training and the wisdom of psychotherapy about layered minds and troubled wills.
This book is an invitation to learn about a man, unique in our culture, one who was faithful to his calling to be helpful to people. I remember him as a man who didn’t take himself too seriously. His ability to laugh at himself suggests a truly large soul. He loved and enjoyed people, and was ready to share his stories and wisdom with anyone who was interested. Although many people put him on a pedestal for his kindness and generosity, he was an extremist who never did anything half way, and his temper could flare when he was tired or ill. But his devotion to God and Jesus Christ and to his holy calling was real and constant, and I often felt his deep commitment to God and the Christ as he led our morning and afternoon prayer times.
Edgar, Gertrude, and Gladys helped steer me in a helpful new direction when I was twenty-three by expanding my world view. In the winter of my ninetieth year—after being involved with the Cayce work for more than six decades—I know that my time as a member of the Cayce household forever changed me. My life reading, in which they all participated, revealed God’s design for me in this incarnation: family life, not my dreamed-of life as a concert pianist. He said, “You should have a lot of little ones, for the home is the greatest career in the earth, and those who shun same will have much yet to answer for.” The reading showed me the temptations I would face along the way, too. I am like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, forever grateful for having the opportunity to change my life’s direction. Reflecting on my reading over the years, I have realized that while I might have had technical prowess at the piano along with a measure of fame as a performing artist, I would have been lonely traveling to engagements and performing alone on the stage. I would probably not have had a family of my own, nor would I have been able to grow in the deepening life experiences that family life provided. So how deep and expressive would my musical interpretations have been?
In this book, Harmon asks a pointed question: “Is Edgar Cayce just a last flicker of the past, when shamans and seers told their visions around the tribal fires? Or is he a glimpse of the future, when preoccupation with technical mastery, private comfort, and deadly weapons will yield to a just and loving society, close to the earth and bursting with invention and playfulness?”
That last sentence is the way I understand Edgar Cayce’s dream for the future of each of us and our world. His view of the individual soul and of the God that created it was huge! He saw the future bright with the magical love and wisdom of the Creative Forces. When we souls can get in step with the lovely design laid out for us and make the right choices, one step at a time, we can be made whole and help transform the world into something like the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s “peaceable kingdom.” That is the promise within Edgar Cayce’s life story.
CHAPTER 1
I Don’t Do Anything You Can’t Do
There was literally a loaded gun on my hip when I began a journey into the scarcely believable life of Edgar Cayce. It was wartime in the mild June of 1943, and I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, holding a night job as a civilian guard under military command. Between my rounds through the laboratories in a large wooden building (given a deceptive exterior to mislead saboteurs or spies), I perched on a stool under a naked light bulb and read chapters from a biography published the year before, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce.1 Now and again I glanced around and fingered my gun when there were creaking sounds in the woodwork or the dogs barked hoarsely in the animal lab down the hall. There was real danger from enemy agents, according to the supervising Army captain. Recent break-ins had threatened research secrets and cost the life of one guard. Often I wondered, while trudging hourly routes through the night, whether I would hesitate for a critical second before firing to kill a man who sprang from behind a table of chemical retorts or around the great humming transformers.
Such images of violence, making all too real the daily reports of GIs meeting sudden death on European and Pacific battle fronts, were utterly incongruous with the images in the book before me. There the author, Thomas Sugrue, a respected editor and critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, described how an elderly ex-photographer in the oceanfront resort of Virginia Beach, Virginia, regularly entered a quietly creative state so potent that it mocked all the university technology surrounding me. The gun on my hip and the book on my knees represented radically different approaches to power. One stood for the skilled violence we guarded in an advanced and top-secret weapons research project. The other reported valuable knowledge about a staggering array of targets, reached peacefully and swiftly in a calm trance state.
Had I known the full nature of the research in my care, the contrast with Cayce would have been even more stark. The intricate equipment was part of the Manhattan District or Manhattan Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Of course, we guards tried discreetly to learn what was happening in our cluster of buildings across the rolling, grassy Midway from the main campus. We could not puzzle it out, because some rooms with flasks and bubbling tubes were clearly for chemical research, while others were crowded with electrical apparatus that suggested work in physics. And why did we have live animals, such as dogs, monkeys, and rats? What was the connection between living flesh and the technology we suspected was connected to the university’s atomic accelerator across the campus? When I tried to question my friend and neighbor from boyhood, the distinguished physicist Arthur Compton, I got only pleasant generalities.
The well-hidden truth of the Project was known in 1943 only to a score or so of scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer (working at the level of Compton and his Chicago colleagues under Enrico Fermi), selected military chiefs, and President Roosevelt plus a few advisors. Just a few blocks from where I was reading through the night about Cayce, a team of researchers in quarters created under the west stadium grandstands of Stagg Field had achieved the first controlled atomic reaction, which they were now turning into an atom bomb. At the end of the same football field, where I had so often flung my javelin towards the sky and watched its distant puncture of the soft earth, they had created a new weapon that would make even warships and tanks seem as archaic as javelins. Just months ago, in the cold and blowy Chicago December, they had turned loose a power which in two years would create an agony of screaming in Japan—enough to drown out all the throaty roars of Saturday football fans that I had heard throughout my youth near Stagg Field. In the very playground of the University, these gifted scientists had fashioned an instrument to suddenly kill some ninety thousand human beings at Hiroshima, with an equal number maimed. Nobody would ever know the exact casualties there and at Nagasaki, because so many civilians would be vaporized and incinerated in the August days already destined at our gracious campus.
A Kind of University All by Himself
Power was in the air, in the whirring machines and humming electrical circuits of the laboratory in my keeping. It was our American genius, our gift for know-how which we hoped would win the war. We raised the banner of technique over university campuses and assembly lines alike. This was the Century of Progress celebrated at the World’s Fair in Chicago a few short years ago, where I had viewed with awe the sparkling technical displays in the Hall of Science, with my father in charge of the University of Chicago exhibits and programs.
But power of a different sort was the theme of the strange Cayce story. If the facts reported of him were even partly accurate, he had an extraordinary capacity that made him a kind of university all by himself, without technology at all.
Twice a day for decades, he had entered a trance state for up to an hour or more. In that unconscious condition (so unlikely that it had never appeared in any of my courses in psychology, religion, or the history of cultures) he seemed able to examine and describe whatever was posed to him by
