was being prepared in the Manhattan Project.
Were we brainwashed, hearing more accuracy than was actually there? On one of the first days I went into the study for readings, he advised a twenty-year-old Army Air Corps cadet in Texas to use an Elliott machine every other day for three to four weeks as part of the treatment for a debilitating catarrh. When Gertrude Cayce asked where the young man could have access to one, her husband responded instantly that there were three near to him in San Antonio. I set out to verify this small item and discovered that in fact there were three, and only three, of the colonic irrigation machines in that area, since the prescribed model was newly available. One was in a civilian hospital and two at military bases; none of the institutions knew of the other locations’ use. This was impossible. This was unthinkable. My professors at Chicago would deny it, and who could blame them? Centuries of Western science and philosophy would back up their denials, as well as their own manifest experience. But Cayce was doing it anyway.
Here he was in a deep trance, stretched out on his back. He had the deliberate breathing and some of the restrained movements of subjects hypnotized to a deep level. Yet his speech and thought patterns were far from jerky or mechanical muttering. He was not less but more alert than in his waking consciousness, as his readings pointed out. Indeed, he seemed to have his whole psyche concentrated for action, not dissociated for mumbling response to a conductor. This hypnosis, as a small dying into larger consciousness, was different from classroom exhibitions.
His eyelids fluttered over unseeing eyes until covered. He spoke in phrases paced by his breathing, using a formal and sometimes elevated but not pretentious mode of discourse. Evidently he was working hard, for his expression mirrored concentration, and his lips were lightly pursed. Yet he spoke in firm composure, as though quite sure of what he said. His voice was clearly his own, but with little notes of stateliness that heightened its dignity, and with a resonance that gave it authority while not sounding preachy or oracular.
The manner in which he addressed those who sought his aid added gravity to the encounter. He spoke to or about each one only by name, never using a title, no matter what degrees or positions distinguished the inquirer in daily life. There was a Quaker-like simplicity in this usage. He flattered none and he belittled none, though he challenged many. He did not exaggerate, though he used irony and wit. Such unaffected discourse was at first unsettling to hear and then reassuring, as he seemed to plant himself before the absent person called to his attention with a forthrightness which invited more than it accosted. His speech was not sententious or pompous, just serious. In later years, when I sought out mediums and studied them in trances, I would find their speech dramatic or chatty, as the case might be, but rarely so unadorned and direct as here.
Beyond Safe Limits
Was this the same man as the one with whom we had been talking in the office, or running an errand to buy supplies, or having coffee with guests just a short time ago? He spoke in trance as someone on important business and typically used an editorial “we” instead of “I.” These were times when his face and speech outside of trance were close to the even discourse of his altered state. The man awake looked and sounded similar when teaching the Bible, whether on Sunday mornings at church or on Tuesday evenings at home. There serenity and depth marked his face so that he was immensely appealing. Some of that same self, so like the person giving readings, came to the fore when he prayed aloud at table graces or at the break every afternoon at two when the entire office stopped for fifteen minutes of Bible reading aloud, prayer, and quiet sharing. And just after he emerged from taking some troubled visitor into his office for an hour of counseling while wide awake, his face was as peaceful and shining as during readings.
How much continuity existed between Cayce’s trance self and his waking self seemed important to discover. For if he were taken over by a strange intelligence, however benign, then what he did was of little relevance to the rest of us who did not become unconscious for a living. But if, as his own counsel suggested, he put himself by prayer into a state which for him extended easily into trance, and there stepped into relation with what he called “universal” currents which lifted up and used all that was best in him, then we were looking at a process which might in some way apply to any of us.
Cayce rarely spoke of himself as a psychic, preferring instead to refer to “the thing I do.” In later years, when I would investigate many professional psychics, that distinction would become sharper. He was not focused on his own skill but upon a relationship, which he would describe as one with his Lord. In that respect he differed from many strongly endowed mediums, healers, and clairvoyants. He saw his ability as gift, in a double sense. It was a talent, to be sure, in the familiar sense of a gift as ability. But it was a talent exercised in cooperation with an active reality much larger and wiser than he, making his skill a gift from out of that relationship. As a result, the whole enterprise of getting readings was seen by him as stepping into a cherished Presence, not as a high-jump leap by his psyche alone.
He would gesture to us to come into his study, and one of us would cover the noisy parrot, a gift from a sea captain, that whistled and expostulated at one end of the library. We shut the door behind us as we entered. There were necessary procedures. For example, we were warned that sudden interruptions could cut off the flow, or even catapult him convulsively from his couch to his feet, leaving him upset in mind and body. Were a hand or a piece of paper to be passed across his solar plexus, or sometimes his head, he could awaken with a violent start. Readings explained that it was important not to interfere with a delicate invisible connection like a cord, connecting Cayce’s body to his consciousness, off inspecting someone ill. And on the few occasions when they had tried successfully, years ago, to get Cayce to locate murderers, he had sometimes wakened shouting, “He’s killing her! He’s killing her!” as though he had witnessed the very event. The distress stayed with him for days. An additional health hazard in years past had been violent, persistent headaches after giving readings, which he had traced to occasions in which a conductor sent his mind off for business and financial counsel when Cayce thought he was giving medical aid. Whatever he was entering with his trances, it involved his whole being and could threaten his health, his sanity, and even his life, since in the process, as one reading put it, “the soul is near to leaving the body.” The danger was greatest to him when he was overtired or ill, and that was just what threatened us as he tried to match his efforts to the stacks of unanswered letters.
As a result, we entered his study with soberness in the backs of our minds, even though we often joked and teased a bit to achieve the relaxed atmosphere which experience showed was optimal for the best readings. We were like those sending a diver to unknown depths, whose equipment was not designed to assure his safety at such far reaches but somehow continued to function. Adding to the seriousness of our effort was another possibility which Cayce had been forced to face. It was the chance, however small, that his counsel might prescribe a powerful medication in error and cause an injury or a fatality. Back in the Cayce Hospital days, when he had worn himself out not only by giving readings but taking on the administration, a full medical reading had been given for someone already dead, not noted in the counsel. Each day, each session, then, was the one in which his gift might prove lethal. Only the sense that he was bound to One who would protect him and others, Cayce observed with no little feeling, allowed him to go on taking this risk.
To start his journey into another kind of awareness, Cayce would sit down on his studio couch and loosen his tie and shirt collar, belt and shoestrings, while his wife seated herself beside him to give instructions. After we had talked enough to create a mood of unforced expectancy, Cayce grew silent and we all joined him in inward prayer. This was, it seemed, the decisive act. It expressed a desire for connection, not private attainment. Essentially it defined the trance which followed as an extension of the prayer process—exactly as Cayce saw it. Many who visited and wrote to us sought to understand his feats by using patterns from hypnosis, which was certainly involved. And in later years Cayce would be studied by me and others in the context of research on altered states of consciousness,18 not only
