say that the Christians were famous in the early years of the Church for their healing abilities. But most of this tradition stopped about the year 600. Let’s look at how this came about.

There were two factors at work. One was that this time became known in history as the Dark Ages. The beliefs of the Church were paramount. Learning was not highly valued. Independent thinkers were persecuted. There were several extensive and disastrous outbreaks of plagues. The culture was in a state of collapse. Quite a hard time to believe in healing. It would be rather like trying to get a recently foreclosed on person interested in some subtlety of philosophy. Survival is his priority.

The second major factor, the real fly in the ointment was the Pope at the time. He became called Gregory the Great. He was the first Pope to come from a monastic order and pushed the monkish concepts vigorously. He was a particularly unforgiving man who received the dying confession of a monk who confessed that he had once stolen three gold coins. Gregory cleared away those helping the dying man and ensured that he died friendless and alone. Then he had the body thrown on the manure heap to rot and said that the monk’s punishment may as well begin now.

But this head of the Christian Church that was once famous for the healing powers of its members, had a problem. He suffered from gout. In England gout is regarded as the disease of a rich man who is over fond of port wine and pheasant, but I won’t even mention that. He couldn’t cure his gout so he made it into a virtue with a clever piece of theological spinning. He wrote a gout inspired book called The Book of Pastoral Rule. In that book he spun the ‘get me off the hook’ theory that God shapes us through our sickness to become perfectly shaped stones for the wall of his Temple.

Today we would call it rationalization. He found a way of using his boundless authority to favor sickness over health since it made a virtue of the gout that he could neither hide nor cure.

Unfortunately, however, an accident of history conspired to make this piece of rationalization a very important factor in health practice. Indeed it was eventually largely responsible for millions of innocent people being persecuted and sometimes killed because they possessed the ability to heal, once so highly valued.

When the Emperor Charlemagne began to put the pieces together and reorganize the Holy Roman Mess into the Holy Roman Empire he decreed that Gregory’s book be placed in the hands of every bishop, together with the Canons of the Church and the gospels compiled by Eusebius at the order of the Emperor Constantine in the century of the Council of Nicaea. That was when all the recently agreed and new doctrines were put into the Gospels as though they were there from the first century teachings.

That was when Jesus in 325 A.D. first became a celibate, the Son of God, the Messiah and Christ by majority vote of a committee. It was a majority vote because those who disagreed were exiled.

Gregory’s book was a true companion in monkish chicanery to the now approved official Gospels, and his warped views on sickness began to become the official position of the Church.

In fact the Church gradually became actually opposed to the practice of healing with the help of their lawyers. It is a general law of human authorities that what they are not up on they are down on. In 1215, at the fourth Latin Council it was decreed that nobody should try to heal a person who had not been confessed. Any Church lawyer could spin this so that the practice of healing could become a sin.

The analogy with the present medical religion of the AMA in this country is very compelling. It is better in the eyes of the AMA to kill with orthodox methods than to cure with unorthodox methods. Both situations have been historically disastrous for healers without official approval.

So, healing by the laying on of hands gradually disappeared from the Western Church, and the Inquisition, a set of monks quite as inhumane as Gregory, worked wonders in its efforts to discourage women from practicing their natural office as healers, usually by killing them in ingenious ways that only women haters with unlimited power could invent.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has avoided all this, and healing is still practiced there. You may sometimes see little models of arms or legs or of whatever part of the body was healed on the altars of the Churches where this has happened.

Since God is considered responsible for all the cures, no matter who else was involved, and since even the extraordinarily crooked spin lawyers of the AMA haven’t yet found a way to sue God, the Eastern Orthodox healers are free from the hammer of the law.

That is a brief summary of how what Jesus and the early followers of the teachings of Jesus used to do as a standard religious practice. And this is what Reiki folks do now. Both activities became targets of religious taboo in certain circles.

The most significant aspects of the life of Jesus from the Reiki viewpoint were the healing miracles that included people with paralysis, lameness, fever, catalepsy, haemorrhage, skin disease, mental disorders, spirit possession, deafness and blindness, not to mention death.

According to the current official scriptures many of these healings were accomplished by the laying on of hands, as in the following examples: Luke 4:40 where Jesus healed all those brought to him by the laying on of hands, Matt 8:14-15 where he cured a fever with a touch, Mark 1:40-42 and Luke 5:12-13 where he heals a man of leprosy, Matt 20:29-34 and Luke 5:12-13 where he uses his hands to heal blindness, Mark 7:32-35 where he heals deafness and muteness by a touch and Luke7:12-15 and Luke 8:49-55 where he raises the dead.

These weren’t the only miracles reported but they were the ones accompanied by the laying on of hands, as in Reiki, Healing Touch, and several other modalities. And the Early Christians were able to heal by touch as well. All we know is they had received what became known as the Jesus initiation.

So another of the similarities between current Reiki and the Jesus practice is that Jesus could pass the power of healing onto others.

In Luke 9:1-2 it is reported that Jesus gave his disciples power to drive out all demons and cure diseases. Then he told them to go and do so, and then report back. This is rather like the Reiki Master of today who attunes a student to the Second Degree and then says go and give a treatment to so many people and come back to see if you can make it to the Masters Degree. In my case it was 150 treatments to ensure meeting all the standard circumstances that occur. My Reiki Master was also a fine musician who believed in many rehearsals to attain a perfect performance. I am grateful for her insistence on multiple treatments.

Many of the healing miracles of Jesus seemed to require faith in his abilities from the recipient, but in the case of the laying on of hands this wasn’t always so. In Mark 6:5-6 it says plainly “He could not do any miracles there, EXCEPT lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” (My capitals)

It seems therefore that as in Reiki, faith is not a prerequisite. And any hands-on healer who has dealt with animals by Reiki, Healing Hands or Tellington Touch knows that faith is not necessary there either, but there seem to be no reports of Jesus healing animals. In fact he threw the demons out of one character and had them enter a convenient herd of pigs which all ran over a cliff and perished. Possibly a little nudge that the pig keeper wasn’t being kosher.

Another striking similarity between the healing activities of Jesus and that of advanced Reiki practitioners only became known recently with the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a special version for advanced initiates of an inner school and not the same as the Gospel of Mark available to all the followers of Jesus. It is clear from this Gospel that he gave secret teachings to those who had received the healing power from him. Read Matt 13:10-11 and Mark 4:10-12, 34 in the standard version to see how he only talked to the public in parables but explained them at various levels to his disciples, depending on their receptiveness.

We know from other Gospels discovered in 1947 that the Church thought it had destroyed, that some of the disciples were much more spiritually aware than others.
The most advanced student had bad press from the Church and was accused of harlotry because she was a woman, while the dumbest and most thick headed among the men became thought of as the first Pope instead of her.

There is a well established theory with about as much historical evidence as that of the actual existence of Jesus as an historical person. It treats of Jesus going to the East and learning from the accomplished mystics of India, Tibet and possibly China.

Certainly many of the quotes of his teachings are almost word for word the same as those from scriptures that were ancient in India milennia before he was said to have been born.

In Kashmir in Northern India Jesus is regarded by the Hindus there as a saint who survived the crucifixion and came back East to where he was understood and his spiritual stature was appreciated. His name there is Issa. If the current bands of idiots ever stop fighting each other you may go there and see his tomb.

It is historical fact that when the Portuguese entered India as the first modern Europeans to do so they were astonished to find a great many Christians already there in the South. Their teachings were based on the pre-Catholic Church missionary work of the Apostle Thomas.

The entirely predictable happened. The friars who accompanied the merchant ships as political commissars accompanied all Communist warships, noted very quickly that these Christians were not using the same gospels or the same words that everyone was supposed to use. The Gospel of Thomas was one of the books destroyed by the Church after 325. It’s the most evocative of those found in 1947 at Nag Hammadi and reads like notes taken by an eye witness during addresses and talks given by Jesus. The Catholics, followed their usual practice when confronted by another religion. They murdered the clergy, burned the gospels and imposed their own version of God is Love.

The previous Pope before our current ex Nazi youth version actually apologized to the Indian Christians for not having made it clear to the world in general that there were Christians in India a couple of centuries before the current Catholic Church was founded.

Since the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Revelation of Paul and many others that the Church had systematically destroyed in the 4th century, and all of them much older than the current versions, it is clear that the very early followers of the teachings of Jesus didn’t much resemble those who flourished after the Council of Nicaea. Women were honoured as spiritual equals of men and healing was a very common practice.

It is not too far fetched then that Jesus was initiated during the mysterious period of his life between twelve and thirty into some Reiki-like practice, as Reiki has mixed origins in India, Tibet, Japan and China.

Those healers were special followers with secret knowledge that only a special initiation could provide. They were knowers of the truth, not believers of the truth. They were Gnostics, and therefore a danger to the Literalists who ran the Christian Church and required belief in dogma, not knowingness through an experience. The Gnostics were mercilessly persecuted with a ruthlessness that only religious fanatics are capable of.

But their stream of initiations survived as an underground river via the Templars, the Renaissance geniuses, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Tarot, the Kabbalah, the writings of the Classical Greek period, the Hermetics of the alchemists, the work of tribal shaman all over Europe, and finally the fairly recent invasion of the West by shaggy swamis bearing Oriental attitudes about spirituality, very much like the destroyed teachings of Jesus and the new discoveries of the miracles that humans can perform with the right mental attitude.

So, though we cannot be certain that what Jesus did was like Reiki today, there is a clear similarity in the descriptions, and He is obviously a consummate role model as a healer for all. Remember His words in John 14:12 “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me, can do the same miracles I have done, and even greater things than these will you do”

Would you like another cup of coffee? I’m at Richton Perk, my favourite coffe house in all the world, but if at any time I’m not here for you to chat with you will find my articles, including this one in the big three ring binder labeled Ex Libris The Perk. Anyone can read them there. Just ask Pete or Sue or Ashley for the articles of Douglas.