Chapter 8.

“HEALING, MARY MAGDALENE, AND JOHN”

KK: “Hi, Simon. How are you today?”

SP: “Wonderful! I woke up in Heaven today. How about you?”

KK: “Well, I can’t say I woke up in Heaven, but I’m okay.”

SP: “Sure you did. Look all around you. The sun is shining, the flowers are
blooming, the birds are singing. You are healthy and have a good life. What more
could you ask for?”

KK: “You’re right. Life is good. I just have to remember to see it that way. It’s just
that there is so much chaos in the world and the traffic was terrible today, and my
car isn’t running right, so that’s going to cost a lot of money that I don’t have, and
the price of gas is starting to creep up again.”

SP: “Whoa! Slow down. Listen to yourself. Can you do anything about the chaos in
the world?”

KK: “No, and it’s very frustrating to hear about it.”

SP: “So why do you listen to the bad news? All you can affect is your little corner
of the world. Work on making your life and the world around you comfortable and
loving and beautiful. If everyone would do that, the chaos would fade away.”

KK: “Yeah, well, everyone is worried about the war and the economy and their
jobs…..”

SP: “So they allow themselves to get so distracted by fear that they forget to make
their own world loving and beautiful?”

KK: “My goodness. You’re right. It’s fear that gets people’s minds so confused and
upset, isn’t it?”

SP: “Yes, fear is the favorite calling card of the Dark Forces. Anything you hear on
radio or TV, or read in newspapers and magazines that creates fear and worry in
your mind and heart is coming from the Dark Side. That is how they have
controlled and manipulated people for thousands of years. Don’t buy into it. Look
around you and appreciate all the beauty of the Earth Garden that our Creator of
Life gave us. Give thanks and be joyful. You are an eternal soul, and you are well
loved every moment of your existence.”

KK: “Thank you for reminding me, Simon. I guess I just get so caught up in the
busy-ness of life that I forget. Anyway, I was thinking about you and Jesus, and …
well, we’ve been kind of jumping around, but what I would like for you to do is take

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me through it from start to finish. I want to travel with you through this experience
from beginning to end. I want to know how you felt and I want to be awed and won
over and so convinced of the importance of the teaching that Jesus brought to the
world that like you, I would be willing to put my life on the line every day risking
condemnation and possible death. I think people need to understand how
compelling the truth is, to really understand how you could have been so committed
and unwavering in your faith.”

SP: “I understand. People will probably think we were fanatics or mentally

unbalanced to have followed such a dangerous path, but as you’ve probably noticed
so far, we were just ordinary people living ordinary lives when Yshu came along
and opened our hearts. And with our eyes and hearts open, how could we stand by
and let the sleeping ones continue to languish in the hell of fear and pain and
suffering created by the Dark Forces? So….okay…let’s back up a little. I’ve told
you about how we met, and the first night he was with us how he talked about the
stars, and how everything in the Universe has a place, each star, each person, each
animal, each plant, all moving in rhythm to the Divine Plan of the Creator, all life
sacred and precious. And I told you about him sharing some of his life with us, that
he was a Mandaean Priest called a Nasoraean, about baptisms and how it felt when
he baptized me. As I said, he was coming and going because he was traveling back
and forth to Jerusalem to perform his priestly duties and spend time with his family.
He was also teaching others that he met along the way. Sometimes, we wouldn’t see
him for weeks, and then suddenly, he would be back. As time went on, we became
used to his knowing our inner most thoughts, and to the way he conversed with
everyone, including our women and children. The children loved him and would
have liked to sit right next to him or on his lap, and we men would order them to go
back to their mothers and leave our guest alone. He would just laugh at us as if we
were being silly, but in those times, children were expected to stay out of the
important conversations men were having, and women were expected to have babies
and cook meals, and stay out of the important conversations the men were having.
But Yshu talked to everybody the same way. Men were not more important than
women. And they were not more important than the very old or the very young or
the very rich. He treated all people the same with great kindness and respect.”

KK: “That must have been hard for you guys to stomach. It didn’t bother you that
he was talking to your wives?”

SP: “Well, of course in the beginning, it was a little unsettling, but we finally got
used to it. It was during those early months that we became aware of his ability to
heal. It had become customary when he was with us, for us all to gather in a big
circle on the ground in front of my house in the evenings. He had gradually drawn
the women in closer to hear what he was saying. This one particular evening, he had
looked around at the group and asked why Edna, my mother-in-law, was not there.
I said she had been sick the last few days and was lying down inside. He rose
immediately, and asked if he could see her. I was startled and more than a bit
puzzled. I called my wife and told her to get her mother up and bring her out to see

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Yshu. He said, “Oh no, I will come to her.” We men all looked at each other. It was
not proper for a strange man to enter a woman’s bedroom. I got up and said, “I will
take you to her.” and I led him into the house and to Edna’s bedside. She was
flushed with fever, but was struggling to get up off her pallet and wrap a shawl
around herself. “Be at peace, Edna, I’ve come to help you.” he said, and lifted his
hand, palm out toward her. She sank back onto the pallet as he closed his eyes and
prayed, “Father, I call forth the power of the Great Life and the Blessing of the
House of Life upon Edna, your daughter. Remove from her the spirit of Darkness
that is troubling her body. Demons, flee before the Light. Evil spirits, be gone.
Clothe Edna in Light, my Father. Seal her and protect her and bless her in the Light
so that the Life is Victorious.” He stood a moment longer with his eyes closed and
his palm aimed toward her, then he lowered his hand and bowed his head
murmuring, “Thank you, my Father.” He looked at Edna and smiled, “Join us when
you feel like it.” And he turned and walked back out and sat down in the circle
again. To my amazement, my mother-in-law was now smiling and gathering her
robes around her and preparing to come outside. She followed me back out. The
men all looked at each other as if to say, well, there’s nothing wrong with her, just
like a woman, but Yshu shook his head saying, “She was gravely ill, but our Father
has healed her.” We all stared at him. How could this be? What magic did he have
to be able to do this? We were thinking these thoughts, no one said anything aloud,
but Yshu knew our thoughts and addressed them, “There was no magic here,” he
said, “we are all connected in the Father, so I asked my Father to remove the
darkness from her body and seal her in the Light so that the Life may be Victorious.
Whatever we ask in the name of the Great Life and the House of Life will be done
when we ask it in love and compassion believing that the Father hears our prayers.
What I do, you can do also.”

I was quick to respond, “Oh no, I have no power to heal anyone.”

He smiled gently at me, “You’re right, Simon, it is not your power. It is the power of
the Great Father of Life, and one day, you will call forth this power and make the
lame to walk.” I could only stare at him and shake my head, but he said, “You will
see.”

KK: “That is awesome. He didn’t touch her or anything? He just said a simple
prayer, and she was healed?”

SP: “Yes, and he aimed the palm of his hand toward her. I saw him do that many
times. Now, in this lifetime, I understand that he was running energy through his
hand and directing it toward the sick person. There are quite a few people today
that can channel the Light energy of God through their hands, and there are several
books available on healing this way. But we had never seen anything like it and the
immediate recovery was unbelievable.”

KK: “Really! I didn’t actually believe that energy healing worked.”

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SP: “Oh yes, it does. Today’s practitioners sometimes take a little longer, maybe
several sessions with a person, but it is an effective alternative to mainstream
medicine. Yshu was able to do such phenomenal and immediate healings because he
was so clear of mind and pure of heart. He was completely free of any negativity like
anger, fear, guilt, or hate, and his heart was full and overflowing with love and joy.
The Light flowed through him freely and with full power. It was incredible to
behold. As you can imagine, word spread of the Priest with the power to heal, and
after this, whenever he came to us, word spread like wildfire that he was here, and
people would bring whoever was ill in their family, and he would heal them. Crowds
began to gather wherever he was, and our earlier times of having him all to
ourselves for an evening of storytelling were over with. However, he always made
time to call us aside, Andrew and me and James and John, to continue teaching us.
Sometimes, the only way for us to be alone and away from the crowds was for him
to come out in the boat with us.”

KK: “People must have been so thrilled and so in awe of him. I can see how the
crowds must have gathered and followed him.”

SP: “Yes, it just about overwhelmed him. We were glad to be able to give him a
break by taking him out on the waters of the Sea of Galilee with us. It was on one of
these occasions that we were able to witness some of his other powers. A sudden
storm had come upon us before we could head back to shore. The winds were fierce
and the waves were coming up over the side, and the boat was lurching perilously in
the waters. I began to suspect that we might actually capsize and my boat would be
lost which would be a terrible blow to my income. Some of the other guys were not
strong swimmers like me, and I had no idea if Yshu could even swim. I turned to
him urgently and shouted, “Yshu! Can you swim?!” He was standing in the middle
of the deck looking up at the sky. The rest of us were holding on for dear life and
being yanked this way and that as the boat lurched and rolled and the wind
whipped our hair and beards and tore the clothes from our bodies. Yet, he stood
there not holding on to anything, seeming to move effortlessly with the boat and the
sea as if he were one with it. When I called out to him, he turned and in one quick
glance saw the fear in our faces and our disarray. He turned back to the sky and
lifted his hand and said, “Father, in the name of the Life and the House of Life, still
the winds and calm the waters. Let there be peace, that the Life may be victorious.”
And just as quickly as the storm had come up, it ended, the winds ceased and the
sky cleared and the waters settled.”

KK: “What an experience!

SP: “In the Twentieth Century, we have heard stories of Yogis in India that they
call Earth Masters. They can do these kind of things, control nature and the
elements, but 2,000 years ago in Galilee, such powers were unheard of, and I would
not have believed it if I had not been there and experienced it myself. Today, I
recognize that Yshu exhibited many of the same powers attributed to the Yogis and
to some Shaman. He could leave his body at will and travel in spirit to attend a

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dying or sick person. During these times, he appeared to be sleeping or even dead.
His breathing would be so shallow that it was barely perceptible, and he had warned
us that if we found him thus, we were not to try to wake him because it could cause
grave problems with what he was doing at some distant location.”

KK: “So he was going out of body to attend to someone at a distance?”

SP: “Yes, he did, and they say that some Yogis can do that, but there are some
major differences between Yshu and the Indian Yogis. They say they are able to do
these things because they fast and abstain from sex and live very pure lives totally
devoted to God. On the other hand, Yshu had completely different ideas about what
constituted purity. He did not fast except to not eat meat because that would involve
killing, and killing is forbidden because Life is sacred. Also, be believed that it is
sinful to not marry and create Children because the Father is Life, so to abstain
from sex and not procreate would be to dishonor our Father. He also believed that
the Creator wanted life to be a joyful experience for us, so any form of asceticism,
self-sacrifice, or self-punishment like the flagellation some of the Catholic monks
have practiced would not be part of the Divine Plan for our lives. Yshu’s idea of
purity was a pure heart free from anger and hate, open to give and receive love,
kind and compassionate and strong in the face of ugly or frightening appearances. A
pure heart is strongly connected to our Father and joyously happy and free. We
embraced this concept. It was so far removed from the blame and punishment of the
Law of Moses, and the fear of displeasing an angry, vengeful God that we suddenly
saw life with new eyes, and we loved this concept of God.”

KK: “Did you ever question him about why his view of God was so different from
what you had been taught all your life?”

SP: “Not at that point. We were so in awe of his powers and his wisdom. I mean, he
was an extraordinary man! He had been trained in the Priesthood since he was
three years old, and he was educated and could read and write, and we had seen
with our own eyes his amazing powers to heal and to affect the weather. Why he had
chosen to share his time and wisdom with a handful of poor Jewish fishermen was a
mystery to us, and we were very honored to be in his presence.”

KK: “I would have been, too. Please continue.”

SP: “He shared with us things about his life and his training. It was rigorous. By
the time he was 7 years old, he was reading and memorizing prayers from the
prayer book, and assisting his father with the various rituals. At age 12, he began
studying with the Head Priest in preparation for being initiated as a Priest. There
were many rituals to be learned and many prayers to be memorized, as well as the
study of the Zodiac. He said that Hibil Ziwa, one of the Kings of Light, had given
the Book of the Zodiac to Adam so that he might be able to foresee coming events.
He said Mandaeans are given two names at birth, their human name for the

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material world, and their Zodiacal name which is their spiritual name and is the
only name used in the wedding ceremony.”

KK: “Didn’t this bother you a little? I mean, isn’t astrology forbidden in Jewish
scriptures?”

SP: “Yes, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with us. We weren’t doing
anything but listening to the story of his life. He went on to tell us about being
initiated at age 16 and how stringent the initiation was, days of performing rituals
that had to be word perfect, having to baptize the Head Priest, spending two months
of solitary purity, and then performing a full burial ceremony that took about 6
hours to complete. He had been put through a grueling period of training and then
performing the rituals, and everything had to be perfect. It required tremendous
will power and self-discipline. We marveled at what had been required of him since
he was only 3 years old.”

KK: “It is pretty amazing. No wonder he had such fortitude and grace.”

SP: “Yes, and there were other things too. He said that a Priest had to be physically
perfect, and that he had been required to strip and be examined by the other Priests
before his initiation to be sure that he was unblemished. They believed that to be
blemished was to be unclean, and an unclean person could not be a Priest. The same
applied to their wives because they would be the mothers of future Priests, so they
had to be physically perfect and come from a family with high morals. Girls were
usually married soon after they reached puberty, so his wife had been 14 and he was
18 when they were married.”

KK: “What was her name?”

SP: “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember that. You know, back then, a woman was
only the wife of some man. Their names were not important.”

KK: “Well, thank God that has changed. At least in the United States, The reason I
asked is because of all the emphasis that has been placed on Mary Magdalene and
speculation about her being married to Jesus. You know the popular book, “The Da
Vinci Code” makes a good case for that. Tell me about Mary Magdalene.”

SP: “Yeah, I read that book. It was a great story. Not accurate as far as Mary
Magdalene was concerned, but it did have a lot of other good information and was
quite entertaining. Mary Magdalene was a middle-aged widow who had inherited a
large amount of money from her deceased husband. However, you know, money
can’t buy everything. She had been very sick for years, and no doctor had been able
to cure her. She had gone to doctors all over the country, and had even paid for
doctors from abroad to come to her as she became bedridden, all to no avail. When
she heard about Yshu, she was ready to try anything, and she had her servants
carry her on a stretcher to where he was. He healed her. The Bible says he removed

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7 devils from her. In those days, they called diseases devils or demons, today we call
them germs, same difference, I guess. Anyway, he removed several illnesses from
her body. After years of suffering, to have her health completely restored was a
miracle, and she worshipped the ground he walked on. She became one of his most
staunch supporters and provided funds for his food and travel, well, for all of us
when we later came together as a large group. She also followed along and got
involved in our conversations which irritated some because she was a woman and at
that time, women stayed home and left the important talk to the men. But Yshu
always answered her questions and didn’t even mind that she intruded on our
gatherings. He said her soul was hungry.”

KK: “So there was no romantic involvement between them?”

SP: “Of course not. Yshu was happily married and a priest. The whole story of the
Da Vinci Code was based on the Last Supper painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, which
was painted over a thousand years after Yshu died, so Da Vinci had no personal
knowledge of his life. In the painting, he shows a feminine looking person sitting
next to Jesus wearing a mirror image of the robe he is wearing and their body
posture forming a giant M signifying that they were married. That was Da Vinci’s
little joke on the Holy Catholic Church.”

KK: “Why do you say that?”

SP: “Well, Da Vinci was gay. If you know any gay men, you know that the last
thing in the world that they are interested in is a man’s relationship with a woman,
so I think it’s safe to say that he was not thinking about Mary Magdalene when he
painted that painting. What Da Vinci was interested in was Yshu’s relationship with
John who is repeatedly described in the New Testament as the beloved of Jesus and
the disciple whom Jesus loved. So he painted an effeminate looking John seated next
to Jesus and secretly signaled to the gay community that they were married. He and
his friends must have had a good laugh over that painting being proudly displayed
in St. Peter’s Cathedral.”

KK: “Good lord! That’s shameful! (pause) Well…..was John gay?”

SP: “No, he was young and impressionable. His build was small and thin which
made him appear more girlish than mannish, but he was as strong and rowdy as
any young man. He and his brother James were great kidders, pranksters, always
stirring up something for a laugh. That’s why Yshu called them Sons of Thunder.
They were irrepressible and full of life, and their energy resonated with Yshu’s
radiant joy. His carefree, fearless attitude toward life was as attractive to John as
the Hippie lifestyle of the 1960s was to so many young people of that time. Of
course, just being in the presence of such a spiritually powerful man and witnessing
the healings and miracles that he performed was an incredible high. Every one
around Yshu felt it. This is why the crowds kept growing. People had never felt such
energy before and they couldn’t get enough of it. For John, it was overwhelming,

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and he slipped into complete adoration of this joyous, mystical, magical man. He
would stare at Yshu constantly with adoring eyes. He would cling to his arm and
lean his head on his shoulder and drink in every word that Yshu spoke. I have to tell
you that this irritated the hell out of me. It was unseemly for a man to cling to
another man like that, but John couldn’t help himself. The adoration was so
profound that no other love of any kind would ever be able to touch John. His
writing in the New Testament differs considerably from the other writings due to
the fact that of all the disciples, John really understood what true spiritual love felt
like. Yshu always told us that the true things of the spirit can only be understood by
the heart. He said many people will know something in their minds, but until they
have felt it in their hearts, it is only theory. John really understood Yshu’s message
of Love and Joy with his heart. A lot of people hear the word love and compare it to
the only love they have known, carnal love, and misunderstand everything. Like the
Jewish Priests did.”

KK: “What do you mean?”

SP: “Well, they heard about all this love stuff between Yshu and his disciples and
that there was some kind of kissing when we met, meaning our Kiss of Peace
handshake, but they only heard the kiss part, so they openly accused us of being
deviants who practiced sodomy, and rumor spread this as if it were a fact. From the
earliest days of the Christian movement, these rumors drew to us men of deviant
nature desiring to become followers of this new religion that they thought embraced
their lifestyle. So the Catholic Church became a haven for homosexual activity and
this accounts for many of the secrets the Vatican has hidden from the public all
these years. It was only in recent times when parents went to the police in the United
States to complain about the Priests sexually abusing their young sons that it
became apparent that this behavior had been going on for centuries.”

KK: “I know. That was quite a disturbing revelation to the world. I don’t
understand why it had never come out before.”

SP: “Really? I’ll explain it to you. Vatican City is a country in its own right, and a
political power in the world. That’s why the Pope is heralded with such high regard
by the government of any country he visits. He is the last ruling absolute monarch
that exists in Europe, the same as a King or Emperor. His country is the largest land
holder in the world. Vatican City owns the ground the Catholic Cathedrals sit upon,
which puts them in the same position as an Embassy. They sit on foreign soil. So the
Priests and Cardinals did not report complaints against their Priests to the local
police department. They reported them to their country, Vatican City, and it was all
handled internally. The offending Priest was warned and moved to another diocese,
usually one in a remote or unpopular region, and life went on without any public
uproar. That is, until the Twentieth Century in the United States when outraged
parents sought legal recourse through their local police departments instead of just
reporting it to the Cardinal for their area.”

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KK: “Simon! I have to stop for today. I’m overwhelmed. Time out, please. I’ll call
you in a few days.”

SP: “No problem. Shalom.”

KK: “Peace.”

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