Edgar
Cayce
was born March 18, 1877 on a farm near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. At an early age he found
that he was able to learn
his school lessons by sleeping on his textbooks.
He was also able to see and talk to his
late
grandfather's spirit, and often played with "imaginary friends" whom
he said were spirits on the other side. Edgar
Cayce dropped out of school after the seventh or ninth grade, there are
conflicting accounts. Either
way, this
was not unusual for the time, living on a farm.
Cayce’s outlook on his life
was
undoubtedly influenced by the Christian revivalist meetings which were
popular
at that time all over the country. At
the age of seven or eight Edgar was sitting in a wooded clearing
reading the
Bible when he saw what he described as a bright vision of a winged
figure
clothed in white.
The vision asked the child
what he
wanted in life, and Edgar Cayce responded that he wished to help
others. The next
day, Edgar was having difficulty
learning his spelling homework. In
his
mind he heard the voice of his vision telling him to ‘sleep, that you
might be
helped’. The boy did as he was told, laying his head on his spelling
book.
He woke up
later, to find he knew the spelling
of every word.
Edgar
Cayce
was a devoted churchgoer and Sunday school teacher. At
a young age, Cayce vowed to read the Bible once
for every year of his life. At
the time
of his death in 1945, he had accomplished this goal. Perhaps
his readings said it best, when asked
how to become psychic, Cayce’s advice was to become more spiritual.
At
the age of fifteen, he suffered an accident at school. He was struck on the back of
his neck by a
baseball. The young
Edgar Cayce went
into a semi-stupor, and while in that state, told his parents to
prepare a
special poultice and apply it to the nape of his neck, at the base of
his
brain. To appease
their son, his parents
did as they were told, and in the morning, Cayce was completely
recovered.
This
was Edgar Cayce’s first health reading,
and he soon discovered that he
could do the same reading for others.
Cayce
left school in Hopkinsville to find work where he could. He worked on a farm, then in
a shoe store, and
later a bookstore. By the age of twenty-one, he had become the salesman
for a
wholesale stationery company.
At this
time Cayce developed a gradual
throat paralysis that developed
into aphonia,
and
caused the complete loss of his voice. The Doctors Cayce approached
were unable to help
him, and he began to regard his problem as incurable.
Edgar Cayce resorted to
hypnosis,
but this had no useful effect either.
It
occurred to him one day to attempt re-entering the same type of
hypnotic sleep
which had enabled him to learn his schoolbooks when he was a boy.
Edgar Cayce found a
hypnotist who
was willing to give him the necessary suggestion. Once
in the trance, Cayce reportedly spoke in
a clear voice, spelling out precisely what his symptoms were, and what
should
be done to cure them. Edgar
Cayce had
succeeded in curing himself. This
launched him on a lifelong career as a psychic diagnostician and
healer.
For
more
than 40 years of his adult life, Edgar Cayce was able to find intuitive
insights into nearly any question he was asked, by lying down on a
couch,
closing his eyes, and folding his hands over his stomach.
In this state of relaxation
and meditation, he
was able to place his mind in contact with all time and space. Cayce called this the
universal consciousness,
also known as the super-conscious mind.
It made no difference to
Cayce if
his patient was sitting next to him in the same room, or a total
stranger
living hundreds of miles away. Preparations
for any reading Edgar Cayce made were always the same.
As Cayce himself described
it, he
would first loosen his clothing in order to have a perfectly free
flowing
circulation. He
would then lie on the
couch in his office, with his head to the south, and his feet to the
north.
Placing his
hands on his forehead between his
eyes, Cayce would wait a few moments until he received what he would
call the go
signal, which he described as a flash of brilliant white light.
Cayce would then move his
hands to
his solar plexus, and fall into a trance. His
wife would tell him the name and location
of the patient, leaving out any mention of age, sex or physical
problem.
Cayce
might pause a while before repeating the
name and address until he had succeeded in 'locating' the patient, he
would
then describe that person’s condition. Cayce
would then prescribe medication and any other corrective measures.
Edgar Cayce always ended his
reading with the words: "We are through."
In
this
state, Edgar Cayce could respond to
questions as broad as, "What are the secrets of the universe?" or "What
is my purpose in life?" and as specific as, "What can I do to help my
arthritis?" and "How were the pyramids of Egypt built?
It
was this
sleep-like trance state that gave him the nickname, “The Sleeping
Prophet”. Answers
he gave while in the
trance have come to be known as "readings".
Edgar
Cayce was the first to use such terms as
"meditation," "Akashic records," "spiritual
growth," "auras," "soul mates," and "holistic
health" that have since become household words to millions.
Edgar Cayce had not been a
good
student as a child. Later
in life, he
would become renowned for how educated he sounded when he spoke while
in a
trance.
In his
conscious, waking state,
he appeared to his contemporaries as a quiet, humble, self-effacing
man,
somewhat unschooled, and deeply religious.
Today
his
psychic readings constitute one of the largest and most impressive
records of
intuitive information to come from a single individual, with 14,879 in
total,
on over 10,000 different topics.
This
vast
array of subject matter can be narrowed down into a smaller group of
topics
that, when compiled together, deal with the following five categories:
- Health-Related
Information
- Philosophy
and Reincarnation
- Dreams
and
Dream Interpretation
- ESP
and
Psychic Phenomena
- Spiritual
Growth, Meditation, and Prayer
For
many
years the information he gave, dealt mainly with medical
problems. Eventually
the scope of his readings expanded
to include such topics as meditation, dreams, reincarnation, and the
future.
The
transcripts of these readings have
provided the basis for over 300 popular books about Cayce's life and
work.
In 1933, when he had been
giving
readings for 31 years, he explained that he still understood very
little about
what he was doing.
Cayce claimed,
"Apparently,
I am one of the few who can lay aside their own
personalities sufficiently to allow their souls to make this attunement
to a
universal source of knowledge -- but I say this without any desire to
brag
about it.
In fact I do not claim to possess anything that other
individuals do
not inherently possess. Really and truly, I do not believe there is a
single
individual that does not possess this same ability I have.
I am certain
that
all human beings have much greater powers than they are ever conscious
of -- if
they would only be willing to pay the price of detachment from
self-interest
that it takes to develop those abilities." |
Those who came into contact
with Edgar
Cayce were continually amazed by the depth and breadth of medical
knowledge he
displayed during his sleep state.
He
would frequently recommend the use of drugs which were not generally
known, not
yet on the market, or which had long since passed out of use.
Although he had a conscious
knowledge only of the English language, Edgar Cayce is estimated to
have spoken
in some two dozen foreign languages while in a trance.
The unconscious Cayce
believed there was a
cure for every health problem in nature, providing that cure could be
found in
time. This even included cancer.
Edgar Cayce seldom advocated
operations, believing that surgery was over used. He
took a holistic approach to health. Edgar
Cayce believed that people were composed
of body, mind and spirit, and that all three are one.
Cayce talked about
consciousness
in the cells of the body, each contributing to the total consciousness
of the
person. Health, he
explained, flowed
from a perfect harmony of body and mind.
In
accordance with the concept that we are
what we eat, think, and believe, Cayce would often urge his patients to
improve
their mental and spiritual outlook in order to regain their health.
Treatments recommended for
patients by Edgar Cayce, included many forms of drugless healing, such
as
special baths, oils, heat, light, colonic irrigation (enemas), massage,
diet
and exercise.
The
knowledge of anatomy
displayed by Cayce while in trance perplexed more than one physician. The first physician to use
Edgar Cayce in his
own work was Doctor Wesley Ketchum of Hopkinsville.
Ketchum wrote of Cayce;
"His
psychological terms and description of the nervous anatomy would do
credit to any professor of nervous anatomy. There is no faltering in
his speech
and all his statements are clear and concise.
He handles the most
complex
jawbreakers with as much ease as any Boston physician, which to me is
quite
wonderful in view of the fact that while in his normal state he is an
illiterate man, especially along the lines of medicine, surgery and
pharmacy,
of which he knows nothing... in six important cases which had been
diagnosed as
strictly surgical he stated that no such condition existed, and
outlined
treatment which was followed with gratifying results in every case." |
It was Dr. Ketchum who
persuaded
Cayce to start a business as a psychic diagnostician, giving readings
twice a
day. It wasn’t long
before Cayce was
receiving sacks of mail every day from people anxious to use his
services.
Occasionally while in his
self-induced trance, Edgar Cayce would speak of events to come. He predicted both World
Wars, the independence
of India, and the 1929 stock market crash.
Cayce
also predicted, fifteen years before the
event, the creation of the State of Israel.
Edgar Cayce's prophetic
powers
often emerged during the readings he gave. For
the most part, his prophecies had little
or nothing to do with the original request for a reading.
Sometimes they were to do
with financial
matters, although Cayce's readings repeatedly stressed that they should
not be
used for personal gain.
In fact Edgar Cayce himself
found
early on in his career that if he did attempt to make money from the
information he received in his trances, he would suffer for it
physically. Each
attempt at personal gain from one of his
own readings brought on headaches and stomach upsets.
Other people however, were
not
affected. Cayce
gave advice to
businessmen who were worried about the location of their holdings or
the stability
of their stocks.
On
occasion, he pointed
to the location of oil wells, and correctly foretold a real estate boom
in the
Norfolk-Newport area of the United States.
In April of 1929, six months
before the stock market crash, Edgar Cayce warned people to sell
everything
they owned in the market. Many
who had
followed Cayce before, failed to pay attention to his warning, and lost
everything.
His most disturbing
predictions,
however, concern vast geographical upheavals which by the year 1998
were to
result in the destruction of New York, the disappearance of most of
Japan, and
a cataclysmic change in Northern Europe.
Edgar
Cayce's predictions on the end of the world are well known. He predicted a major
global change in 1998. He
explained that the Sphinx had been built in
10,500 B.C.E. and that survivors of Atlantis had concealed beneath it a
Hall of
Records containing all the wisdom of their lost civilization and the
true
history of the human race.
|
"It
would be well if this entity were to seek either of the three phases
of the ways and means in which those records of the activities of
individuals
were preserved -- the one in the Atlantean land, that sank, which will
rise and
is rising again; another in the place of the records that leadeth from
the
Sphinx to the hall of records, in the Egyptian land; and another in the
Aryan
or Yucatan land, where the temple there is overshadowing same.”
(2012-1;
Sep 25, 1939)
"...the
entity joined with those who were active in putting the records
in forms that were partially of the old characters of the ancient or
early
Egyptian, and part in the newer form of the Atlanteans. These may be
found,
especially when the house or tomb of records is opened, in a few years
from now.”
(2537-1; Jul 17, 1941)
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