When I returned home, more like a pussy cat than the roaring lion, I tried to sneak into bed without waking my wife. But she heard me and said, “Well, did you charge them like you said you would?” I told her I didn’t—that the little girl was really sick, and besides, they didn’t have any money to pay me for the visit. We went to sleep again.
It was at that point that I became aware that service was what I was there for and I chose it. My later years emphasized that concept of service and enlarged on it, for how is the quality of Divine Love best manifested, unless it is in helping those who need help, caring for those who are anxious and insecure, those who are sick in body, mind, or spirit?
Chapter Three
A Chance Encounter
(If Chance Is Yet a Reality)
Nothing really happens by chance, does it? at least that was what i was to find repeated over and over again in the Edgar Cayce readings. I was now in the practice of medicine in Phoenix, Arizona, having started over again after a stint in the air force as a flight surgeon.
It was 1955, and I had been in town just a few months. I had started an exploratory adventure into the field of parapsychology with a friend of mine, Dr. Bill Rogers. We had come across a wonderful story about Edgar Cayce—a man who could lie down on a couch and enter an altered state of consciousness—and really tell what was happening inside the body of another individual who could be 2,000 miles away. It was as if he were communicating with the unconscious mind of another person, while his own conscious mind was set aside. I was fascinated, but thought—“Well, that’s just another event in the past, for Cayce died in 1945.”
Then, one day, my receptionist came rushing into the office and gave me the phone number of a man who was going to talk about Edgar Cayce. It was Cayce’s oldest son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, and I was excited.
That was the beginning of the adventure that was to take me through time and space, in a sense, and demand my time and attention, my thought processes, and my writing and speaking abilities for the rest of my life. For there is still much to be done, some thirty-eight years after that “chance encounter.” It was Hugh Lynn Cayce who captured my imagination that day after I made the phone call. And the world was a different place from that point onward.
Hugh Lynn told about his father’s abilities that night at a lecture, and I began to understand how this psychic information could relate to the practice of medicine. Much of Edgar Cayce’s life was spent in giving 14,306 “readings,” as they came to be called. Over a period of forty years, two-thirds of these readings—9,604—were given for individuals who were ill; some seriously so. The remainder were for a variety of other reasons. The bulk of his work, then, had to do with what I’ve been trained in and involved with for most of my life—the care of those who are ill.
The full story of his life is well told by Thomas Sugrue in his book There Is a River,3 which is biographical in nature. Later on, Jess Stearn authored a best seller about Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet,4 which emphasizes more the importance of Cayce’s physical readings. Since then, literally hundreds of books have been published about this man or his work, which he stated was the work of the Christ.
Cayce died in 1945, but while he lived he was able to lie down on a couch or bed, loosen his tie and collar, and place his folded hands on his forehead. After a few moments, he would bring his hands down over his solar plexus, and enter a state that resembled trance or self-hypnosis. It has been called in recent years an altered state of consciousness.
In this state, he was able, upon suggestion by the conductor of the reading, to visualize, describe, and comment upon another individual who might be thousands of miles distant at that moment and a complete stranger to Cayce and those surrounding him. He was able to describe physical conditions which were present in that person’s body, in the bloodstream, the nervous system, or other parts of the person’s physiology; and then give suggestions, which, if followed, tended to restore that body back to a more normal condition of health. Each time Cayce “went to sleep” and gave such information for an individual, this, with the questions and answers, became a reading.5
Cayce’s clairvoyance, while in this condition, was substantiated time and again, and he subsequently became known nationally as The Miracle Man of Virginia Beach, Virginia,6 where he spent his last years. His abilities to be accurate in the unconscious state throughout his life brought a variety of people to see him and ask him questions. During the days of World War II, the mail brought literally thousands of letters pleading for help for servicemen who were embroiled in the war and had not been heard from. He was indeed an unusual man who apparently had direct contact with a source of information few people have had in recorded history.
Cayce’s strength—in this field of parapsychology—was his medical clairvoyance. He described the body differently than anyone else I had ever met or read about. Certainly he did not discuss it in the way I had been taught in my medical school training. He talked about “forces” in the body—meaning the energy in the bloodstream or the nervous system—the digestive activities, and all those activities that go on within the body. He talked about incoordination, about “overflow of nerve impulses,” about lacteal ducts, about the Peyer’s patches in the small intestine. It was a new education in how to help the body to become healed and to return to a normal balance.
It took me quite a while to look at this wonderful human body from a perspective different from what I had been taught.
One of the earliest readings in which castor oil packs were suggested by Cayce was for a woman who had applied for a reading because of a tumor of the upper bowel—diagnosed by x-ray as cancer, but stated in the reading to be an impaction. This reading was taken on August 17, 1927, and represented the beginning of a type of therapy which was continued throughout the life of this psychic individual, who, without a medical training or degree, found himself in the position of diagnosing illnesses and giving suggestions for therapy, without seeing the patient or often even knowing anything about the person, except the location of the individual.
In another reading (1836-1) Cayce described what he saw in the functioning of a sixty-two-year-old man who had epilepsy and advised what to do:
As we find, unless there are measures taken the conditions here may become very serious.
These are the conditions as we find them with this body, [1836]:
There having been a disturbance in the lacteal ducts, there has been a disturbance that causes an adhesion in this portion of the body; and at times a drawing in the side (right) just below the liver and gall duct area.
This disassociation causes a breakage in the coordinating of the cerebrospinal and sympathetic nervous system, until there are the tendencies and impulses for an overflow of the nerve impulse through the cerebrospinal system.
And these, unless some measures are taken, may form a clot or a break on the brain.
As to the general conditions of the body, these are gradually giving away to these disturbances, both from the physical reaction and from the anxiety in the self as well as those about the body.
Then, as we find:
We would apply, consistently, for at least ten such applications, the castor oil packs—about every other evening, when the body is ready to retire, for an hour; the packs changed about twice during the hour period. These would be applied over the caecum and the gall duct area, or the right side from the ribs to the point of the hip, extending lower over the abdomen in that area, see? Use about
