KS&L 347 The Challenges of Edgar Cayce Part 1

How many times have people wondered what it would be like to be psychic, not just a little, but to have real ‘powers’, powers that could change people’s lives. What if you had the power to tell someone what their illness was and how to cure it? What if you had the power to learn a book simply by sleeping with your head on the book? What if you had the super power of seeing into the future, or could share the reality of what had happened in the past, in places like Egypt, Atlantis, or Lemuria? Imagine. Wouldn’t that be awesome! Or would it?

What most people do not understand would be that to have those supposed powers, you would have to have the ability to live with the responsibility and the reactions of non-super power enhanced people. Sometimes, wanting and having are very different realities. Having abilities that are beyond the norm of ordinary people would end up being the challenge of a person’s entire lifetime.

And such is the extraordinary case of Edgar Cayce. Mr. Cayce never even contemplated having any such elevated psychic ability. The reality he probably expected, was living a simple life with a sweet wife, children, friends and neighbors and working at his job. He never dreamed of the life he would eventually be living. He certainly didn’t dream of being as famous as he eventually became.

Edgar Cayce was the real thing, a man with truly tremendous psychic skills. He literally was born with this ability and throughout his life he struggled to find the best use of it for the greatest good for all people. Learning how to use it in a spiritually correct way was hard enough. But fundamentally, it was the reactions of other people that were among the most challenging aspects of living and working with the most sophisticated psychic ability ever consistently recorded in modern times.

The child Edgar Cayce could see ghosts as well as nature spirits. Several family members also had this ability, which frequently runs in families. As a youngster, he discovered that he could learn the contents of any book, or any length, simply by sleeping on it. He was able to recall every single word in the correct order in whatever book he ‘slept on’ and he did not lose that memory over time. Is this a miracle? If that is not a skill the rest of us can easily acquire, then perhaps it can be considered a miracle.

As a young man, Mr. Cayce lost his voice for several months and no doctor could heal him. Finally, a very clever doctor suggested asking Edgar, while in the sleep state, how to help himself to heal. To everyone’s astonishment, a voice came from Edgar giving exact instructions for healing himself – on the spot! This event opened the door to Edgar Cayce’s life of service to those in need of healing through his life readings. Literally, he could lay down, instantly fall asleep and once a suggestion was made that a person at an address anywhere in the world needed healing, a voice would come from Cayce with exact instructions for healing this person. Once the patient had been acquired and their status recorded, then an analysis of the illness and treatment was meticulously provided. Mr. Cayce’s track record was impeccable. His knowledge while asleep, of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, homeopathy and healing was unmatched. Literally, he was never wrong. The patient may have needed follow-up later, but the initial diagnosis was routinely correct.

But Edgar Cayce had no more than a 9^th grade education. He was not a doctor, and had never studied any of these topics, yet, one allopathic physician after the other verified that Edgar’s analysis was not simply correct but often genius. What Edgar Cayce was able to do, was in many minds, truly a miracle from God.

Often, however, miracles engender jealousy, fear, disbelief and resentment. If you are witnessing a miracle, you may be required to rethink your very belief structure. Sometimes this miracle will mean that what you believed to be true – something as common as: all psychics are charlatans – will have to change. Often the purity of Mr. Cayce’s intentions unnerved people and made them question him even more, even though he never charged for the services he provided.

Because of his unique ability, Mr. Cayce led a challenging life. Should he tell people what he could do? How should he help? How do you get people to believe the astounding? Cayce suffered not only insults, such as the Harvard professor, who, upon witnessing a reading, called him a simpleton and another physician referred with skepticism in his voice, to Edgar’s ‘so-called powers.’ But worse things were to come: he also suffered physically because of this disbelief.