he delayed the move from the larger library to his study, especially when there were interesting visitors. Even though it was time for him to go unconscious and the conversation stumbled into awkward pauses (when those present manifestly wanted him to begin his unique process), he might extend a story as though to say, “Look, I matter as a conscious person, you know.” But when the conversation lagged further, he took the demand in good grace, laying aside his consciousness and putting his life on the line by entering a pressure chamber which none of us fully understood nor could guarantee that he would leave unharmed.
He was the only one among us who never heard a reading. He alone must take his gift on faith. The rest of us were daily reinforced in our reliance on it. The doubt he had to conquer showed all too clearly in a dream he told from some years earlier. In it he held an infant girl in his arms. (Other dreams showed her as a mummified Egyptian girl who had to be brought back to life, since the young female was often his dream emblem for his unusual talent, as what Jung called the creative anima.)21
She spoke precociously and was being examined by authorities to discover whether she were in fact a midget and doing nothing unusual. Inspection proved, to his relief, that she was an authentic prodigy. The reading taken on this dream confirmed that the infant stood for an ability which seemed to him at times small, of little account in the world affairs. Yet it would grow, he was admonished, to bring joy and aid to many. “Good dream!” “the information” concluded.
More poignant and revealing was a dream he shared with me which had come at one of the many times when he was out of money, facing the nagging doubt which would confront any modern American: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” The dream took place in a courtroom, where his wife—ever the bearer of rational judgment in his life—had him arraigned on lunacy charges and brought in their forlorn-looking children to show how incompetent he was to take care of them. Somehow in the trial he managed to affirm his adequacy and ended up giving what amounted to a mini-reading for each prominent figure in the courtroom, starting with the judge. He cited details of their past lives with him which none could deny, and convinced his hearers that he was mentally sound. The reading taken on this dream recognized his financial distress but urged him to be faithful. Then it added that getting in touch with the one man who had vouched for him in the dream would bring him requests for readings and needed income—as it did when he followed up the lead. Obviously in such dreams, Cayce’s unconscious during the night mirrored his fears over the sanity of having to rely on a process he only partly understood, never saw or heard for himself, and found brought him only as much money as he required for everyday needs.
But a very different, visionary dream he related set his trance efforts in a larger context. He saw himself preparing to give a reading (“fixing” to give one, was his Southern expression) and observed his consciousness as a tiny speck at the base of a great funnel or spiral which reached upward and outward toward the heavens. Between the rings encircling the funnel at different levels were located sources of the information and aid he sought in order to help others. Even the resources of whole cities were available to him, according to their quality depicted as rates of vibration. The tiny dot of his consciousness was tugged by someone’s need to whatever points on the vast spiral he should reach for aid. The dream with its cosmic, mystical scope affected him strongly, and he sought a reading on it. There he was told that his little consciousness was indeed as nothing in the great vortex or spiral of the universe. Yet by its purpose of service it could be lifted to whatever heights and specific resources were needed, “even unto the Thrones themselves,” the ultimate thrones of divine grace. The spiral he had seen was like a great trumpet of the universe, resounding with whatever was required for one who would for a time empty himself of all self-seeking.
Given the soaring imagery of such a dream, Cayce’s response was understandable when I asked him what he felt essentially transpired in his trance. He chose an image from a letter of Paul’s to the Corinthian church, and spoke of being absent in the body but present in the spirit with those who needed him.22 His image often returned to me in later years when I worked intensively with parapsychologists and gifted subjects trying to replicate some of Cayce’s doings. Typically our emphasis was on states and circuits in the psyche and in the body. Not often was the model stretched as far as his dream of the spiral suggested it might be.
Where Power and Love Meet
Slowly it became clear that Cayce’s readings were a joining of power with love.
Cayce’s power was his distinction. In a technical culture, his skill with facts stood out as the hallmark of his gift. To most of those who learned of his story he was (if real at all) a psychic, a supplier of unknown data, a purveyor of useful facts, a trafficker in unusual power. Yet we were hearing more than facts. We were hearing engagement and encounter, call and sending, of one person at a time. We were dealing with power, to be sure, but it was power infused and shaped by love. Or it was love surprised by wisdom.
We were watching a consciousness instantly form itself into the person being counseled. Comparing the tone of voice and the choice of words given in readings at the same session showed that we were not dealing with a grand Western Union of the mind, hunting up psychic data to drop on listeners. This counsel was far more personal, more individual. It was bent on engaging each seeker in terms appropriate for just that person’s growth.
To one the counsel might be demanding, brusque, and businesslike, to another supportive, gentle, or even tender. The factual information was firmly knit to the effort to reach and quicken the person. Caring formed, paced, and sharpened each reading, both in content and in style. The counsel to a somewhat officious Army colonel startled us when Cayce made a rare departure from his usual impersonal address to admonish, after answering a question, “Take that and think it over, sonny boy!” By contrast, for a little old lady in her eighties who only wanted to know in the question period, “How am I doing?”, he capped a reading of warm praise for her generous life with the words, “Who can tell the sun how to shine, who can tell the wind how to blow? Who can tell a rose to be beautiful, who can tell a baby how to smile?” She needed, he said, no evaluation from him.
The entranced Cayce took his own measure of each counselee, not judging by appearances. Often he impressed us with his patience. An alcoholic who insisted on several checkup readings, but kept up drinking (to his wife’s dismay), received not the rebuke one might expect but firm and supportive counsel. We were surely dealing with power. It was skill, knowledge, and judgment in superb measure. But its quality or essence was active love. We were seeing not just a general spirit of goodwill, but a specific, original engagement of each person. To be sure, the counsel often took up the same series of issues in a given type of reading. But within this framework were the flashes and angles, the embraces and the stiff challenges which lifted the aid above mere information.
Getting clear on the union of power with love in this effort seemed important when we asked “How can such an ability be developed and nurtured in others?” Visitors steeped in the American ethos of know-how tended to focus on such manageable techniques as hypnosis and yogic concentration when the question arose of how to duplicate Cayce. But this narrow, engineering perspective, which gave maximum attention to mastery of a new power, tended to miss the element of caring and compassion which seemed the heart of Cayce’s gift.
Further, when some of Cayce’s friends and associates, outside his intimate circle, quoted “the information” on subjects as varied as nutrition and ethics, they did so as one might quote the Bible in comparable church circles. Lifted out of individual engagements and made into abstract admonitions or general principles, these quotes could be impressive. But they produced an oracular mind-set about Cayce’s work which easily lost the element of concern to free and empower the listener. Such an approach, it seemed, could easily produce a cult. Pronouncing rather than serving, explaining rather than eliciting, informing rather than inviting—these were classic temptations in viewing Cayce as a purveyor of unusual
