is that all of life is purposeful. To be sure, sometimes seeing the purpose in something takes a skill beyond sensory observation. It requires a change in consciousness; it can require seeing beyond the physical self; and, it often involves the intuitive imagination. To accept that there is purpose to life also requires acknowledging a reality beyond the domain of waking consciousness and personal ego. In practice, exploring Cayce’s premise of the purposefulness of life relies upon perceiving subtle truths, and exploring the hidden key to life that the Cayce information postulates for all of humankind.
Let’s begin with a simple analogy. Suppose we present a group of scientists from another planet with one of our automobiles. Being alien to our world, they do not know what this object is, but they begin to investigate it with their research tools. They measure its length, width, and height, and take measurements of each piece they can isolate on this large “contraption.” They take as many observations as possible, keeping careful records. They discover that pushing a round thing labeled “ignition,” causes many of the parts to begin moving and making noise. They see gray vapor coming out of a tube at one end. Someone discovers that if you press on a lever down below the sound increases, the speed of movement of the parts increases, and the gray vapor is replaced by a blast of hot smelly air coming out fast!
And so it goes. There are so many measurements these scientists can make. But what are they discovering? If they did not know the purpose of the object—to convey folks to distant locations—how would they know how to make relevant measurements (horsepower, fuel economy, braking distance, handling, etc.)? Taking a friend on a moonlit drive, the thrill of navigating a curvy mountain road—these and other pleasures of driving remain unknown to the alien scientists unless they discover the purpose of the automobile.
How many of us on earth have ever made the appropriate measurements of the human being? Have we even asked the right questions? Collectively, we’ve certainly accumulated enough observations, and we’ve proposed many theories. Evolution is a theory based on many observations of nature. The idea of “cause and effect” is a meta-theory, a universally applied assumption about how the world “works,” which is to see all living processes as functioning like a machine. Another term for this worldview is “the clockwork universe.” More recent advances in science have introduced the mysterious “uncertainty principle,” concerning the unpredictability of the moment and direction of the “quantum leap.” Cayce’s own vision of “God” displays both of these properties—the ironclad chain of cause and effect that describes God like electricity—a force that acts upon the physical world; and the highly personal “I am” that is within each of us as our awareness and capacity for free choice, which becomes more and more unpredictable the less we are driven by the cause-and-effect force of determinism.
Ultimately, the Cayce information suggests that the “why” of life is to encounter a series of experiences that will ultimately awaken each of us as individuals to an awareness of our true divine self. Somehow, collectively, we have forgotten the truth of our divine origins and the fact that we were created—as Cayce puts it—to become “companions and co-creators” with God. From this premise, all of our life experiences (both challenging and wonderful) and each of our relationships (also challenging and wonderful) have the potential to expand our limited consciousness beyond the ego self.
Just as Cayce asked the question as to the “Why?” of life, for thousands of years countless stories and myths have arisen in respond to humanity’s asking “Why?” Their existence demonstrates our tremendous need for an answer to this question; a question to which science alone may not be able to provide a response.
What is it about humankind that we wish to know our meaning, our purpose? Where did we get that quality of curiosity, and how does it play into creation? To answer these questions, we need to look at the ways in which humankind has responded to the need to find meaning and purpose through myths. What are myths? One could say that myths are stories about our origins and its challenges. A myth can sometimes be presented as fictional, and yet in your heart, you know it’s true.
In a fashion similar to that provided by Hinduism, Cayce describes the creative principle as awakening from a slumber to begin a cycle of exploring possibilities. Just as a person might paint a picture to make what’s inside visible, to gain a sense of self, Cayce’s view of the Creator’s motivation for creation was for the joy of self-expression and the desire to experience oneself through that expression. Sound familiar? Sound human? Give a kid a crayon and he or she will scribble on the wall, and then look at what was created. The creation of souls was part of God’s expression. God expressed Himself as souls. The purpose of that expression, as with any self-expression, was for God to experience Himself through His creations. In the case of souls, God gave souls all of His own qualities so that God could experience the companionship of these souls. The reflection of God that souls provide gives God the desired companionship, and thus the greater self-awareness.
In thousands of readings, Cayce explored the gradual growth in collective humanity’s consciousness by examining the mythic tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, and other ancient civilizations. Told from the perspective of specific individuals and their personal journeys through various lifetimes, these readings portray the fact that a soul “grows” when it explores its own divine consciousness and its relationship with others whereas it “loses” (opportunities and consciousness growth) whenever it focuses only on the physical world and its perception of self alone.
A similar worldview can be gleaned from the Mayan culture and their religion’s approach to an understanding of God’s desire for companionship and the challenging opportunity it presents us as participants in creation. Their mythology is such that the Mayans claim to be the fourth “people” of the planet. They believe that God destroyed the first three “peoples,” because they could not say the prayers correctly. Was God simply being capricious? No. The Mayans believed that God requires reflection and acknowledgement in order to experience His own existence. The purpose of humanity is to allow God to become conscious of Himself. Our willfulness has distracted many of us from this task, but it is this task that makes life truly meaningful.
Most creation myths include a chapter on humanity’s “fall from grace.” In the Bible, we have the story of the serpent tempting Eve to bite the apple. Cayce’s version tells a different story, and helps us realize how we experience the “fall” every day. There are two parts to Cayce’s version. The first part has to do with our use of free will to go our own way, rather than the way that aligns with the divine purpose that God intended for us. We get caught up in our creations, our life dramas, our things, and become “willful.” The second part has to do with how our willfulness in exploring our abilities in the three-dimensional earth world keeps us hypnotized to the sensory world, rather than to the intuitively given spiritual world. It’s the separation two-step: “I can and will.” Although definitely agreeing that at one point in the history of the world there was the physical appearance of humankind (the Adam and Eve story), Cayce suggests that the “fall of man” was ultimately a descent in consciousness; however, rather than being a “bad” choice it was part of our evolutionary growth to bring divine consciousness into the physical world.
A summation of Cayce’s story of creation is told in the “Philosophy” chapter of There Is a River, the Edgar Cayce biography by Thomas Sugrue. Elsewhere, in Edgar Cayce’s Story of the Origin and Destiny of Man, author Lytle Robinson provides perhaps the most complete summary of the Cayce perspective on these topics. Scholars have shown that Cayce’s intuition is as we might expect to echo the oldest of humanity’s notions about essential metaphysical truths. He echoes the mystery religions, whose concern is the problem of freeing oneself from the chains of materiality, having sensed a spiritual or non-material dimension of experience, such as in dreams. The question of “why” takes us to the original purpose. Cayce’s intuitive view of creation and its purpose gives an important creative role to the human being in the history of creation. At the same time, his version of creation doesn’t fail to point to the foibles of humanity that have affected the course of creation’s history.
