The Essential Edgar Cayce (2 page)

• The importance of
meditation
as a spiritual discipline. Although meditation is an ancient practice best known to Eastern religions, Cayce evolved an approach that was easy to learn and easy to apply to the Judeo-Christian world in which he lived.

• A perspective on
reincarnation, karma,
and
grace
that is potentially acceptable to the Judeo-Christian world. Cayce presents reincarnation as an inescapable reality of how the universe operates; but, according to his theories, the harsh, retributive flavor of karma is softened by insistence that the healing and reconciling influences of grace are also available to every soul.

• An approach to
astrology
that recognizes past lives and the influence of the planets, especially with regard to helping people find a sense of purpose in life. Cayce’s approach to astrology was not the familiar, benign sun signs of today, nor the deterministic brand that believes that the stars control our fate. Instead, he used the influence of the planets as a way of describing innate temperament and its impact upon the personality and aptitude.

The many ways in which Edgar Cayce is viewed today is testimony to the breadth of his work. People are able to relate to him in different ways not only because of their own “filters” but also because of the scope of the material itself. It is very easy to get lost, in fact, in its sheer variety, and very hard to grasp all that he has to offer.

And it is just this problem that this book addresses. What is the “essence” of Cayce’s material? What are the most basic theories, principles, and teachings illuminated in the thousands of discourses he presented between 1901 and 1944?

There are no simple answers. But if we’re willing to put aside preconceived notions about clairvoyantly derived knowledge or Cayce’s qualifications as a spiritual philosopher (or lack thereof), then we really can find the heart of his material. Indeed, there really is an “essential” Edgar Cayce, and it may reveal some real surprises.

THE LIFE OF AN INTUITIVE HEALER

One of the most significant books written in recent years about Edgar Cayce is K. Paul Johnson’s 1998
Edgar Cayce in Context.
Johnson’s theme is that Cayce can be understood only by viewing the man in the context of his own life story, and, more important, in the context of his own time. Adhering to this premise, let’s consider the prominent events of Cayce’s life, as well as some of the social and cultural factors that went into shaping it and his teachings.

Born in 1877, in rural Kentucky, Edgar Cayce was largely the product of a conservative Southern Protestant upbringing. It was just a dozen years since the end of the Civil War, and even though his home state had not joined the Confederacy—Kentucky was one of the so-called border states—it was surely a place where the tensions between North and South were still acutely felt.

The farm Cayce grew up on was in the southwestern part of the state, just outside the small town of Hopkinsville; the nearest big city was Nashville, Tennessee, nearly two hundred miles to the southeast. Hopkinsville is right in the heart of Christian County, and in Cayce’s youth it was a God-fearing agricultural community with tobacco as its primary crop.

Like all of us, Cayce’s developing personality was profoundly influenced by his parents. His mother, Carrie, was, by all accounts, a powerful influence. Warm and nurturing, she was a deeply religious woman, and surely a major factor in fostering the young Edgar’s profound dedication to the Bible and religious life. While still a boy, he made a deep commitment to read the Bible daily. Photographs of Carrie show a pleasant-looking, rather round-faced woman with kind eyes.

But the young Cayce’s relationship with the men in the family was seemingly more complex. By some accounts, his paternal grandfather, Thomas Cayce, was a strong influence on him, better modeling the masculine aspects of strength and accomplishment coupled with sensitivity than did Edgar’s own father, Leslie. Sadly, however, Thomas drowned when the horse he was riding threw him into a lake, which the four-year-old witnessed and no doubt was traumatized by. Years later, as an adult, Edgar wrote of this trying experience in his diary, which was not published until 1997 in
Edgar Cayce: My Life as a Seer,
edited by A. Robert Smith. About the death of his grandfather Cayce wrote, “I often wonder just what effect these associations of thought have had on my mental being or my activities in this life.”

Thomas Cayce, a rather handsome man with a full beard but no mustache, was considered a clairvoyant in his own right, although he was confused about his gift and therefore cautious about it. Edgar recalled riding with Thomas and being able to hear disembodied voices speaking to him. “I also saw him move tables and other articles, apparently without any contact with these objects themselves.” But when the younger Cayce asked about these strange phenomena, the elder Cayce said, simply, “I don’t know what the power is, but don’t fool with it.” Although Edgar was so young when Thomas died, modern psychology has it that his childhood experiences shaped his adult personality profoundly, and from his grandfather Edgar learned that psychic ability was a real force deserving of his greatest respect.

Edgar Cayce’s relationship with his father is glossed over by many biographers. Often referred to affectionately as “the Squire,” Leslie in photographs is dashingly good-looking, sporting a prominent handlebar mustache. But he was not a particularly successful man, moving from one job to another and never really settling into a career. And although pretty much a family secret, some report that he had a problem with alcohol for much of his adult life. When Edgar began to demonstrate clairvoyance as a young man, it was Leslie who was eager to explore this mental power, including its commercial potential. Since exploitation dogged Cayce for most of his adult life, it is difficult to say whether he considered his father’s involvement as a supportive, protective influence, or as a potentially threatening one.

Family stories about Edgar Cayce’s early years reveal that from a very early age he possessed uncanny powers that would surface spontaneously. At the age of six or seven, he told his parents he sometimes saw visions, and even occasionally spoke with relatives who had recently died. His parents, for the most part, attributed these experiences to an overactive imagination and paid them little attention.

Perhaps the most celebrated psychic experience of Edgar’s childhood happened when he was thirteen years old, an event his first biographer, Thomas Sugrue, made the centerpiece of his highly influential
There Is a River
of 1943. Edgar had become an avid Bible reader when he was ten, no doubt inspired by his mother and her attendance at Christian revival meetings so very popular in America during the Reconstruction era. He had vowed to read the Bible in its entirety every year for the rest of his life, a promise he apparently kept—an expression of true dedication and a remarkable achievement in its own right. One day, he had a vision, which he describes in his own memoirs:

One evening I had my first vision. I had read through the Book [i.e., the Bible] several times by then. I had been reading the vision of Manoah, for I loved the story of Samson. I prayed very earnestly that afternoon as I sat in the woods by my favorite tree that had so often seemed to speak to me. . . .

[That night] I was not yet asleep when the vision first began, but I felt as if I were being lifted up. A glorious light as of the rising morning sun seemed to fill the whole room, and a figure appeared at the foot of my bed. I was sure it was my mother, and I called to her, but she didn’t answer. For the moment I was frightened, climbed out of bed, and went to my mother’s room. No, she hadn’t called. Almost immediately after I returned to my couch, the figure came again. Then it seemed all gloriously bright—an angel, or what, I knew not; but gently, patiently, it said, “Thy prayers are heard. You will have your wish. Remain faithful. Be true to yourself. Help the sick, the afflicted.”

The very next evening, the remarkable capacity of his mind began to show itself. Heretofore, Cayce had not been a particularly good student, sometimes even being punished for forgetting his lessons. But that night, as Leslie grilled Edgar on his lessons, Edgar intuitively felt the need to take a short nap. Falling asleep after having just studied, intuition seemed to tell him, would make a big difference in his ability to retain knowledge. And, in fact, it did. He began to demonstrate a kind of “photographic memory”—ironic, perhaps, given his later career as a portrait photographer. As he wrote in his memoirs, “From that day on, I had little trouble in school, for I would read my lesson, sleep on it a few seconds, and then be able to repeat every word of it.” Cayce had begun a journey of self-discovery that would link falling asleep to tapping in to his mind’s potential. At this stage, it merely facilitated reconnecting with what he had studied already. But in his early adult years, he would find that he could connect to deeper, more mysterious wisdom within his reach.

A hint of this talent came at age fifteen when Cayce was playing baseball with other boys and he was hit accidentally by a thrown ball at the base of the spine. In the hours immediately after, he exhibited erratic behavior—giggling, laughing, making faces, even standing in the middle of the road stopping buggies with his upraised hands. Just as Edgar was about to fall asleep that night, he announced that a poultice of cornmeal, onions, and some herbs should be administered to the back of his skull to counteract the shock sustained from the injury. His parents followed his instructions—virtually, his first medical reading—and following a night’s sleep he was normal once again. Little did anyone realize then how this medical clairvoyance would foreshadow the work he would pursue later as an adult.

In 1901, when he was twenty-four years old, Edgar happened serendipitously upon his talent for tapping in to the wisdom of the unconscious mind. It was at this time that he met and fell in love with Gertrude Evans, his future wife and mother of their three sons (one of whom died as an infant), and an ardent supporter of his life’s work. But in this first year of the new century, he was stricken with an ailment that threatened to undermine his current career as a traveling salesman—and, even more alarmingly, his long-term hopes of becoming a minister in the church someday.

A severe case of laryngitis plagued Cayce for months and baffled doctors. In the end, it proved responsive only to hypnosis. When hypnotized, Edgar could not only talk again but was able to diagnose the cause and prescribe a treatment to effect a lasting cure.

Some months later, Cayce tried out his diagnostic and prescriptive skills on other people to remarkable effect. And so began his work—albeit, for many years only occasional—as an intuitive healer.

Edgar Cayce quickly found that a hypnotist wasn’t needed to access his unconscious wisdom. Following an interlude of prayer, he could move into this state on his own. It was a fragile, vulnerable condition because his unconscious was wide open, he said; hence, his insistence that a family member be present to direct the experience, to act as what came to be called
the conductor
of the reading, because on more than one occasion people tried to take advantage of his gift. Usually, Gertrude or his elder son, Hugh Lynn, served in this role.

Typically, when giving a reading, Cayce first lead the others with him—the conductor, the stenographer, and sometimes the person(s) for whom the reading was being given—in prayer. Then he would lie down on a couch on his back, close his eyes, and place his hands on his forehead. The conductor would then read aloud a hypnotic-like suggestion tailored to the type of reading desired. For example, for a physical health reading the suggestions might be: “You will go over this body carefully, examine it thoroughly, and tell me the conditions you find at the present time; giving the cause of the existing conditions, also suggestions for help and relief of this body; answering the questions, as I ask them.” On the other hand, for a reading addressing reincarnation and the purposes of life currently, the suggestion might be:

“You will give the relation of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the entity in the present, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them.”

Listening to the suggestion, Cayce would allow himself to move into a trancelike, meditative state, and he would move his hands down from his forehead to cover his solar plexus. To observers in the room, it appeared that he had fallen asleep. But he was not asleep, and he would begin to address the request posed in the suggestion. After an opening discourse that may or may not be brief—sometimes only a minute in length, other times as long as twenty minutes or more—Edgar then would invite questions for further elaboration. The reading would end when he would announce “We are through for the present,” at which point the conductor read aloud a suggestion that Cayce regain normal consciousness and he would slowly awake, much like a person awakening from a nap.

Because Cayce was unable to remember what he had said, the stenographer would transcribe every word recorded so that Cayce could review the reading for himself. Then a transcript would be forwarded to the subject of the reading. Sometimes Cayce maintained a correspondence with the individual in which he added his own conscious interpretive comments or advice. On occasion, the stenographer was not sure about a word uttered by Cayce, and therefore she inserted a bracketed reference to an alternative word—for example, in reading 281-13 found in chapter 3: “. . . that which shadows [shatters?] much in the experiences of others.”

The source of the information that came through Edgar Cayce’s readings is an important issue. Although Cayce sometimes has been labeled a
medium,
or a
channeler
of psychic information, he insisted that it was almost never some external source speaking or channeling through him; in other words, it was not some deceased soul or some enlightened master broadcasting from beyond in the spiritual world. Instead, the origin of the information—what Cayce called
the source
—was his own superconscious, or universal, mind, a level of awareness from which all experience up to that time is accessible and from which the solution to any problem is available. In fact, Cayce often stated that all of us potentially have access to this superconsciousness if we can only learn how to access it.