The Essential Edgar Cayce Read Free Page A

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.

    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.