The Essential Edgar Cayce (3 page)

It should be noted that there were some dozen rare occasions on which a voice spoke through Cayce that identified itself as something other than Cayce’s superconsciousness. Most were in the 1930s, and it was frequently the Archangel Michael claiming to speak through Cayce, usually admonishing Cayce and his followers to practice in their own lives the very teachings promoted by Cayce. And in 1934, yet another being spoke through Cayce, offering to become the source of the readings thereafter. After careful consideration, however, Cayce decided that he was not interested in such an offer.

As curious as this
methodology
surely was—although today, in the early twenty-first century, an era of psychics on every corner, it doesn’t sound quite so strange—it was the
content
of what he said in his readings that is most important. Holistic, natural approaches to healing were advocated, and any illness was essentially a body, mind, spirit phenomenon and healing must happen in all three areas. Over the many years in which Edgar Cayce gave medical readings, he finally received the credit due him in an article published in 1979 in
The Journal of the American Medical Association:
“The roots of present-day holism probably go back 100 years to the birth of Edgar Cayce in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.”

Nineteen twenty-three, when Edgar was forty-six years old, was an important turning point in his life. During this new phase of his work, he discovered that he was capable of clairvoyant discourses on a whole range of nonmedical topics as well. It was in September of that year that Gladys Davis, all of eighteen years of age, came into Cayce’s life and served as his secretary/stenographer for the rest of his life.

Edgar Cayce was befriended at this time by several wealthy individuals who supported his move to Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1925, where his full-time pursuit of his spiritual gifts began in earnest. Edgar’s own life readings indicated that Virginia Beach would be ideal for him; it was near a large body of water, in close proximity to the nation’s capital, and he predicted tremendous growth in the decades to come. What’s more, he had had a significant past-life experience there several centuries earlier and it would feel like home to him.

But the next twenty years were difficult times for the Cayce family. Not only was it no easy task trying to be a full-time clairvoyant healer and spiritual philosopher seventy years ago, but the Great Depression and World War II tended to direct national attention toward priorities other than exploring the extrasensory. Nevertheless, Cayce and his supporters made several attempts to establish institutions and a school that embodied the readings.

In that regard, the Cayce Hospital of Research and Enlightenment was founded in Virginia Beach in 1928. Here was a courageous pioneering effort to launch a body-mind-spirit healing facility. But after only two years, it collapsed financially. The same fate befell an advanced educational program Cayce cofounded called Atlantic University. It, too, shut its doors after only two years (only to open again in 1985, exactly forty years after Cayce’s death).

The remaining years of Edgar Cayce’s life were similarly difficult, with the family usually teetering on the brink of poverty. With the close of Atlantic University and the demise of both the Cayce hospital and the Association of National Investigators—the organization that had supervised the hospital’s development—a few core supporters remained to gather around Cayce. In 1931, they created a new organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which made Cayce’s clairvoyant services available to members for a fee of twenty dollars. It was no small sum in the Depression era, and it was the principal means by which Cayce supported himself and his family. Yet many of the readings during this time were free of charge because people just didn’t have the money.

In 1932, some of Cayce’s most ardent followers worked with him to found a study group program. Over the next eleven years, the group received 130 readings on character development and spiritual growth topics. These readings were summarized in essays written by group members and published in a two-volume set titled
A Search for God.
Topics included “Know Thyself,” “Faith,” “Patience,” and “Wisdom.” In the decades following Edgar Cayce’s death, this program has grown into one of the most important aspects of his legacy, with hundreds of ongoing groups in the United States and in more than thirty countries worldwide.

The 1930s were complicated for Cayce not only because of depressed economic conditions but also because of difficulties finding recognition for his work. Parapsychology was a budding science, with pioneers such as J. B. Rhine, who had been trained as a botanist but conducted groundbreaking research in psychic ability through the department of psychology at Duke University. There was some passing interest in Cayce’s gifts expressed by a handful of scientists, but these gifts were in turn expressed in probably too anecdotal and uncontrolled a fashion for them. They were much more interested in proving the veracity of ESP under laboratory conditions.

And so Edgar Cayce had to look to less scientific pathways to gain acceptance. His son Hugh Lynn moved to New York City in 1938 to help produce a regular radio series titled
Mysteries of the Mind,
to help generate interest in psychic ability generally and in his father’s work particularly. Broadcast on WOR, the programs dealt with various psychic experiences in a dramatized form, but they met with only marginal success.

It wasn’t until the early 1940s that the mainstream press became aware of Cayce’s gifts. Marguerite Bro, a renowned theologian and author, came to Virginia Beach to personally investigate what she had heard about Cayce’s intuitive healing powers and came away so impressed that she published an article about him in 1942 in
Coronet
magazine, one of the most widely read periodicals of the time. Letters of inquiry and requests for readings began to pour in.

But an even more significant publishing event gave Cayce’s work something that had been long sought. In 1943, the lengthy and beautifully written biography of Cayce,
There Is a River,
was published by Henry Holt. Penned by newspaper reporter and family friend Thomas Sugrue, the book marked a watershed in the public’s appreciation of Cayce’s achievements. Widely praised, it resulted in an even greater influx of requests for readings—a demand beyond anything Cayce himself could keep up with.

Sadly, Edgar Cayce was not able to enjoy these publishing milestones for very long. With both of his sons serving overseas as soldiers in World War II, he and his small circle of supporters did the best they could to deal with the newfound deluge of interest. But, now in his mid-sixties, Edgar’s health was not robust, and with his fervent efforts to keep abreast of the new demands in his work—sometimes involving giving more than ten readings in a single day—it began to deteriorate. There were warning signs as to how detrimental this output could really be to his health, but the warning signs were largely ignored.

Nineteen forty-four was a catastrophic year for Cayce’s health. Early in the year, he contracted pneumonia. Later, he suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed. After one especially debilitating episode, he spent three months at a recuperative facility in Roanoke, Virginia, but there was little improvement and he was brought back home to Virginia Beach in December 1944. There, he was diagnosed with pulmonary edema, which led to his death on January 3, 1945.

AFTER EDGAR CAYCE’S DEATH

In spite of the many frustrations and challenges of his life, Edgar Cayce left an extraordinary legacy in the thousands of discourses. Indeed, he became far better known to the public
after
his death than when he was alive and doing his work. A considerable amount of attention was focused on just several dozen readings—a number significantly less than
one percent
of the total number of readings—because they dealt with prophecies for the years 1958 through 1998, and, to a lesser extent, prophecies for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Many of the prophecies sounded a dire note, warning of rather catastrophic geological events and severe changes in the earth that never came to pass. These images of the world in turmoil became the centerpiece of a landmark best-seller about Edgar Cayce published in 1967,
The Sleeping Prophet,
in which author and newspaper reporter Jess Stearn captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers. In the years following Cayce’s death until the book’s publication, the organization he founded in 1931, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), had grown very slowly but steadily under the tireless leadership of Hugh Lynn Cayce. But with the publication of Stearn’s book, interest swelled, not unlike what happened in 1943 with the publication of
There Is a River,
and membership in ARE increased dramatically, the number of active study groups increased fourfold in three years, and an entire series of books about the readings were published by mainstream publishers both in the United States and abroad.

Even though it was Cayce’s prophecies that initially captured the public’s attention, other readings began attracting growing interest. The physical health readings—some nine thousand of them—were by far the largest category. In between were the “life readings,” dream interpretation readings, and readings offering spiritual advice and even business advice—each numbering in the hundreds, or, in the case of the life readings, nearly two thousand. The life readings were in-depth character analyses addressed to specific individuals to help them see the purpose of their lives; they also included Cayce’s views on the mission of the soul in this life as well as the next, and his views on reincarnation.

From early on in Edgar Cayce’s career as a clairvoyant, it was clear that his discourses should be recorded in writing. At first, notes were taken in a rather haphazard manner; later, a stenographic transcript was compiled, the vast majority of which was accomplished by longtime secretary Gladys Davis. Years later, the readings were numbered, both to protect the privacy of the recipient and to facilitate research and publication. The name of the individual (or, in some instances, the group) was assigned a
case number;
and because many people received multiple readings, a second number was assigned to indicate a given reading’s place in sequence. For example, Cayce’s own son Hugh Lynn, who received dozens of readings over the years, was assigned case number “341,” so the thirty-first reading he received was numbered “341-31.” (It is included here in chapter 3, “Healthy Living.” The numbering system is employed throughout this book.)

Many people find the discourses somewhat difficult to read, especially at first. They often seem rather stilted, and they are full of references to the King James Bible. The sentences are frequently long, complex, and discursive in nature, and much reads like poetic advice-giving. Those new to Cayce may find reading appendix 1, “How to Read and Study a Cayce Reading,” page 263, helpful
before
starting the text.

Given the wide range of topics that Edgar Cayce addressed over the years, what was it that finally allowed his work to make a significant impression both here and overseas? Beginning in the 1960s, the increased appreciation of Cayce ultimately came not from sensationalistic earth-change prophecies or even clairvoyant diagnoses; it came from his holistic philosophy of life, his skillful blending of Eastern and Western traditions to heal the body
and
feed the soul. What’s more, Cayce himself is an exemplar of Americana: raised in a lower-middle-class, rural environment, with only an eighth-grade education, he “made good” somehow. But his achievements weren’t typically American entrepreneurial; they were life-enhancing, and they were for the common good. In many ways, he was ahead of his time, and truly appreciated only after all these decades following his death.

THE ESSENCE OF THE CAYCE PHILOSOPHY

Before exploring theories and models of human experience proposed by Edgar Cayce, let’s identify the key themes that run throughout his work. Here are twelve points that speak to the heart of his philosophy—the “Cayce dozen,” as it were, of the essential principles of life. Some, such as the purposefulness of life and the reality of evil, are explored in much more detail in later chapters.

1. Everything is connected—all is one.

The oneness of all life is the foundation on which the teachings of Edgar Cayce rest. He even said on one occasion that those interested in studying spiritual law should first study the principles of oneness for six months before moving on. Clearly, oneness means more than just some platitude we toss about—“All is one”—and then keep living our lives based on superficial
distinctions
rather than the deeper reality of
unity.

To call Cayce a
mystic
means to see his work in terms of oneness, for surely the essence of mysticism is a belief in the underlying unity of all things that otherwise appear to be distinct. Mysticism means going beyond differentiating such qualities as inner and outer, light and dark, good and bad, and bringing together the extremes. As Cayce often put it, “Only in the Christ Consciousness do the extremes meet.” His point here was
not
to rank one religion over another but to champion a state of consciousness that lives
as potential
within all of us.

But Cayce’s mystical approach takes things a step further. Once we perceive that unity links the apparent differences in life, then it’s our challenge to return to the world of distinctions and apply what we have learned as
practical
mystics. We can bring this sense of oneness to everything we do, which leads to the second essential principle.

2. Life is purposeful.

Edgar Cayce’s readings remind us that life has a central purpose. We are born to bring the creative, spiritual world
into
the daily material world—“making the infinite finite.” What’s more, each of us is born with a personal mission, a “soul-purpose,” which we will examine in more detail in chapter 5, “The Soul’s Journey.” Essentially, Cayce suggests that each of us is created with certain talents, skills, and aptitudes that equip us for a unique “way of being” in the world. That way of being promotes our own spiritual awakening; and, equally important, that way of being promotes the well-being of others. There is an aspect of service to soul-purpose, a sense of making a contribution to the world. Cayce often helped people see the soul-purpose in their lives by articulating individual personal mission statements for those receiving life readings.