When we look into the stories told about the life and teachings of Yeshua (Aramaic-Hebrew for "Jesus") we find a very luminous Jewish teacher and mystic, an amazing prophet and wonderworker, and most important of all a holy man who embodies the fullness of the presence and power of God, the Divine—hence, the Messiah, the anointed of God.

In him we see the union of a human being and God—the embodiment of the knowledge of God or enlightenment.

When we look into the many wonders or miracles he performs, more than anything else what we find is the removal of displaced energies, the mending of souls from "spiritual possession," and the healing of illness and disease, the restoration of well-being and harmony on physical, psychic (mental-emotional), and spiritual levels. In fact, according to all accounts he brings about some of the most radical healings, and even brings the dead back to life on a number of occasions, and we may say that he is, perhaps, the greatest healer to have ever walked upon the earth.

If we look into the stories of great adepts and masters, aside from the mystery of the crucifixion and revelation of the resurrection, Yeshua stands out for his active love and compassion in healing works, relieving the sorrow and suffering of the people, and drawing them nearer to God, the Divine.

In orthodox or mainstream forms of Christianity we are taught that Yeshua is the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes for the forgiveness of "sin," the dispelling of negative karma—he comes to make a sacrifice of himself for the remission of sin, the negation of karma that binds souls, so that whosoever believes in him as the Messiah, the Son of God, may be forgiven and set free, receiving eternal life.

There is, indeed, some truth in this—the generation of a sanctuary of grace through which negative patterns in consciousness are dispelled or removed, a release from sorrow and suffering. Yet, from a Gnostic perspective there is something much more essential in the Divine Incarnation—the Messiah is not only the Savior who releases souls from negative karma or sin, but it also the Gnostic Revealer, a teacher of enlightenment or self-realization.

In Gnostic Christianity, in fact, the issue is not so much sin or negative karma, but rather the state of ignorance that leads to the generation of "sin" or negative karma and negative energy. Thus, more than the forgiveness of sin or the dispelling of negative karma, Yeshua Messiah (Aramaic-Hebrew for "Jesus Christ") comes to dispel ignorance (agnosis), imparting spiritual knowledge (gnosis). While faith may be the beginning of our salvation, our enlightenment, and our liberation, spiritual knowledge and the experience of divine illumination is the fruition of our enlightenment and liberation—the knowledge of self, reality, and God through direct spiritual and mystical experience.

According to orthodox or mainstream forms of Christianity the Messiah is the Son of God who comes to save us from sin, and the wonders he performs are to demonstrate that he is, indeed, the Son of God so that we might believe in him and receive our salvation. Gnostic Christianity, however, takes a somewhat different view. In Christian Gnosticism and Christian Kabbalah, the presence and power of the Divine embodied in Yeshua Messiah is within us all, so that beholding the living presence and power embodied in him, the Messiah, our true essence and nature, our true being, is revealed to us—he comes to reveal our true being as we are in God. Likewise, teaching and performing wonders, he reveals our innate unity with the source of our being, God, and he reveals the true nature of the reality of our experience.

In a manner of speaking, from a Gnostic point of view, Yeshua is like a lucid dreamer who enters into the collective dream we call "reality" and the "world" in order to awaken us so that we might also become lucid in the dream. In the play of radical wonderworking he performs, he reveals that we are completely interconnected with the reality of our experience and its source. He also reveals that the reality of our experience is "dream-like," which is to say that it is a radiant or magical display of our own mind, consciousness, or soul.

In Gnostic Christianity and Christian Kabbalah we are taught that God, the Divine, is pure spirit, energy, or light—the one Being-Consciousness-Force—and we are taught that we are all emanations of Divine Being, Divine Consciousness, Divine Force, the "Light of the Infinite," and so is all creation on every level. As such, we are co-creators with God, co-creating the reality of our experience on an individual and a collective level. It is all the radiant or magical display of the one Being-Consciousness-Force, the spirit, energy, or light that we are and God is.

According to Gnostic teachings, Yeshua is the pure emanation of the Light Continuum (Yahweh), the Human One of Light (Messiah); but, then, so also is our soul, our energetic being—we are a person of light who emanates from the Light Continuum, and who, in fact, never depart from it, for all is the emanation of this Holy Light, even our physical body and the physical world.

In this regard it is very interesting what modern science has to say about the material universe and the matter that composes it. According to modern physics it is all energy, the energy of the Big Bang and light of the stars. In explaining the actual nature of matter, one British physicist has said that, in effect, matter is "frozen light:" energy or light in its most dense manifestation.

Basically speaking, modern physics is confirming what mystics and metaphysicians from many different wisdom traditions have been teaching for thousands of years (although most often in a primitive way, failing to recognize the source or cause, the one Being-Consciousness-Force that we call "God," the True Light).

In our essence and nature we are spirit, energy, or light—our soul is, in essence, an energetic or light being, emanating from the source, God, the Light Continuum. When we incarnate, our energetic being, our soul, emanates through a process of restriction at various levels, through spiritual dimensions into the material dimension, eventually generating a physical or material body and life, an incarnation in the physical or material world. When we incarnate, in effect, we become a dual being, having an existence on an energetic and material level; that is to say, we become an energetic being and a material being. At the outset, usually, when we are little children our energetic and material being are aligned and in harmony, completely integrated with one another, and although unconscious of it, we experience an inseparability from our environment and we are near to our source, experiencing our innate unity with the source of our being, the True Light.

Indeed, if we look with the sight of the Spirit, or we look with our interior senses in an expanded state of consciousness, and we gaze upon a little child in the energetic dimension, in most cases what we behold is a vision of incredible luminosity and beauty, seemingly divine or "angelic." We see a radiant aura or field of energy that is somewhat egg-shaped and very bright. As we continue to gaze, looking within this we see the image of the child in a body composed of even more subtle energy or light, and within that body we can see a matrix of energetic channel-ways and centers that look like points of light or little stars. What we see is, indeed, a person of light or energy who is self-generating, self-transforming, with an incredible self-healing power, and it is a vision of holy awe and wonder to see, for seeing this we are glimpsing the truth of a human soul as a radiant energetic or light being.

If and when we are able to see a little child in this way we may understand a curious saying from the Gospel of St. Thomas:

Yeshua Said, "An individual old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that individual will live. For many of the first will be among the last, and they will become a single one" (Saying 4).

This integrated state of being, however, is unconscious in a little child and it does not tend to last very long once a soul is incarnate in this world. Fairly swiftly the karmic continuum of the soul begins to become activated, habitual patterns in consciousness formed in previous lives begin to arise. As the person of the incarnation forms consciousness and becomes conditioned through interactions with family, society, environment, and education, we experience negative exchanges of energy between ourselves and others, or what we view as traumatic events. In this process, more and more we become identified with the surface consciousness, with name and form, and personal history—our material being—and we lose touch with our soul, our energetic being. In effect, we become divided, our energetic being and material being no longer aligned and in harmony, no longer integrated.

When this happens we lose awareness of our inner being, and in losing awareness of our inner being, our soul or energetic being, we lose our awareness of our innate connection with the source of our being, the Divine, the True Light. We become bound up in ignorance, an illusion of separation, a delusion of lack. Likewise, habitual and negative patterns in consciousness from previous lives and from traumatic events in this life (negative self-images, thoughts, and emotions) create distortions, disruptions and, obstructions in the flow of energy or light, and in our energetic being.

Typically speaking, when we look at the energetic being of most adults with the sight of the Spirit, or in with interior senses in an expanded state of consciousness, what we see is very different than with a little child. The aura appears dim in comparison with that of little children, and it often will appear distorted in one way or another, and in it we may see a displaced energy. Likewise, as we gaze deeper we will find distortions in the subtle body or light image of the person, and perceive blockages in the matrix of energetic channel-ways, and we will find various imbalances in the energetic centers within the subtle body.

The state of disharmony between our energetic and material being and within our energetic being is what produces our experiences of sorrow and suffering, illness, disease and ill fortune in life—it all has its root on a spiritual and psychic level, an energetic level, in our soul, which then plays out on a physical or material level. This awareness of ourselves as energetic and material beings, and the cause of illness, disease, and ill fortune on an occurring on energetic level is the basis of spiritual healing—Gnostic Healing.

Essentially, the process of Gnostic healing is the restoration of the original state of our being as little children, a restoration to the state of the original blessing in which we are all conceived, but that as a mature and awakened individual we are also aware of ourselves as a co-creator inseparable from the universal and the source of our being, God, the True Light. In a word, it is a process of reintegration, the reintegration of our energetic and material being, our soul and body, and the reintegration of our energetic being with its source, the Holy One of Being.

The Gospel of Thomas hints at this:

Yeshua said, "When you make two into one, you will become children of the Human One. When you say to the mountain, 'Move,' the mountain will move" (Saying 106).

There is an even more direct teaching about this in the Gospel of Thomas, however, which says:

Yeshua saw some babies nursing and he said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like souls who enter the kingdom." The disciples said to him, "Then shall we enter the kingdom as babies?" Yeshua responded, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter into the kingdom" (Saying 22).

In the healing art within Gnostic Christianity we learn how to access the presence and power of the Divine that is in us: the power to re-create our lives, heal ourselves, and to work wonders in our lives, as well as to help others re-create their lives, heal themselves, and work wonders in their lives. It is a journey of self-exploration and self-knowledge that leads to an experience of the awakening of the soul and divine illumination, or to what is called the "Gnostic experience."

The Gnostic experience is, in fact, at the very heart of the healing way, and it is an experience that is threefold: 1) It is an experience of higher or more expanded states of consciousness; 2) an opening of consciousness to new dimensions—inner or metaphysical dimensions, the energetic or visionary dimension; 3) and it is knowledge of God acquired through direct spiritual and mystical experience of God, the fruition of which is a conscious experience of unification with God—our full reintegration with the Light Continuum, the source of all being.

In this we may know and understand that Gnostic healing isn't just the relief of our pain and suffering, or the restoration of wellness and wholeness of our being in this life, but it is also a way upon the path to enlightenment; its ultimate aim is the enlightenment and liberation of our soul, a healing in the body and beyond the body.

The aim is our self-realization in Christ, the realization of Supernal or Messianic Consciousness.

This is why along with practices for the healing of people in the midst of life, the healing art in Gnostic Christianity also teaches practices for the healing of people who are dying, as well as practices for the healing of souls in the afterlife—healing in the body and healing beyond the body.

In truth, the healing arts within Gnostic Christianity are teachings about conscious living, which empower conscious dying: a reintegration of ourselves with the Truth and Light in life, which leads to our full reintegration with the Light Continuum when we depart this body and world; hence, "entrance into the kingdom," the light realm, on earth and in heaven.

From a Gnostic perspective, it is this healing way that Yeshua Messiah comes to teach us.