incisively varying his aid from person to person.
Cayce told a dream which contained a succinct warning on just this score. In it he had found through the aid of his readings that his dead grandmother had come back to life. He had located her resting body, breathing and capable of being wakened, in a thicket far away. In the dream he was eager to leave and tell others of the remarkable discovery he had made with his unusual trance skills. But he found to his horror that dogs nearby might damage the body before he could get help to bring it fully back to life. When he awakened, it was with the thought that he was letting his real work go to the dogs. The reading he sought on the dream did not encourage him to feature the prowess he wanted to exhibit for others in the dream. It emphasized instead the grandmother’s return to life—the symbolic process of resurrection. The “information” urged him to keep clear on just this purpose in every reading he gave. To him this counsel meant he was to call people to fuller life who were, in some part of their beings, dead or deadened. He was not to call them to another existence, or to a spiritual existence floating in the air, but to their present existence, awake and potent.
The dream motif of resurrection seemed fitting. The people he served were indeed being summoned one at a time from death to new life and given aid to make the change. Whether the death process was a disintegrating body, a troubled and defensive mind, or a flagging spirit turned back on itself in doubt and self-condemnation, Cayce’s counsel was undoing the burial wrappings. He did his own dying from waking consciousness so that his hearers would walk, grin, plan, and build. For those of us listening to his measured speech, the revivifying brought awe and delight side by side. Tears would come to our eyes when some young mother was told that her desperately ill baby could be treated and would live. Laughter burst out of us when a too spiritual couple asking for a propitious site on which to build a house were told it had best be done “on the ground.”
It was not difficult to think of death around us, waiting to yield to resurrection. Actual death threatened in many of the pleading letters. It was also in the very air, rattling the windowpanes of Cayce’s study while he spoke his unhurried readings. (Big artillery guns practiced their booming volleys at a base just down the coast from us.) And daily we could hear fighter planes from the nearby Naval Air Base at Oceana, droning over the house like angered hornets, intent on some offshore target. Sometimes we could not catch Cayce’s words, so loud were the planes carrying a load heavier than bombs—a reminder that most of mankind was caught up in an effort to kill. All of the mind-wrenching contrasts from the Manhattan Project laboratories, when flickering dials and buzzing machines could be weighed against Cayce’s simple trances, came back in those moments.
What seemed important was that our civilization’s struggles for ever greater power over nature, over the psyche, over institutions, and over competing nations must one day be taken up in a commitment to love. Not just vague goodwill, but passionate commitment to the hungry, the poor, the ignorant, the ill, the discriminated against, and the lonely. And the love would need to stretch to the earth itself, whose face we smashed so easily with our bombs. If we could not love the land and the lowly creatures, how could we love each other?
The way in which Cayce’s readings joined power with love, wisdom with caring could be seen clearly in what he chose not to say. When the life of an individual seemed to lie bare before his vision, he could be pungent, even confrontational in his trances. But the steady voice refused to shame people. It would not reveal humiliating personal secrets, except in cryptic references that only the recipient would understand. There was a record of an instance in which Cayce had given part of a reading in German (of which he knew nothing) so that severe points could be made without exposing the person. In the same spirit, he refused to take away crucial choices. “This must be answered within self” was the frequent response to an ethical dilemma in a marriage or a career, in a sexual tangle, or in deciding about conscientious objection to military service. The reading might spell out the issues involved in such deep choices and even point to overlooked consequences or to dubious motivations. It would formulate principles and evoke biblical or historical figures faced with similar choices. Still the thrust, demanded by love, was to turn the responsibility back to the individual. Sometimes it seemed that the most important readings to understand might be the ones he did not give, because love restrained his speech. When he insisted “I don’t do anything you can’t do,” the price was ultimately both simple and difficult—love itself.
In later years when people studied his readings in the form of typed transcripts, or even downloaded computer excerpts, they all too easily skipped over the element of caring which so deeply shaped each encounter differently from those readings given just before and after it. The result was not just missing nuances, but perhaps missing the key to the entire operation.
Especially revealing were a series of readings he had given for a man depressed by business failures. A husband and father, he had deserted his family, who were frantic that he might have killed himself. Coming to Cayce, they were told in the trance that the person they sought was alive in another city but that the location could not be given because the fleeing businessman did not wish it. However, Cayce added, if they would come back each week, “we will be with him.” They came back, week upon week, and the entire hour-long reading went by each time in utter silence, supported by the family’s prayers. One day Cayce said, “He’s ready now, and will call home soon.” That was exactly what happened. Both the man and his family credited his recovery of perspective and motivation in part to the quiet, holy presence he felt again and again, alone in his hotel room. Nothing in the usual definition of psychic would fit such a wordless activity, representative of Cayce’s process at its core.
Could power and love be brought together on a large scale, as the basis for a whole civilization? Or were we seeing in Cayce a fluke, a geyser that appears from a crack in the earth and then is gone for a thousand years? The answer seemed most clear when one turned from watching Cayce to glance at another face in the room. There he was on the couch, supplying fresh data yet also analyzing, evoking, inviting, and calling forth the person in the same sentences which plucked resources from nowhere visible. Then one might look across the room to someone else, perhaps his grave wife, his earnestly inscribing secretary, or just a puzzled visitor on hand for the day. Repeatedly would follow the surging surmise: “It’s got to be in all of us! We are made for such consciousness, as birthright and destiny.” Of course, the thought was not provable. But again and again it seemed as we listened that each of us could well be appointed to grow toward a love so strong, so steady, so clean that we could become channels of resources from beyond ourselves, where love would be surprised by wisdom.
As visitors came (often to hear their own readings), I asked them what they made of the process as they left the room. Two themes dominated their responses. One was best put by a thoughtful student: “We are known, all the way. And not just by Cayce.” As did others, he felt the astonishing certitude, almost alarming in its force, that he was known to the smallest details of his bodily organs and the deepest recesses of his thoughts. Who did the knowing and supplied the helpful responses to it? He answered that no sparrow falls without that same knowing.
The other response which I heard in varying words was this: “How we are loved!” Here even the fact of intimate knowledge was absorbed in the sense of being cared for and called by name. Something greater than Cayce seemed present to these people in the peculiar trances at the edge of the ocean, during a shattering time of history.
The next task was to see the larger outlines of Cayce’s work. What was he essentially called to be and do in his resurrection process? But as the days slid into weeks in that rainy fall in a blacked-out resort town, it was evident that a portrait of the unschooled but immensely creative Cayce would require painting on a very large canvas indeed.
17Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy, 1923.
18See Tart, Charles, Altered States of Consciousness, 1969, and States of Consciousness, 1975.
19See
