windowed study, across the room from his desk and little portable typewriter. He prayed, then lay down and step by step went unconscious. He spoke in measured address about each person or need to which his wife, sitting beside him, quietly directed his attention. After an hour or more of discourse and questions which his secretary recorded in shorthand, he came swiftly back to consciousness, remembering nothing of what he had said, and got up to resume the activities of his busy correspondence and office. It was all done in broad daylight and simplicity, as naturally as if he were still taking portraits in a photographic studio. But the plainness of the process did not take away the jolt of seeing him accomplish day after day what our culture said was impossible.
House Calls on the Desperate
In some ways, watching him was a huge adventure. His body was in the room with us, but his consciousness appeared to be elsewhere. He seemed to go exactly where he was sent—to a California coastal city, a Maryland suburb, a Mississippi small town, or a factory city in England—wherever he was needed that day. Like a busy doctor making house calls and phoning back to his office, he often offered little asides on what he saw as he located his patients:
“It’s raining here,” or “Rooster in the yard,” or “Right pretty pajamas,” or “You can see the capital from here.” Sometimes he made comments under his breath about the person he was about to counsel: “Quite a blade!” or “Has been a very lovely person,” or “What a muddle-puddle, yet what a beautiful, talented soul!” or “Not much to be done here but help the soul to leave the body.” His asides in a half voice, whose crisp accuracy had been verified hundreds and hundreds of times over the years (but which I promptly set about checking for myself, with letters and phone calls) set the stage for the high drama of the detailed formal counsel to follow. Often the small comments, as neatly accurate as they were impossible to explain by any normal means, assured seekers that he really was in touch with them. To be sure, a few of his observations were unverifiable, though they added to our sense of adventure by their matter-of-fact tone, such as “Not alone but accompanied by many besides those visible to the naked eye.”
People from varied stations and walks of life streamed into his far-ranging vision, one at a time. In just the first few days he addressed a secretary, an Army officer, a housewife, a newspaper editor, an ice manufacturer, a factory supervisor, and a pianist. He also took on a tutor, a salesman, a retired mechanic, a bank president, an infant, a lay preacher, a film director, a diplomat, a student, a filling station attendant, and an asylum inmate. Where else might one find such startling contrasts? Given social stratification, they were unlikely at any one doctor’s office. But many might show up at a marriage license bureau or an undertaker’s parlor—some place where common human destiny calls us all.
At first I just took notes in amazement, stunned by the unusual activity. But within a few days my attitude began to change under the pressure of such severe needs. Three died in days after getting their readings. Cayce recommended brain surgery for a six-year-old girl and surgery of the throat for a woman of fifty. He observed quietly that the body and mind of an elderly woman were just holding onto life, right while he spoke. And he told a man of forty-six with hypertension and near blindness that his condition could only be stayed but not removed. One’s feelings while listening moved from awe to compassion, pushed by the evident pain of sufferers, until fascinated observation gave way to alert desire to be helpful. The intellect alone, I thought, wants its labels, its constructs, its triumphs of understanding and prediction. It wants to cut events down to manageable size in order to group them with similar phenomena and pronounce generalizations. This was all too raw, too quick, too far-reaching to delight the mind. Being in the room was like standing at the scene of an accident or at the bedside of someone dangerously ill. What one asks is how to be useful.
More common than terminal cases in the first dozen or so days were those with chronic conditions which had taxed sufferers to their limits. A man of fifty-eight shook constantly with Parkinson’s disease, a woman of forty was a psychotic alcoholic, and an elderly woman of seventy-three was senile and weak, while a young housewife of thirty-six was desperate with asthma. A man in his thirties was dragging his leg from multiple sclerosis, and a construction worker had a chronic anxiety neurosis (whose origins Cayce surprisingly traced to an injury to his spine from a baseball bat). The seriousness of these conditions made abundantly clear how often people turned to Cayce after all else had failed. A retired woman suffered with uncontrollable sneezing, a severely retarded infant had been in and out of hospitals, a woman of sixty was paranoid and thought Cayce was attacking her telepathically, and a mid-life woman had progressive arthritis (among Cayce’s multiple treatment recommendations for her was cobra venom). While one case was a young student helpless to stop white blotches spreading on her skin, another was a military man in his forties who had endured migraine headaches for twenty years, and a third an older woman with tumors headed for malignancy. Still other medical extremes that emerged almost at once were deafness, blindness, paralysis from an auto accident, and epilepsy. It was a relief to have less threatening cases appear now and then among the others, although these often entailed their own hardships for persons with constricted lives: gall bladder infection, a chronic rash, neuritis, high blood pressure, and tilted pelvic organs.
Whatever the disability, the individual got a careful review of the health of his or her total body, organ system by organ system, focusing on the primary medical problem and followed by a thorough treatment regimen for rebuilding the total person—sweeping in its detail, balance, complexity, and tailoring to the individual. Alongside specific medications were massages, surgery, diets, packs and compresses, as well as electrical applications, exercises, osteopathy, and not infrequently prescribed work on attitudes and emotions, together with other interventions that ranged from ocean travel to prayer. Since most of Cayce’s subjects were already under medical care, he took pains to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and other treatments in use, explaining why modifications or substitutions might be required. Once in a while he specified an utterly unconventional treatment in these first readings I heard, as when he told a woman with cancer that it could only be retarded, but spelled out a procedure with a magnet “strong enough to raise a railroad spike.” For a small number of those with chronic afflictions, he offered, along with treatment measures, the explanation that the causes of their suffering were partly karmic from their own previous lifetimes—meaning that ultimately a soul lesson of growth was to be sought in illness along with relief from symptoms (a perspective that he did not hesitate to use about disabilities not connected to past lives, as well).
Time Travel for High Purpose
Amid the stream of physical suffering, the vocational and psychological counsel, or life readings, offered some breathing space. These had accounted for as many as one in five formal requests for Cayce’s aid since the publication of his biography. To be sure, those whom he counseled in this mode were not without problems. Loneliness and confusion were often represented in the letters asking for help, alongside marital conflicts, sexual indiscretions, mental illnesses, black moods, and business failures. Cayce himself provided the gravity in some instances, as when he told the parents of a ten-month-old baby to take special care lest the child drown again, as it had in a prior life. Yet the same reading assured them that the lad had talents for a career in chemical or electrical engineering. His brother, aged three, was the only individual I heard given a famous name from history, in the first months of my listening to such readings. Cayce said he had been Gladstone of England and could one day serve well as U.S. secretary of state, adding details of his past-life service as an imperial advisor in Rome, a governor in Persia, and an emissary to ancient Egypt from Indochina.
It was a relief to hear this latter reading tell the parents to bring the child back for further counsel at age sixteen. Unless Cayce had in his entranced view successors we did not know about, he should still be giving readings when he was nearing eighty. The same implication was in a reading for a child of three in New York City, who surprisingly received no incarnations at all in his life reading. His parents
