down to paint on the walls and stuffing in a mattress—while searching for the person. But when properly guided, he would repeat after his wife the complete address and then seem to move as though in narrowing orbits by citing out loud the state, then the city, then the street and the building, concluding often with an aside on what he observed at the site before firmly stating, “Yes, we have the body.” For a life reading he needed the time and place of birth, which he followed down to the point of a not infrequent aside on how it had been snowing in that locale on the day of the birth, or how the delivery was complicated, or how big the town was and what could be seen of the mountains from there. Then he concluded, “Yes, we have the records.” For those who requested it, he would supply the precise hospital and time of birth, providing one more surprising item we could then verify.
There were colorful complications. An address I supplied for a man in Los Angeles was one we later found to be incorrect. Cayce promptly commented that it was the wrong address, and his wife hesitantly suggested that he try to locate the person anyway. With something like a groan he observed of Los Angeles, “Mighty big place!” After a lengthy pause, he found the man in the huge urban tangle and proceeded to give the reading, full of accurate personal details.
By contrast, the instructions were a bit too specific on highway directions to a farm in Minnesota, exactly as if Cayce were to drive there from a nearby town and numbered highway. The last leg of a dirt road according to the correspondence was “a mile and a half.” Cayce found the state, the town, and the highway, as usual, but then corrected the final distance to a mile and two-fifths. When we asked the family of the seeker about the discrepancy, they responded that Cayce was correct, since they had rounded off the distance, as they said, “so he would not be confused.” From our perspective he was not easily confused. For a man in New Orleans the unconscious Cayce pronounced the street name in what sounded like French. Leaning toward Gertrude from across the room at Cayce’s desk, I hastily repeated twice what I thought was the right pronunciation, which she gave her husband. He stuck with the French version (one we later found was correct for local New Orleans usage) and asked the brisk question, “Who’s giving this reading?” Despite his being in trance, we were evidently dealing with a process more than mechanical hypnosis. Some sort of active agency, some wide-ranging intelligence, seemed both to be following and leading us.
It Kept Us in Mind
Whatever it was, it kept close track of us.
Gladys was seated several feet from him, making her notes on a steno pad at a little table. Cayce could not even see her notebook without lifting himself from the couch, much less read her rapid, cryptic inscriptions upside down. Besides, he knew nothing of shorthand. But he did not hesitate, though the occasions were unusual, to correct her spelling, her punctuation, her paragraphing, or her medical terms. Her eyes would flash with surprise and humor when part of his consciousness monitored her careful work, after more than twenty years of serving him. Perfection did not seem to be his goal so much as care on important details. There were a few words which the unconscious man habitually mispronounced and she corrected for him, such as “angrandizement” for “aggrandizement,” and “obogdulla mengata” for “medulla oblongata,” or “morstle and petar” for the pharmacist’s “mortar and pestle.” He did not bother with these. But he did interrupt her when the use of an i for an e, for example, might change the meaning of a medical term, or a comma change the intent of a sentence.
How he kept us in view also showed when he answered my own unspoken questions. After studying an individual’s correspondence, I often wanted to understand how a back injury had affected the person’s vision, or why certain foods precipitated a young man’s fits, or why a mother and daughter were such strong rivals for the husband/father’s attentions. Sitting all the way across the room from him, with my notebook open and my pen scurrying along, I would be trying to abbreviate technical terms and to underline key factors in a disease, a personality, or the structure of a reading. Now and then my thoughts would shoot up with a spontaneous “Why?” when Cayce linked a cold spot on a child’s abdomen to epileptic seizures, or traced a woman’s mental illness to a fall on the coccyx at the end of her spine, or described a man’s deafness as karmic consequences from having “turned a deaf ear” to the pleas of others in a previous lifetime. There were similar questions when a reading suddenly became eloquent, after proceeding as detached discourse. But I said nothing and did not stop writing, only thinking my questions. Yet on occasion, when the entranced man appeared to be in an expansive mood, he would pause, saying, “As to the question being asked . . .” or noting my query in some other way. He might even instruct his secretary to keep aside what briefly followed, as he had done with unspoken questions of his elder son and others before me. Then he would give a little essay on the theory, or explain a chain of medical reactions, or suggest how we should investigate further the laws he had just implied. My breath stopped a moment each time.
There was little to suggest the limits of his peripheral awareness in trance. For example, how had he known that a small boy cherished by Gladys, T.J., was out on a fishing dock behind Cayce’s house and in danger of falling into the little freshwater Lake Holly? What prompted him to interrupt his speaking with a terse “Better go get the boy from the dock” and then wait in silence until Gladys returned?
More sobering were comments that might be made about the attitudes and priorities of those of us in the room. The voice we listened to was not unkind, but it could be blunt. In the files were warnings to “Do something for yourself!” when people in his immediate circle had grown too fond of getting guidance on everything that came up. “Next thing,” he added pungently in another transcript, “you’ll be asking whether to blow your nose with your right hand or your left!” And Cayce showed me ruefully that the shortest reading in the files was one given for him: a medical checkup which elicited only the sharp comment that he hadn’t done what was given to him last time and promptly terminated. None of us wanted a brush with the shining blade of this counsel.
Love As Quenched Wrath
The Cayces spoke of his readings as an active agent, which they called “the information,” though it provided as much judgment as data, as much values as facts. They appeared to do this in humility, not wanting to claim overmuch for the presence in their midst. It was indeed a presence for them, almost another character in the drama of their lives, and often the protagonist. Dependable yet never fully predictable, compassionate yet never indulgent, and lawful yet not to be manipulated for private gain—it was familiar, but it was always awesome. For it showed flashes of such purity, goodness, and staggering helpfulness as to leave all of us uncertain of our worthiness to be there. Its spirit many times recalled for me Rudolf Otto’s description of the holy as numinous, partaking of a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum,17 and his observation that God’s love was only his quenched wrath.
Some of our sense of humility and awe, of course, came from the awareness that “the information” would be accurate on items we could verify. We had the sense of staring over Cayce’s shoulder into an abyss of final reality, where being and non-being were divided and apportioned. If he said someone would soon die, then we could expect it to happen. If he promised that careful treatment would produce relief or even a cure for a seemingly hopeless condition, then odds were that the treatment would work, if it were fully carried out. If he rebuked someone for a corrosive temper that spoiled a marriage, then that temper would prove to be the problem, although it had never been mentioned in the correspondence. If he ascribed to a youth a talent as a pianist which could stand out in his generation, then that talent would prove to be there, though the youth might choose not to cultivate it far. If (on rare occasions) he counseled someone in such detail as to specify that the best companion to marry would appear in a certain year, then such a person could be expected to show up, with the qualities he described. And if he commented, as he did, that the war would end suddenly and by unexpected means in the Orient, we had reason to think it would,
