white jackets. Everything important was molded around the relief of pain: the mail, the phone calls, the small but growing research, the day’s most earnest conversation, an unpublicized visit of a physician or nurse. Cayce’s house might have been an emergency station set up near a catastrophe, taking in each one who came with a wound or hardship.
This was not forced on him by circumstance but came from his own choice and purpose. He was sure his gift was rooted in direct service of those in need. Were he to get too far away from that, it might soon distort or wither. To him the trances were not just his private prowess, but part of a circuit much larger than he which reached from an invisible and transcendent source of goodness directly to someone’s scabs or cramps, tumors or aches, birthing or dying. If the lightning of helpfulness in our midst also lit up the far sky now and then, so that lifetimes and mysteries of the soul could be glimpsed, that was a bonus. But for him the central business was medical service. Listening to him, one wondered whether the urgent ministering to those in pain helped to keep him sane in a wholly unlikely vocation that had brought him extremes of both scorn and adulation.
Might his priorities be reversed after his death by those drawn to study the transcripts of his readings? He could be turned into a revealer of arcane truths, with his work of lifting physical suffering from others shoved into the background. There was plenty in the history of sects and movements, including the transformation of the work of the active young healer and teacher from Nazareth, to indicate how quickly and decisively such change could occur. As had happened in churches, future students of Cayce might find it too frustrating, taxing, and expensive to focus on failed organs, wrenching injuries, damaging childbirth, chronic fevers, convulsions, and schizophrenia. Where Cayce might want a hospital for the blind or deaf, others might prefer to remove the blindness or deafness of their fellows to metaphysical mysteries of rebirth. Power and wisdom were forever pushing themselves beyond their roots of caring, like mindless social climbers.
Watching Cayce at work was like staring into a flame, making the mind go momentarily numb. For despite the perplexing past-life claims, all too much of what he produced was reality that we and others could verify. The unending accurate medical data, the fitting details of individual history, personhood, talents, relationships, and choices were staggering. Had Cayce not asked me to make the trance sessions part of my job, I might well have absorbed myself in the backed-up correspondence, or editing the small monthly Bulletin of the Association, or adding to the booklets on specific diseases as his readings saw them. (We had collections on appendicitis, arthritis, the common cold, epilepsy, intestinal fever, scleroderma, streptococcus infection, and multiple sclerosis.) Then I could have attended the trance periods from time to time and settled for being amazed and stimulated. But Cayce beckoned me to his study at the appointed hours each day, and I put down my projects, preparing to be as calm and cheerful as I could before what was necessarily as shattering to my University of Chicago worldview, and therefore to my personal sense of identity, as it was adventurous.
Asking Questions of the Unseen
Cayce assigned me a task in the middle of the action, insuring that I knew more about each case as it came up for a reading than anyone else in the office. The job was to prepare the questions to be asked Cayce by his wife, at the end of each reading when the steady voice would indicate, “Ready for questions.” By comparing the discourses with what was in letters already sent in by each person, often over a period of many months, and not infrequently supplemented by notes on phone calls, it would be possible to study with some care the strengths and weaknesses of his counsel. Making maps and models of the operation would also be natural, looking for what made it go better. For one reading had tersely warned, the norm for his aid was to be “informative, constructive, enlightening, yet practical.”
Before long it became clear which kinds of questions would get helpful replies. The most useful to the inquirer elicited fresh information not supplied in the main body of the reading. Issues could be discarded which experience showed would be covered in any case, and the remaining queries carefully arranged, putting the most pressing first, for none of us could predict how many questions the unconscious man would answer before moving swiftly on to the next reading or terminating the session.
Usually there were appropriate questions about puzzling side issues in health, business affairs, or relationships. “Why have I had digestive upsets since I injured my back?” “Why do I have such difficulty with mathematics, when I am a good student?” “How can I guide my daughter, who seems to me so stubborn?” Such concerns, often urgent to the seeker, were likely to get patient replies of a few sentences, if the topic had not already been covered in the reading (as central concerns typically were). Less likely to be answered were questions on the margin of real need. Once people got Cayce on the line, so to speak, quite a few were tempted to get all the information and guidance they could. They inquired about warts, about dreams, about real estate holdings, about psychic experiences, or about marriage prospects. Cayce was not likely to mix radically different kinds of counsel, such as answering vocational questions in a medical reading. “We haven’t that” might be his abrupt reply. His response meant that the opening suggestion given him for a particular kind of reading had not put him in touch with some other area of the individual’s activity or relationships. Medical counsel was not available in life readings, and vice-versa. Would they seek at their bankers for tailoring aid, he asked?
Yet if he were feeling expansive in trance on a particular day, or if something touched him in the spirit of the seeker (which could be noted in the tone of his voice), he might offer at least a partial answer on any issue important to the person’s welfare. So the challenge was to phrase and rephrase the questions carefully, conveying the best spirit in the letters. And it was necessary to keep my own interests out of the exchange, not slanting questions to elicit explanations I wanted. Several blunt refusals taught me to try harder to be a detached channel of aid.
It was reassuring that Gertrude would be scanning the typed-up questions as she put them to her husband in his strange state. She would skip those which had already been answered in the body of the reading and sometimes make up clarifying questions of her own. Her determination to subordinate her own able intellect was impressive, as she sought to stay out of the way and be the “passive” helper which the readings had indicated should be her role. She set aside her emotions, too, so as not to react to a particularly demanding or officious seeker, represented by letter or occasionally present in person for a reading. A deep dream which she told had depicted her collecting unique shells on the beach, as she loved to do. The reading taken on the dream interpreted it as she suspected: she was being encouraged to see each seeker in appreciative wonder and respect as she did shells. One could readily guess how crucial this woman must have been in Cayce’s life and work, and why the readings had grown fuller and clearer after she took on the work of “conductor,” which had been handed about to many in the years before their move to Virginia Beach in the 1920s.
Nothing in my work on questions offered any warning of what tumbled from the lips of Cayce on a few days when the pressure was heaviest to serve people in rapid order. Usually Gertrude would read the questions aloud to him, one at a time, and he would methodically repeat each before answering it. But on these days Cayce would come to the question period and simply go right down the typed list, answering each query in order without waiting for his wife to pose it. Then he would instruct her to move on to the next reading, while we would stare at each other in astonishment. There was no way he could see the sheet of queries. His eyes were covered, and the little stack of correspondence in his wife’s hands was clearly out of his line of vision in any case. Part of his consciousness seemed to be present with a person in Denver, or Bangor, or Miami, or Seattle, judging by his prompt and detailed reports. But part of his mind was still in the room with us, running over unseen papers in his wife’s hand.
A second task assigned to me was to write out for the entranced man precisely where he would find each individual. For medical aid this meant giving him the exact street address and sometimes an apartment or office at that location. In the
