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Cayce, Edgar
Category: Healer
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) was an American diagnostic healer, but quite a unique one. He was able to self hypnotise himself and go into a deep trance state. In this state he was ‘used’ as a means of channelling information about a person’s illness and the cure. He was unconscious throughout this process, as such he had no idea what had gone on, or what he had said whilst he was being used. In order that both the diagnosis and cure could be obtained accurately he eventually developed a system whereby he had a ‘stenographer’ - someone who could write down word for word what had been said during the session - and a helper who prompted him with questions. Thus it is through these people that we still have a unique record of his cases all of which are numbered and kept by the Edgar Cayce Foundation based in Virginia Beach.
He had a succession of helpers some of whom contributed to his healing practise, but many also exploited his skills for their own gain, causing him a great deal of distress in the process. If he was being used for ‘good’ honest means liable to cause no hurt, Cayce knew, because he always felt well and refreshed after the session. If he was being exploited, he was often ill with headaches and loss of his voice. His case is a marvellous example of someone who was punished by his spirit helpers if he didn’t do things right. Eventually his wife stepped in and became his helper and all the headaches ceased.
He helped thousands of people who wrote to him or came to see him. He could remote heal. He had no need to see the person as all his information about illness and cure came wherever the person was. Initially he did not charge at all for helping people, but after a while he realised that in order to live, he needed to charge something, but at no time did he seek either fame or riches, although his abilities earned him a good deal of unwanted publicity. In order to support himself, his very faithful and supportive wife Gertrude and their two sons, he ran a photography business. He was constantly in debt, constantly in danger of losing his house, constantly suffering business set-backs but he ploughed on with his healing even during times of extreme crisis, following the same principles of basic or no charges. Throughout his entire life his principles held strong. He thought his destiny was to help people become well, but I think on reflection, that his real destiny was to leave a legacy and record of cures that might make people in a more enlightened age understand the principle of spiritual healing.
One of his abiding frustrations throughout his life was that the medical profession did not take his cures and suggestions seriously. He often received letters of gratitude, but he also received letters of despair:
“The doctor says we must be crazy. The doctor won’t even read your diagnosis. The doctor says he won’t even answer a call from anyone who would listen to a spiritualist fake’.
There was a large body of doctors and medical professionals from osteopaths to homeopaths who used his services, but fearing ridicule they kept quiet. During his life he faced a constant battle with the rest of the medical profession and was labelled a charlatan, and numerous other unwarranted names. He was even arrested on a few occasions, though never charged. Some doctors who used him were even afraid to admit a social connection with him. His primary frustration was that many of his cures were not followed and people as a consequence suffered and died. It was the deaths and suffering of people who could have been helped that caused him the most anguish.
He tried throughout his life to establish a hospital where people could come and know the doctors they saw would follow his recommendations. After numerous aborted attempts, a hospital was eventually established in Virginia Beach with the help of David Kahn and the Blumenthal family. The hospital was built and was running successfully until the Blumenthal’s started to get grandiose ideas about adding a University of psychic studies to the hospital, they ploughed ahead linking the fate of the hospital and the university. The Wall Street crash came and Blumenthal’s fortune with it, the university failed and took the hospital with it.
But eventually in 1956 after his death, and through a totally unexpected gift, The Edgar Cayce Foundation was able to buy back the old hospital, reopen the vault of his case studies and begin cataloguing and restoring them. The Foundation now runs various healing and meditation courses, but of course without Edgar, the diagnosis part no longer exists. Ultimately the most important part of Edgar Cayce’s life on this planet was in reality not the hospital but the Foundation with its record of all his cures. These are ‘observations’ in the true sense of the word because of the meticulous way they were documented and witnessed. They are numbered and carefully classified. I have only been able to include a few on the site and I have extracted them from Joseph Millard’s book, but added to a site like mine they could form an invaluable record particularly if my site was extended eventually to include links to ‘cures’. The following is for computer database people only [it is a data model]
Where did Edgar’s talent come from? All of it appears to be through inherited genes. Although he had periods of grief, trauma, illness and so on throughout his life which seemed to act almost as goads to keep him going, his abilities were all inherited. His mother was gifted, his grandfather was especially gifted and was a talented dowser and his grandma was gifted. All of them were extremely supportive of him, which must have helped him greatly in developing his skills. All could ‘see’. From an early age he had friends invisible to others who would play with him. Even before he could read, he would tell stories about places and events of which he could have had no information from other people. Some of these stories proved to be extremely accurate depictions of what really did exist or had happened. Interestingly enough, it was found later in life that he could see people’s auras, but he never used this ability to diagnose and didn’t realise he was not seeing what everyone else was seeing only by chance.
There is the hint in books about him that his brain configuration was abnormal. I hesitate to say this was damage, but it was not normal. He found written language very very difficult. There is an account in Joseph Millard’s book of the agonisingly painful ordeal he had to go through as his father beat and punished him to try to force him to spell ‘cabin’. He was made to stay after school and write ‘cabin’ on the board 500 times and still he could not remember how to spell it. Overall academically he was classified as something of a dunce.
His biggest problem throughout his life was his relationships with those who could not ‘see’. He ended up [as many like him do] rather isolated and lonely. When a child he ended up having a lot of fights. He had a violent explosive temper that plagued him most of his life that could be triggered by anyone who appeared to doubt or ridicule him. Sensitives are like that – they are sensitive!
How did his gift work? In order to understand Edgar Cayce we need to use the diagram of the spiritual world.
In the diagram the blue circles are our composers all linked together in a sort of chain. Communication between all composers is instantaneous. The green rectangles are bodies – thus some of the composers have a body and some don’t – embodied or disembodied. Some composers [Higher spirit] are awaiting reincarnation, some may be on different levels within the levels and layers and have never been bodies as we know it.
Connected to every composer, bodied or not, are their perceptions shown in the pink box as lines with all the inter connections that have been made between composers as activity progressed. This is the loom.
Above the red band we have the Intelligences. I have a number of observations that show that Perceptions are summarised both in order that the creation can be monitored and so that new creations [the product of co-creation] can be kept and added to the Intelligences’ functional and data store.
Some people have called this the Akashic records, but this is not at all helpful in terms of naming. It is a level and layer in the aether level that is full of systems consisting of both functions and data, thus it is the Database and Functions and these systems are sometimes symbolically found as a palace or a city in dreams and visions or out of body experiences. Edgar Cayce had access to other composers and he also had access to this level of systems –the Database of information which contained cures and invented procedures.
He had a Spirit helper and it appears to have been a helper extremely unfamiliar with how to use language. In order to help Edgar, language had to be used, there was no option, and of course it had to be English, but it is clear that whoever or whatever was helping him had extreme difficulty converting the information they had symbolically into language he and his helpers could understand. It was almost as if they were using Google translate with no ability to understand whether what they had said made sense.
Edgar Cayce – Joseph Millard
The curious language of the readings would drive an unimaginative stenographer mad. It had bothered a great many people, including Edgar and Gertrude. Some of the language would be clear and simple; some of it was what one critic called "rambling, redundant, ambiguous, and evasive verbal meanderings." Sometimes the language was biblical. There was a constant, stilted use of "same" and "self" that harked back to archaic English. Sentences would begin, turn back on themselves, and bog down in a maze of syntax that would baffle anyone.
To later researchers, who made detailed studies, the reason seemed to be that the source of Edgar's knowledge was struggling to express itself in a language that was crude and limited.
It was like Einstein struggling to explain relativity to a kindergarten class.
There is also a sort of Dr Spock [Star Trek] like quality about this helper, that is at times hilarious. Tact and diplomacy are all learned behaviour peculiar to being human and this helper appeared not to understand these functions at all.
Edgar Cayce – Joseph Millard
"You'd have died laughing," he was chortling, slapping his thigh. "It was the funniest thing that ever happened up here. It was old Henry Simms from out east of town. His young wife was ailing, so he came in for a reading on her. Well, sir, when I told you to find the body of Mrs. Henry Simms, you came right back with 'which one? We have several here.' The old man turned red as a beet. He finally managed to mumble that he'd been married before he moved here, and this was his fourth wife. The reading came through then without a hitch."
We have confirmation that the approach I have tried to explain above was being used, as, at Gertrude’s suggestion, Edgar spent one key session asking his Spirit helper [or helpers] how all this worked. At the session, they invited only two close friends, one of whom was a stenographer who could record everything said. And this is what was said, it is a good example of the odd language used
“ We have the body here - we have had it before. In this state the conscious mind is under the subjugation of the subconscious or soul mind. The information obtained and given by this body is obtained through the power of mind over mind, or power of mind over physical matter, or obtained by the suggestion as given to the active part of the subconscious mind. It obtains its information from that which it has gathered, either from other subconscious minds - put in touch with the power of the suggestion of the mind controlling the speaking faculties of this body, or from minds that have passed into the Beyond, but which leave their impressions and are brought in touch by the power of the suggestion. What is known to one subconscious mind or soul is known to another, whether conscious of the fact or not”
The idea of a Higher spirit would have been incomprehensible to Cayce, who believed fervently only in ‘God’ without his having any clear idea what God was. Cayce can here be characterised as having complete faith in the existence of ‘God’ and angels and anything else mentioned in the Bible, but he never questioned anything he was told. It was very very late in his healing career before he even attempted to ask these sorts of questions and most of the answers he got – that there is reincarnation for example – he couldn’t get his head round. Cayce was essentially a trusting, good natured, kindly channel. One total stranger who came to ask for a reading said ‘I wasn’t anybody he’d ever heard of, but I knew instantly he cared’.
Edgar Cayce – Joseph Millard
Through the years, Edgar had come to accept his uncanny medical knowledge as part of his strange life. …No mounting score of triumphs could change Edgar Cayce or shake his simple humility. He was the same warm, friendly, human man, with his share of human frailties. He knew that he smoked a little too much and stubbornly refused to cut down. He loved rich foods and overate and paid the human penalty. He saw no harm in the use of alcohol, though he hated the abuse of it. On a rare occasion, he sipped a drink as a gesture of hospitality, but he had no taste for it. ...Like any individual, he could be stubborn, moody, wildly impulsive. The urges that had kept him broke in St. Louis in his youth never weakened. He would go out to buy one rosebush, recklessly order fifty, and wonder afterward what made him do it. Children loved him and followed him on the street.
One of his other gifts was the ability to prophecy, a talent I have not covered in much depth on the site, but there is a terrible irony about his talent. Through a symbolic dream, he prophesied his own death – not when he would die, but how he would die- through pulmonary oedema - water on the lungs - after having suffered an earlier stroke. He died at his home in Virginia Beach, supported by family and friends on January 3rd 1945. Three months later his loving and faithful wife Gertrude slipped quietly away to join him.
Observations
For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.
- Cayce, Edgar - Meets his Higher spirit
- Cayce, Edgar - Nearly dies
- Cayce, Edgar - Out of body to a patient
- Cayce, Edgar - Treats Italian royalty
- Cayce, Edgar - A request for clary water
- Cayce, Edgar - Aimee Dietrich
- Cayce, Edgar - An angel with a message
- Cayce, Edgar - And the rain storm
- Cayce, Edgar - Bowel stoppage and a baby
- Cayce, Edgar - Choking from a button in her windpipe
- Cayce, Edgar - Cures Al Layne
- Cayce, Edgar - Cures infantile paralysis
- Cayce, Edgar - Dancing brooms and table lifting
- Cayce, Edgar - Dying woman seeks Edgar's help
- Cayce, Edgar - Has a run in with doctors
- Cayce, Edgar - He was with me at the river
- Cayce, Edgar - Levitates whilst healing
- Cayce, Edgar - Remote views in New York
- Cayce, Edgar - Seeing Grampa
- Cayce, Edgar - Sees auras