KS&L 348 The Challenges of Edgar Cayce Part 2

One of the cruelest tests of Edgar’s veracity was the time several supposed physicians sought to expose Mr. Cayce as a fraud while he was giving a reading. They physically assaulted him by sticking large needles into his arms, hands and feet. Edgar did not respond [because he was in trance]. Then one doctor cruelly stuck a needle all the way through Edgar’s cheeks. Finally one of them took a penknife and ran the blade under Edgar’s left forefinger. Slowly the nail was lifted away from the flesh. Needless to say, Mr. Cayce awoke in agony.

The twentieth century was supposed to be the age of reason and science. However, it appeared that science had separated itself from God and anything that was not science was suspect. The cruel irony was that many organizations had entire funds set up to study and record authentic examples of psychic phenomena, the ones science truly could not explain. Harvard University was one such institution. This school sent representatives and they did seem to believe in his authenticity, but neither Harvard nor any other school ever made any of the grant money available to Mr. Cayce to further study what he was doing for the people he helped.

Some people wanted Edgar to dress up in costume, hide behind curtains and appear mysterious. They even volunteered to pay him $1,000 a day to do this. Edgar refused. He would have nothing to do with any action that made his ability appear to be fraudulent. Edgar Cayce was not only honest to a fault with the skill God had given him he was also true to himself.

Medical authorities always remained skeptical of Cayce, discounting his readings because he had no formal medical training. Yet, despite this, Cayce’s treatment recommendations worked when the recommendations of allopathic doctors failed.

Consider how humiliating this would have been for these doctors: a man with a 9^th grade education is able to correctly diagnosis, prescribe and heal people at a distance by going to sleep! The irony was that the physicians, who truly cared deeply about healing their patients, followed what Edgar said. The other doctors, who refused to believe his readings, would not.

Sometimes it was difficult for Edgar Cayce to understand within himself what this ability could do. Yet, Cayce was a man so pure of heart, that even though he often questioned himself, he continued to pray every day for Divine guidance. Sometimes he wondered if he should be doing this medical psychic work at all. Yet his patients were devoted to him. Cayce’s readings were successfully used to help his son with horrific photographic powder flash burns to his face and eyes. Edgar helped his wife, Gertrude with a life threatening illness. His readings helped his other son as well.

Cayce struggled with finances all of his life. Money was a chronic problem, primarily because he did not charge and was spending so much time helping people that he had difficulty developing his photographic career into a financially viable business. Edgar inherently knew to his very core, that to use his ability to charge large sums of money, or to help only those who could pay, would engender an absolute loss of that ability.

At one point in the readings, Mr. Cayce was advised to open a hospital in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which he did in November of 1928. There the hospital could charge people a nominal fee to defray the expenses of the hospital. Once the hospital was opened it was routinely booked three months in advance. The entire load of identifying treatments fell to Mr. Cayce and instead of doing the four readings a day that the readings advised, he raised them to six a day. From June 1943 to June 1944, Cayce gave 1385 readings. He did not want to say no to anyone in need. Finally, in one of the readings, he was told to rest or he would die. While he did rest for several months, he passed away in Jan of 1945 at the age of 68.

One might wonder why doing these readings was so exhausting for him; wasn’t the energy coming from God? After all, wasn’t he asleep and resting during the readings? Doing the readings was utterly exhausting because when any mortal soul acts as a medium, or conduit for the energy of the Divine, they literally are using their own body as a type of step-down transformer, making the energy of the Divine, the information of healing available on a level that the patient and the family would readily use. Mr. Cayce may have appeared to be resting, but he was in fact working most diligently. Even in the resting/sleeping state, it takes great concentration, discipline and skill to host such powerful energy, day after day, week after week, and year after year – for your entire life.

And what a life! Upon his death, Edgar Cayce left behind a life’s work of some 30,000 readings! This legacy of invaluable information, remedies, procedures and devices are still in use to this day. Perhaps we will never fully appreciate the degree of Edgar Cayce’s sacrifice. However, we can at least now have a greater respect for the depth of his pure love for humanity and the dynamic example of his tremendous service to all mankind.

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.

KS&L 330 The Good Steward

Edgar Cayce was considered one of the most remarkable psychics of the Twentieth Century. His ‘readings’ are so prolific that they are housed in the Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This center has a metaphysical library that is so large that only the metaphysical library at the Vatican is larger. What makes this so remarkable is that the very foundation of this library is the massive collection of Edgar Cayce readings that cover topics that range from healing the body to what happened in Atlantis.

When you study the life of Edgar Cayce what you find is a man who had an astounding ability to tap into the spirit world when asked a specific question, and then to share that information with the rest of us. These ‘readings’ offered glimpses of the future of the world as well as how to heal someone at a distance. Mr. Cayce didn’t just heal someone he gave them the tools to heal themselves. That information using everything from essential oils, electronic devices, therapeutic massage to meditation, comprises the basis for the Cayce healing library in Virginia Beach.

Perhaps the most important element of all of the Cayce work is the integrity with which he dealt with his ability to work with the spiritual world. Edgar Cayce was a man with tremendous psychic ability. This ability was not a gift. A gift is something unexpected that you receive on a holiday or your birthday.

Psychic ability is a very specific skill that you earn life after life after life. You don’t just wake up one morning and you are suddenly psychic. Perhaps if you are hit by lightening, then perhaps you may have found a sudden ability, but that ability is never a gift, because it carries with it a huge level of karma both positive and negative based on how any soul chooses to use that skill. Psychic ability is a responsibility and the greater a person’s ability, the more significant the responsibility and the heavier the karmic burden. Abuse that ability by hurting another person with it, and the karmic price tag for that abuse is very high. It is costly because you earn your ability life after life by what you sought to learn each life. Perhaps you wanted to learn how to do hands on healing or become a medical intuitive. Maybe you wanted to be able to see into the future and prevent disaster. Possibly you actively sought to see the dead, or auras or the stacks of time. All of that is fine. But once you acquired this ability, what did you do with it? How did you use it?

Karma attaches because once you have an ability you are karmically expected to share what you have earned and learned with the utmost integrity. The more you use your ability, the higher the ante is raised. This means that you are earning more intense positive karma with each wonderful, generous and above all, wise action you perform. The reverse is also true. People who participate in fostering psychic addiction by taking advantage of other people, such as fortune tellers, cult gurus or energy vampires, know what they are doing and they energetically steal on a conscious level.

Edgar Cayce always used his powerful psychic ability from a place of the utmost integrity. He is one of the finest examples any of us can study in just exactly how to use any spiritual ability and hold ourselves up to the highest karmic/spiritual standards. He did not promise what he could not deliver. Cayce was honest in what he could and could not do for someone, and he realized that he could not heal everyone. No one could do that, not even the Christ because not even Christ could randomly remove the karma of another person.

Edgar Cayce was truly the finest steward of the psychic and spiritual ability that he had. He was a humble man with a deep and powerful love of Christ, the Divine and the spirit world. Cayce also loved all people of all religions so much that he would often sacrifice himself to help a person in great need. In the crazy world we live in, perhaps now and then it is a good practice to study those more spiritually advanced souls who walked among us and follow their example of outstanding spiritual stewardship.