sure they had not let the youngster dictate the terms for his own life. Perhaps Cayce was destined to be around longer than the pressures on him in his mid-sixties might suggest.
The reincarnation material, spanning centuries and touching every aspect of the personalities whom Cayce counseled, was baffling to evaluate, though it often seemed to fit well the person whose correspondence could be compared with the reading. If in trance Cayce were using the past-life material simply as a projective framework to analyze and motivate people, he was doing it rather skillfully. But the scenes were demanding to visualize. Just one morning session presented such contrasting extremes as the sands of a Bedouin caravan, the forests of an early American trapper, the bloody combat of the Crusades, the hushed halls of a Chinese temple, and a weaver’s cottage in Ireland.
Since these readings summarized many an incarnation of the past with the comment “Here the entity gained,” or “The entity lost in this experience,” or noted some combination of gaining and losing in soul growth, it was reasonable to compare vocations and life-stations in which the entranced Cayce saw people making major progress. There were salutes to the wife of a colonial American innkeeper, a trainer of future mothers in an Egyptian temple, an emissary to Africa from Hellenistic Greece, a nurse in an ancient Persian hospital, a helper to Thomas Paine, a companion to an Inca leader, an early monk, a decorator of Indochinese temples, and the daughter of Cyrus “in love with the cupbearer to the King, Nehemiah.” Evidently there was no easy division of secular and sacred callings, high and low station, male or female, educated or ignorant, which marked the growth of souls that Cayce reported. There was no caste hierarchy from peasants up to Brahmins, such as India had long conceived. Instead, the quality of each life, whatever the circumstance, seemed to grasp his attention.
But interests, once developed, were often described as surfacing in successive lives for a time, though Cayce insisted that souls had free will to develop in many directions, like plants with varied shoots and blooms. A woman now in her fifties, for example, was urged to become a physical education director for teenage girls. Previously, he said, she had lived during colonial times in the same Mohawk Valley of New York where she was born this time. There she had helped to develop “strong-bodied, long-waisted mothers,” while in an earlier Norse incarnation she had focused on a different development of her sex, as she “spread the gospel of woman choosing the companion for herself.”
Not all of Cayce’s counsel in these life readings was solemn. The reading for the Mohawk Valley woman was full of high spirits, reminding her that when younger she had played good tennis and that she should keep it up, even at her age. And a young dictaphone operator whose past lives he traced with care was told that when the present war was over, she could sing herself to glory with her talented voice, developed in other existences. When she asked how much of the confusion in her present life was attributable to a gynecological disturbance, the entranced man responded briskly with obvious mischief and a touch of a smile: “Forty-three and seven-tenths percent!” He was evidently not about to foster fatalism.
More difficult to conceptualize were past-life causes that yielded present afflictions or distressing circumstances. How could the universe be organized to bring these about? A woman now suspicious of her husband, for example, was told that she had been swapped by him for tobacco in an early American fort but that in a yet earlier life she had been unfaithful to him. “We only meet self,” the reading insisted. Could we all dimly remember such betrayals at times? Which part of us would do the remembering? Another woman, in her forties and having difficulty finding a husband, was told that some of the problem was having changed sexes often from life to life, and having difficulty settling on a feminine identity this time. But the counsel added the cryptic encouragement that she had already met the right man and had only to catch him. The recommendations were much more serious when a leader in the publishing world, from a distinguished family, was told that he had helped bring on the collapse of an ancient civilization and once again would have the opportunity to make “for success or naught.” The research task in following up these claims seemed huge.
It was easier to picture the unfolding of talents across supposed lifetimes, for here a model from nature seemed to work. Something tended and used well in the garden of one lifetime might be expected to bloom in another. A Southern businessman nearing retirement was told he had once interpreted for a high priest in Egypt and should now get trained and ordained so that in his new leisure he could plunge into the church work he enjoyed. A woman described as a deaconess in the Early Church who had argued against Paul in favor of marriage was told to make up with a man she now loved and build the home she had talked about. A young stenographer in New York was instructed that in an earlier century she had come to French America of the South and should now learn French. After the war she would have exciting opportunities for a life and career in France, “only don’t be led by men!” as she had been then. For an artist Cayce began his reading with the observation “Once a wonderful Cossack and rode a horse!” Then he went on to show the man how to combine his many talents with fabrics, buildings, and acting but warned him that he had too much ego to take up hypnosis, currently tempting him. And in a beautiful reading which stirred us as we heard it, a mid-life man in the service of the British government, stationed in the U.S., was told he had once helped William Penn bring refugees to this country. Then he was described as having been often with Jesus centuries ago, as one of the seventy sent out by him. Today the man’s essential kindness despite his self-doubt would assure that he would again “meet Him in the way.” Tenderly the reading addressed the man in closing as “my son,” and urged him that in all his doings he should be not only the statesman in his present calling, but a “messenger of hope from the Master, even Jesus the Christ.” Much later I would get a clue as to why the sending of the seventy might mean much to Cayce, from depiction of a past life of his own.
Were it not for the attention given to ultimate values, it would have been easy to view these life readings as colorful imagination. But Cayce used them to do serious business. Often he employed them to enunciate principles, such as “We only keep what we give away.” At other times his counsel was boldly practical. A mother was encouraged to let her son go, because it was his own deep choice. A wife was told that she might well divorce her husband after her children agreed to stay with her but she should not judge him for his actions. A secretary to a bank president trying to make life decisions was reminded that Thursdays were usually her bad days and to avoid them for such reflection. Then a businesswoman in Ohio was abruptly refused any past-life information at all and sternly told to apply herself to charity. When she wrote to object that her reading was defective, Cayce promptly returned her membership fee. A young engineer was guided to seek a job in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then given an essay on how General Electric at that time was a corporation “almost with a soul” (startling to one with my labor-organizing attitudes to large businesses). An editor interested in the psychic field was encouraged to proceed with his magazine on the mysteries of the mind but to stay away from Spiritualism. And a film director, considering how he might actively help the Association sponsoring Cayce’s work, was told first to convince himself on its purposes and ideals; if these did not answer to him, he should have nothing to do with it. Cayce’s counsel was evidently not interested in promoting itself.
To make sense of all this material, one would have to handle a huge array of unconscious variables. As it turned out, it would be twenty years before I found professional tools to begin exploring reincarnation in the setting of doing psychotherapy, using a Jungian perspective and such procedures as dream study, guided imagery to music, and projective tests, along with inventories of interests, attractions, and repulsions. But in the midst of war’s extremes, the whole enterprise seemed daunting indeed.
First of All an Emergency Clinic
Besides, every hour given to such psychological archaeology was an hour taken from someone waiting as though in an invisible line outside Cayce’s study, hurting with leukemia or polio, or sweating with fever, or coughing with tuberculosis. Cayce’s work was decisively medical. All that lacked to make his home and office a clinical treatment
