Twenty years after his death, the mystic’s life work was thriving, slowly and painfully collected from thousands of readings and left as bis legacy in the files of the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach. Scorned, generally, by the medical profession while alive, the dead Cayce, and his readings on disease, was now a magnet for the inquiring minds of distinguished medical researchers. “Cayce,” one medical authority reported, “was one hundred years ahead of his tune, medically, and one day we may rewrite the textbooks on physiology and anatomy to conform with his concept of health flowing out of a perfect harmony of blood, lymph, glands and nerves.” Years before psychosomatic medicine, Cayce stressed that tensions and strains were responsible for stomach ulcers. In a benign Nature, he saw the remedy for any health deviation or illness man was heir to, though, at the same time, he realized that not everyone could be helped when their time was at hand. Thirty years before the revelation of a rabbit serum “cure” for cancer blazoned across the country’s front pages in 1966, Cayce had prescribed such a serum for cancer cases, and described how it should be prepared. However, as he recommended it in only five cases of the seventy-eight he diagnosed as cancer, in his schemata it was obviously only helpful for certain cancers. In the years since his death, five hundred healers of every description—MDs, osteopaths, chiropractors, physiotherapists have familiarized themselves with his methods, and in such diverse areas as Virginia, New York, Michigan, Arizona, Connecticut, and California, people who could get no help elsewhere are being successfully treated out of his readings. One woman was cured of a vaginal tumor by a therapist who had studied his Cayce well; again, dramatically, I learned of a man cured of incurable psoriasis, by a voice from the dead, so to speak. I sat and marveled, watching a distinguished American composer, a semi-invalid only a short time before, rolling around on the floor, doing the Cayce-inspired exercises that had magically loosened the arthritic joints of his shoulders, arms, and fingers. He was a new man, he told me gratefully, thanks to the dead Cayce.
There was little question of Cayce’s healing force, for I was able to check this out with the hopelessly ill who had been helped. I spoke to therapists, principally osteopaths, whom he did not consciously know, to whom in his lifetime he directed patients. He had told one Staten Island mother, with an ailing child, “Find Dobbins,” and her steps finally took her to a young osteopath, Dr. Frank Dobbins, so newly arrived to Staten Island that his name was not yet in the New York City telephone directory. And just as Cayce had not consciously known of him, so Dobbins had never heard of Cayce. The prescriptions he recommended were often as incomprehensible. Some had a dozen different ingredients, many of which the average pharmacist had never heard of, and yet Cayce himself was completely unschooled, never having gone beyond the sixth grade in his native Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Often the preparations were completely unknown. Once, for instance, he had recommended clary water for a man troubled with rheumatism. No druggist had heard of it. So the subject took an advertisement in a trade paper, asking how it might be obtained or compounded. From Paris, seeing the ad, a man wrote that his father had developed the product, but that production had been discontinued nearly fifty years before. He enclosed a copy of the original prescription. "You may have it duplicated if you wish.” Meanwhile, Cayce had made a check reading, asking himself in trance how clary water could be made. His new information tallied exactly with the prescription from Paris.
How did he do it? Dr. Wesley H. Ketchum, an MD with an orthodox background, but an eclectic approach, used Cayce as an adjunct to his practice for several years, styling him a Psychic Diagnostician, and he told an intrigued medical audience how Cayce functioned, according to Cayce’s own description of his powers.
“Edgar Cayce’s mind,” Ketchum told a skeptical Boston medical group, “is amenable to suggestion, as are all other subconscious minds, but in addition it has the power to interpret what it acquires from the subconscious mind of other individuals. The subconscious mind forgets nothing. The conscious mind receives the impression from without and transfers all thoughts to the subconscious, where it remains even though the conscious be destroyed.” Long before the humanist Jung advanced his concept of the collective unconscious, Cayce was apparently practicing what Jung only postulate. “Cayce’s subconscious,” Ketchum elaborated, “is in direct communication with all other subconscious minds, and is capable of interpreting through his objective mind and imparting impressions received to other objective minds, gathering in this way all knowledge possessed by endless millions of other subconscious minds.”
Ketchum, who is still alive, and living in California, was particularly impressed because Cayce correctly told him he didn’t have appendicitis, when seven doctors insisted he did advising surgery. Cayce attributed the attacks to a wrenched spine, which had caused nerve impingements and peripheral pains, and recommended osteopathic adjustments. With Cayce’s treatment, the condition cleared, and Ketchum was never troubled with “appendicitis” again. He had no quarrel with the doctors, for he had diagnosed his own case similarly—appendicitis.
As one examined his work, Cayce appeared to be not only healer but counselor and philosopher. Much before his time, he was aware that most bodily illness was born of the mine, of emotional frustrations, resentments, anger. He advised one woman to cleanse herself physically and mentally. “Keep the mental in the attitude of constructive forces. See in every individual that which is hopeful, helpful. Do not look for others’ faults, but rather for their virtues, and the virtues in self will become magnified. For what we think upon, that we become.” He told another woman bothered with chronic colds; “Instead of resentments, love; instead of snuffing, blow.” It worked. She didn’t have another cold for years, and her disposition today is sunny, her complexion the schoolgirl pink of a teenager, though she is in her sixties.
He applied the same philosophy to nations, stressing that as the body warred on itself, so did countries, feeding on jealousy malice, hate. Once asked what could be done by the American people to bring about a lasting peace, he replied: "We haven’t the American people [here at the reading]. The thing is to start with yourself. Unless you can bring about within yourself that which you would have in the nation or in any particular land, don’t offer it to others.”
As sound as he may have been medically, this was evidence of but one phase of his powers. There were those who thought that if Cayce was subconsciously infallible in this one respect, he was right in all respects, since the source was necessarily the same. “Why,” said a grizzled old sea captain, whom Cayce had correctly diagnosed at a distance of a thousand miles, “why should he be so right about the cure for my aching back, and be wrong about anything else?” It was a question that I had to ask myself many times, as I looked into many of the other marvels he talked about in sleep: his truly earth-shaking prophecies and forecasts of world affairs, Atlantis, reincarnation, his detailed description of past geological changes that had caused entire continents to disappear. There was another intriguing point. Why, too, if he had unlimited powers of divination, had he not made himself wealthy, exploring for oil or gold, playing the races or the market, instead of being wretchedly poor most of his life?
Ironically, others did make fortunes out of his stock market readings; others did find oil, where he said it would be, and others, reportedly, won on the horses. But Cayce himself had never profited. Perhaps the answer lay in his own readings, which stressed repeatedly, that they were not to be used for material gain. In the end nobody gained, it seemed, when motivated only by gain. A stockbroker lost his fortune, achieved through Cayce, when he persisted in playing the market, contrary to Cayce’s advice; a man who had won on the horses, misusing the Cayce gift, wound up in an asylum. Yet Cayce was uncannily accurate, predicting the 1929 stock market crash almost to the month, and saying there was oil in Bade County, Florida, when all anybody was thinking of was oranges and grapefruits, and pinpointing the end of the Depression. As he considered his own performance, Cayce felt that the stress on materiality was a negative force, defeating what he thought a God-given purpose. Whenever he read subconsciously for gain, his own or somebody else’s, he suffered severe headaches, or in extreme cases, lapsed into aphonia, loss of voice. There was a notable instance of this. After the turn of the century, he had given a test demonstration, describing to doctors in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the precise movements of a real estate operator in New York, as he climbed up to his office, smoking a cigar and whistling “Annie Laurie.” Since the report tallied precisely with his actual movements, the realtor immediately saw the possibilities. He took the next train for Bowling Green. His proposition was a simple one. “I’ll take you back with me,” he said, “and we’ll make a fortune on Wall Street.”
The newly married Cayce discussed it with his wife, Gertrude, a moving force in his life, and she felt it would be an abuse of his power, for which he would suffer. “Once you get away from helping people,” she said significantly, “it always makes you ill.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.4-8)
In addition to all the destruction he saw, Cayce also saw the passage of world events. He saw wars and peace, depressions, racial strife, labor wars, even the Great Society, which he saw doomed to failure. He saw things for individuals, as well as for nations, predicting that they would marry, divorce, have children, become lawyers, doctors, architects, sailors, and marines. Most of his prophetic impressions came during his sleep-readings, but he was spontaneously psychic in his waking state, and fled from a room full of young people once because he saw instantly that all would go to war, and three would not come back.
His batting average on predictions was incredibly high, close to one hundred percent. He may have missed once or twice, on Hitler’s motivations, which he thought essentially good in the beginning, or on the eventual democratization of China, but so much of what he said has come so miraculously true, that even here there are some who give him the benefit of the doubt—and time.
He not only foresaw the two World Wars, but picked out the years they would start and end. He saw not only the great worldwide Depression of 1929, outlining the stock market crash with uncanny detail, but forecast when that Depression would begin to lift, in 1933.
One of his most celebrated predictions, yet to be realized, concerns Soviet Russia. It was almost one of his last major predictions, made a few months before his death. He not only saw the end of Communism in Russia, but saw that country emerging as the hope of the world: “Through Russia comes the hope of the world. Not in respect to what is sometimes termed Communism or Bolshevism. No. But freedom, freedom! That each man will live for his fellow man. The principle has been born there. It will take years for it to be crystallized. Yet out of Russia comes again the hope of the world.”
As many have begun to suggest plausibly, in view of the growing peril to the West from China, he saw Russia eventually merging in friendship with the United States. “By what will it [Russia] be guided? By friendship with that nation which hath even placed on its monetary unit In God We Trust”
Cayce was perhaps the first to visualize the approaching racial strife in the land, sounding his original warning back in the 1920s. He also predicted, in 1939, the deaths of two Presidents in office, tying these deaths in, time-wise, with an additional prediction of racial and labor strife and mob rioting.
It certainly had all come to pass between the time Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945 and John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Riots in Little Rock, Birmingham, Chicago, New York, had shown only too well how right Cayce was. And his prophecies, which live in the files of the A. R. E., where they can be checked and rechecked, carry a foreboding picture of the days ahead: “Then shall thy own land see the blood flow, as in those periods when brother fought against brother.”
Cayce was not a prophet in the conventional sense. He didn’t enjoy making predictions, or drawing attention to himself. Often he restrained himself from telling people what he saw, as he did not want to influence their free choice. In the choices that the individual made for himself, Cayce recognized his opportunity for growth, even though the result might be destined.
Perhaps because gain was not a clear motivation, Cayce was never good at making money for himself. But he did make fortunes for others out of fiscal predictions, and even after his death, people have been making thousands anticipating the real-estate boom he foresaw for the Norfolk-Newport News area.
Those honoring the prophet in his home town, were able to make money with him twice again, beginning forty years ago when he predicted that property values in Virginia Beach would move north, and in 1966, when he said this trend would end, and the south beach build up, as was happening before my eyes.
Some who made money with Cayce lost it when they stopped following him. Some six months before the 1929 crash, Cayce warned Wall Street friends to sell every share of stock they owned. But they had been doing so well for so long on a rising market, they attributed some of the success to their own judgment. They wouldn’t listen, and went broke.
Other predictions only appeared clear in retrospect. In 1925, in a life reading, Cayce said of a young man, “In the present sphere [life], he will have a great amount of moneys to care for. In the adverse forces that will come then in 1929, care should be taken lest this money, without the more discretion in small things, be taken from the entity.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.80-2)
Even before World War II, in June of 1938, Cayce was giving the blueprint for the welfare state of the future, including our own Great Society. “A new order of conditions is to arise. There must be greater consideration of the individual, so that each soul becomes his brother’s keeper. Then certain circumstances will come about in political, economic, and whole [human] relationship, in which a leveling will occur, or a greater comprehension of the need for it. The time or period draws near for such changes. It behooves all who have an ideal—individuals, groups, societies—to practice faithfully the application of this ideal.” But he warned: “Unless they are up and doing, there must come a new order for then: own relationships and activities.”
Cayce was sympathetic with the working man, but in 1939 foresaw almost ceaseless strife between labor and capital, with first labor then capital making demands that would feed the fires. He made an almost direct commentary on union featherbedding: “There must be more and more a return to toil upon the land, and not so much make-work for labor in specific fields. Unless this comes, there will come disruption, turmoil, and strife.”
But capital was not blameless. “Unless there is more give and take, consideration for those who produce, with better division of the excess profits from the labor, there must be greater turmoil In the land.”
As a Southerner, from a border state, Cayce had a lively consciousness of the approaching integration problem. Believing in the brotherhood of man, he was aware that the coming confrontation could only be solved by good will, but his subconscious told him the situation was to be badly handled. He visualized the sectional strife that has risen in many areas of the land over the racial issue, in one of his most dramatic forecasts: “Ye are to have turmoils, ye are to have strife between capital and labor. Ye are to have division in thy own land, before ye have the second of the Presidents who will not live through his office. A mob rule.”
Even then, he anticipated the opportunism of politicians catering to bullet or bloc votes, rather than to ending the inequities which have brought about so much discord. True equality, Cayce pointed out, was not the indiscriminate lumping together of groups, not false, artificially contrived integration, but of judging individuals by merit, regardless of skin.
“What should be our attitude toward the Negro?” he was frequently asked.
He replied, “Those who caused or brought servitude to him, without thought or purpose, have created that which must be met within their own principles and selves. These [Negroes] should be held in an attitude of their own individual fitness, as in every other form of association.”
Cayce constantly called the Negro “brother.” And in his most provocative forecast of racial strife, harking back to the Civil War for an analogy, he made a prediction which obviously has not yet been fulfilled. The prophecy has an almost Biblical cadence in its solemn urgency: “When many of the isles of the sea and many of the lands have come under the subjugation of those who fear neither man nor the devil; who rather join themselves with that force by which they may proclaim might and power as right, as of a superman who is to be an ideal for a generation to be established, then shall thy own land see the blood flow, as in those periods when brother fought against brother.”
There was a distinct pattern to the Cayce predictions. Every word or phrase had some special meaning. Brother against brother, meant just that, citizen against citizen, civil war. At the time the forecast was made, during an A. R. E. conference in Norfolk in 1940, the conferees had no doubt of the meaning. The only misgivings were as to timing, identifying to the evil power with which the prophecy was linked. It could be Russia, China, or X, the unknown, waiting to “proclaim might as right.”
But the Negro must have his chance. Cayce hit thought the interpretation clear. He was clairvoyant enough waking, to visualize years of racial ferment. “Being my brother’s keeper does not mean that I am to tell him what to or that he must do this or that, regardless. Rather, that all are free before the law and before God.”
There was no easy path to integration or racial harmony. “More turmoils will be from within.” Repeatedly, he attacked the sincerity of some trying to resolve the racial problem. “There is lack of Godliness in the hearts of some who direct the affairs of groups.”
In the midst of the world’s greatest war, he was asked about peace, and he warned that the losers—Germany and Japan—might soon rise again if their land was not occupied and democratized.
“How,” he was asked, “might we cooperate in setting up an international police force in such fashion that our recent enemies will not be antagonized?” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.86-8)
Cayce was the answer to the cigarette manufacturer’s current nightmare over cancer. He said that moderate cigarette-smoking—five or six cigarettes a day—never hurt anybody, and he was an inveterate smoker himself. They relaxed him.
He saw no harm in an occasional drink, but said wine was the only alcoholic drink actually helpful. “Wine is good for all, if taken alone, or with black or brown bread. Not with meat so much as with just bread. This may be taken between meals, or as a meal, but not too much, and just once a day. Red wine only.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.181)
Here was a girl, thirteen, whose mother had written, “The asthma has bothered her two and a half years.”
Cayce was as specific as gravity. “For the asthmatic condition,” he said, “have those properties made into an inhalant. To four ounces of pure grain alcohol (not 85%, but pure grain, 190 proof) add: oil of eucalyptus, twenty drops; benzol, ten drops; oil of turpentine, five drops; tolu in solution, forty drops; tincture of benzoin, five drops. Keep in a container at least twice the size, or an eight ounce bottle with a glass cork. Shake solution together and inhale deep into the lungs and bronchi, two or three times a day.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.182)
Curiously, as recently as 1966, there was some confirmation of a gently sloping plane extending into the North Atlantic, and scientists at the Oceanographic Institute at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, theorized it was a likely abode of the earliest humans in this continental area some twenty thousand years ago. However, oriented as they were, they visualized this slope as easternmost North America, not westernmost Atlantis.
To some, the Azores, eight hundred miles due west of Portugal, represent the eastern marches of the last of the Atlantean islands. And they have been acting up lately, just as their counterparts may have once before.
Recent activity in the nine islands of the Azores is a striking reflection of the instability that may have dropped Atlantis in the Atlantic thousands of years ago. Quiet for centuries, the Azores began erupting in 1957, curiously close to the year 1958, which Cayce saw as the forty-year beginning of large-scale breakups around the globe. (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.221)
“And Poseidia,” he said, “will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again. Expect it in sixty-eight and sixty-nine [’68 and ‘69]. Not so far away.”
And where to expect it? The Geologist had the clue in still another Cayce reading. “There are some protruding portions that must have at one time or another been a portion of this great Atlantean continent The British West Indies or the Bahamas, and a portion of the same that may be seen in the present, if a geological survey would be made, notably in the Gulf Stream through this vicinity, these [portions] may yet be determined.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.223)
Current research confirms relatively recent sinkings of large land areas near Florida and the Bahamas. The National Fisherman featured an article, “Huge Sunken Piece of Florida Identified South of the Keys,” referring to a 1300 square mile plateau submerged south of the Florida Keys. Geologist L.S. Kornicker described a submerged chain of islands and lagoonal basin ten miles south of Bimini in the Bahamas, at depths of forty to fifty feet Whatever happened occurred at the approximate time of the Atlantis debacle. “Kornicker suggests,” the Geologist said in a bemused voice, “that the features of the submerged area were formed eight thousand or more years ago when sea-level was about forty-eight feet below its present level.”
With some excitement the Geologist stumbled upon an obscure Cayce reading discussing how the Atlanteans constructed giant laser-like crystals for power plants. “The records of the manners of the construction of same,” he read, “are in the sunken portions of Atlantis, where a portion of the temples may yet be discovered, under the slime of ages of seawater, near what is known as Bimini, off the coast of Florida.” (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.224)
Cayce’s own remembrance was remarkable. His references to Atlantis, Lemuria and other lost civilizations could be dismissed as speculative, but other phenomena could not be so easily scouted. He frequently lapsed into languages that were clearly recognizable—French, Italian, Spanish, German, and others that were unrecognizable. These ventures into tongues he had no knowledge of in the waking state were triggered by the subject matter or subjects. Once he read for a man in Italy, who had deputized a friend here to sit in on the reading. The friend, of Italian extraction, asked a question, and the answer came back in fluent Italian. Another time, reading for a German, Cayce branched off into idiomatic German, bespeaking ultimate knowledge of the Teutonic. (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.250)
And that was it.
The young man smiled evenly. “The reading seems to have worked out well, as far as analyzing my life goes, but I haven’t made up my mind on reincarnation. It’s almost too pat a way of explaining everything we don’t understand. The need is there, and the concept supports it.”
“You haven’t been influenced then by previous incarnations as a doctor and farmer?”
“I just don’t know. Some day, the message may come as it did to my father. But I’ll have to find out for myself.”
“Then how did Cayce pinpoint your strong and weak points?”
He frowned. “That I don’t know, either, except that clairvoyantly, he may have been able to look into the future.”
We shook hands, and I knew, without a Cayce, that here was a young man destined for success. He had an inner calm and resolve beyond his years.
The next day, the father called. “How did it go?” he asked. “You know,” I said, “he doesn’t believe in reincarnation.”
“We’ve never imposed our beliefs on him. He’s a most determined young man.” He laughed. “When he was a boy, eleven or twelve, another boy his age borrowed his bicycle without permission, bringing it back without the chain. I happened to look out the window, and saw him standing over the boy, with the chain in his hand, forcing him through sheer will to put it back. He never got flustered or upset, but the other boy obeyed without a word.”
I recalled the boy hesitating over the warning on political activity.
The father chuckled. “I don’t blame him,” he said. “You know, he was always politicking in school. In high school, he was elected president of the student body, campaigning all over town, and it stirred a certain amount of criticism. In college, he was president of his class, but his campaigning again stirred opposition, and even friends ganged up on him. He was a disillusioned young man before it was over, brooding over the frailty of human friendship. He’s never run for any student office since.”
But what had it to do with reincarnation?
“There is some aptitude remembrance, in his flair for farming, in his ambition to be a doctor, and in other qualities from the past; the ability to listen and evaluate, have certainly stood him in good stead. He’s been self-supporting since he was a teen-ager.”
It still seemed nebulous grounds for reincarnation.
“In one of the previous lives mentioned by Cayce,” the father said, “as a four-year-old boy he saw his grandfather killed by a horse. The horse caught bis foot and fell, and the rider, tossing the boy to safety, was crushed under the animal. It was an unforgettable experience.”
He had been born again to the same family, apparently permissible in reincarnation. And there was remembrance, remembrance that he consciously knew nothing about. “When my boy was four, we had been out for a walk, when we saw a horse rear up with a girl on it. There was nothing to get alarmed about, but my son, normally stolid, stood trembling, his whole body in a sweat, as though having a nightmare. The horse soon quieted, but the boy kept staring, rigid with fear. Then taking hold of himself, he advanced determinedly and put his hand on the horse’s forehead, stroking the animal as though he was trying to overcome his obsession.” The father had never seen fear in the youngster before or since. “There is no doubt in my mind that the old memory came surging in, and then he determinedly tried to rid himself of his fear.”
Granted reincarnation, signs were apparently all an independent researcher could hope to find, unless he had a pipeline to Universal Knowledge. Remembrance was one of these signs, of course, but again a Cayce was needed. A young woman, morbidly fascinated by circuses, left in a panic every time they trundled out the lions and tigers in their steel-barred cages. Without knowing of this idiosyncrasy, the sleeping Cayce told her that she had been a Christian in an earlier life in Rome, and had been fed to the lions. No wonder she was scared. For another girl born lame, just as the Biblical child was born blind, Cayce explained that during the reign of Nero she often sat and laughed in the Colosseum, as the Christian martyrs were killed or maimed by the wild beasts. I read elsewhere in Cayce of people who had used the sword cruelly in one life being plagued in this by unexplained fear of all cutting instruments, including an inoffensive bread knife. And I recalled Eula Allen saying that the millions who had perished in war must have killed others in earlier wars. From Revelation, I suddenly remembered: “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.” I had always considered this in the framework of one life, but it certainly didn’t work out that way; wickedness so often went unnoticed, even rewarded. It was that kind of a world. (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.)
He did not push anything at anybody. Reincarnation, Atlantis, Lemuria, these were no stranger than his traveling through space to pick out a jar on a drugstore shelf hundreds of miles away, or his description of how a rabbit serum should be prepared against cancer years before medical researchers turned up a similar concept. Not dissimilar from one who had trod the earth two thousand years before, he applied the wisdom of a connected universe to virtually every facet of human thought and behavior. During the war, as so many had, a worried mother consulted him, psychically, because of her concern that her only son, in the Army, might be killed or injured in battle. The mother, already helped by a Cayce health reading, expressed her anxiety over the safety of her son, then stationed in the U.S. “Please give advice, guidance, and help to this confused mind, and answer the questions, as I ask them.”
Cayce put the problem on a spiritual plateau, indicating that the over-all cause had to be considered in weighing the mother’s private concern. “To be sure, there is built within the consciousness of the entity [the mother] an aversion to strife, to war, and to all phases of military activity. But in an hour of trial, when there are influences abroad that would change or take away that freedom which is the gift of the creative forces to man, that man might by his own innate desire be at-one with God, there should be the willingness to pattern the life, the emergencies, the exigency as may arise, much in the way and manner as the Master indicated to each and every soul. According to the pattern of the life as He gave, one should ever be able and willing, even to lay down the life, that the principles may live as he indicated, that of freedom not only from the fear of servitude, but that the whole earth may indeed be a better place for an individual, for those that are to come to reside in.”
In the Christ story, Cayce saw clearly the tribulations of every son of man on the terrestrial plane, climaxed on earth with the Crucificixion. “When he withheld not his own son, how can ye ask him to withhold thine.” There was practical advise. He suggested the mother revise her attitude so that her courage and resolution, her faith, would be transmitted to her son, encouraging rather than depressing him. “So live then, so think, so act in thy conversation, in thy convocation with thy fellow man, that others may know, too, that the Lord walks with thee. Instill that hope, that encouragement in the mind and in the heart of thy son, that he, too, may look to the Lord for strength, for purpose, for sureness; and that in the peace which is to come there will be the needs for his activity among the children of men, that the way of the Lord may be sure in the earth.” The earth was the house of the Lord, and Christ, too, had showed anger when it became “a den of those who took advantage of their fellow man.” He stressed how Christ’s travail could reinforce the woman’s own strength. “He, too, brought that knowledge to those that seek His face, that He knows the heartache of disappointment, the heartache of fear, even as He prayed: If it be possible, let this cup pass from me—not my will, oh God, but Thine be done.”
After listening to the message she had requested, the mother, apparently missing the prophetic reference to her son’s postwar activity, very humanly asked, “Is there any other branch of the service where my son could serve, that would be less dangerous?”
The sleeping Cayce recognized that she had not got the message. "No portion of the service is dangerous,” he stressed, “if he is put in the hands of God. Look upon that condition which disturbs—not from a material angle—but from the standpoint of a mental and spiritual blessing to others in the opportunity offered.”
There is probably nobody more concerned than a mother about her only son. "Could he be transferred to some post closer to his home?”
“This may be, but is it best? Rather than making the environ by doubts and fears, isn’t it better to put it all into the hands and upon the heart of thy Elder Brother, in the hands of thy God?”
“Is it best for him where he is?” she persisted.
“Consider well the Master’s answer, No man is in this or that position save by the grace of God.”
“Could he better serve in some defense work outside the military service?”
For a brief moment, the sleeping Cayce appeared to lose patience. “If it had been, would not this have been the place? If what has been given is studied, these questions will be answered.” And then came the sharp enjoinder. “Fill the place better where ye are, and the Lord will open the way.” The stressed words were Cayce’s. “Only as we are able to realize consciously that we live and move and have our being in Him, can we put it all into His hands, and leave it there, doing our duty as we see it from day to day.”
The son eventually went overseas, and saw battle service without harm. However, there was a family loss. The father, for whom similar concern had not been shown, died suddenly a year later, at the height of the war. Perhaps Cayce had foreseen this event when he counseled, “Fill the place better where ye are.”
The greatest of the American psychics conveniently left a guide on psychic development for those with some of this ability, or for researchers interested in its development In trance once, he pointed out that the psychic force, traveling through the subconscious, functioned through certain glands. “In the body we find that which connects the pineal, the pituitary, the Leydig, these may be truly called the silver cord.” The force was more active in women, whose conscious powers were not as highly developed perhaps, permitting greater development of the subconscious. The higher levels subconsciously would be attained only through a spiritual outlook, an avoidance of the material - a lesson that psychics who have striven for notoriety might well heed. “One fed upon the purely material will become a Frankenstein that is without any influence other than material or mental,” he warned. (Jess Stearn "Edgar Cayce The Sleeping prophet" p.275-6)
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