Electrosleep devices for insomniacs have been used and marketed for a long time now in the Soviet Union, Japan, India, and Western Europe. Thus there is possibly something to back up the statement of many users of the Cayce impedance device that “it puts us to sleep.”—H.J.R.
Newsweek magazine (November 8, 1971) reported that researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have successfully used direct electrical current to accelerate the rate of healing of a patient with bone fracture.
The Wall Street Journal of March 27, 1972, carried a front-page report in depth on a “host of current research projects,” many of them conducted with human patients involving the application of electrical signals to the nervous system in attempts to kill pain, to put insomniacs to sleep, and to relieve asthma, ulcers, and high blood pressure. According to this report, electromedicine may soon emerge as a major new approach to many diseases.
At Temple University in Philadelphia, a neurosurgeon has implanted a dorsal “column stimulator,” an “electric pain killer,” in the back of a salesman incapacitated by a slipped spinal disk. Dr. C. Norman Shealy of the Pain Rehabilitation Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Dr. William Sweet of the Massachusetts General Hospital, who developed the device, now have research tests going on in fifteen medical centers, and they report that 85 percent of all properly selected patients are being helped “to dial their pain away.” (Of course, this involves major surgery.)
Electrosleep devices for insomniacs have been used and marketed for a long time now in the Soviet Union, Japan, India, and Western Europe. Thus there is possibly something to back up the statement of many users of the Cayce impedance device that “it puts us to sleep.”
Hugh Lynn Cayce told this amusing story about the impedance device and sleep. At the time this happened, it was being made by Marsden Godfrey, who was a close friend of the Cayces in Norfolk, Virginia. “One day Dad got a letter from a woman who had received one of the appliances and said, ‘Mr. Cayce, I was sleeping part of the night before I got this appliance that you recommended and now I can’t sleep at all. I have gotten so nervous. What should I do?’
“Well, Dad didn’t know what to do either, so he suggested she send the appliance back to us, and when it arrived at Marsden’s shop they decided the thing to do was to get a reading. They did that and the suggestion came that Godfrey use a magnet to remove the anger that he had built into it.
“As it turned out, Godfrey had had a violent argument with his wife at the time he was building the appliance and the vibration of their anger was picked up by the appliance. They put the magnet over the appliance and then sent it back to the woman. She subsequently reported that it worked beautifully.
“This is an incredible story, but there is a complete record of it. Of course, we could never explain to the woman what was wrong with her appliance because the explanation was harder to accept than the original malfunction.”
Dr. William McGarey writes in a Medical Research Bulletin7 on the work of Drs. Wheeler and Wolcott at the University of Missouri, reported in Neuroelectric Research:
These men have brought about remarkable regeneration of tissue in healing old chronic ulcerations of many years’ standing. In their discussion of their ideas and the direction their work is taking them, they make several very interesting observations. They mention, for instance, that
Contrary to dogma, constant electric current does not confine its physiological effects solely to the make-and-break points, but, rather is capable of causing subtle, undefined changes during a prolonged period of application.
Cayce suggested weak, electrical currents to be applied to the body in recurrent, hourly periods, and the amperage was not unlike that suggested in the University of Missouri work reported on above. His interpretation of the “subtle, undefined changes” Wheeler mentions are discussed in different terms in the following reading given for a sixty-seven-year-old woman suffering from senility and debilitation. She was told to use a wet-cell battery:
And as the electrical vibrations are given, know that Life itself—to be sure—is the Creative Force or God, yet its manifestations in man are electrical—or vibratory.
Know then that the force in nature that is called electrical or electricity is that same force ye worship as Creative or God in action!
Seeing this, feeling this, knowing this, ye will find that not only does the body become revivified, but by the creating in every atom of its being the knowledge of the activity of this Creative Force or Principle as related to spirit, mind, body—all three are renewed. For these are as the trinity in the body, these are as the trinity in the principles of the very life force itself, as the Father, the Son, the Spirit—the Body, the Mind, the Spirit—these are one. One Spirit, One God, One Activity. Then see Him, know Him, in those influences. (1299-1)
Then, in discussing further their ideas, Wheeler and Wolcott point out that the role of biomagnetic effects in work of this kind cannot be truly separated from bioelectrical phenomena. They state further that:
It is known, for example, that the majority of biologic processes are based on chemical reactions. The chemical properties involved in these reactions result from the arrangement and motion of electrons and atomic nuclei, which are, in turn, determined by electric and magnetic field interactions of elementary particles. As a result, the principles of chemistry are the consequence of the sciences of electrodynamics and quantum physics. In living organisms these effects are seemingly amplified by the semiconductor properties ascribed to biologic structures. It is these effects that now strongly influence our ongoing clinical and basic research.
We believe that one of man’s most human qualities is his preoccupation with the mysteries of conception, growth, disease, aging, and death. Modern technology reveals that some older intuitive hypotheses were remarkably accurate, especially in . . . areas concerned with electricity and other physical phenomena. Therefore, part of our research is now directed toward the integration of selected products of past and present science, and toward the further development of a theoretical guide for the deeper understanding of living plants and animals.
The power of relaxation to heal has been dramatically emphasized in experiments conducted by Dr. Elmer Green, former head of the Psychophysiology Laboratory in the Research Department of the Menninger Foundation. He has used “biofeedback training” or “autogenic feedback” in training subjects to produce alpha brain waves in a meditative state of quiet relaxation. When in that state, his subjects have been able to cure migraine headaches, control their blood pressure, raise or lower the temperature of a finger, and control the involuntary bodily processes with relaxation.
Cayce frequently recommended meditation for its therapeutic as well as spiritual value. In the following case he advised a twenty-eight-year-old traveling salesman, whose disordered lifestyle resulted in digestive disorders, back trouble, head noises, and other symptoms, in the following manner:
(Q) How can I overcome the nerve strain I’m under at times?
(A) By closing the eyes and meditating from within, so that there arises—through that of the nerve system—that necessary element that makes along the pineal (don’t forget that this runs from the toes to the crown of the head!) that will quiet the whole nerve forces, making for that—as has been given—as the true bread, the true strength of life itself. Quiet, meditation, for a half to a minute, will bring strength—will the body see physically this flowing out to quiet self, whether walking, standing still, or resting. Well, too, that oft when alone, meditate in the silence—as the body has done. (311-4)
An excellent book on Cayce’s approach to meditation is Meditation: A Step Beyond with Edgar Cayce by M. E. Penny Baker. There are other excellent works on this subject by Cayce himself and by Elsie Sechrist. Of course, the Search for God books by Edgar Cayce published by the A.R.E. Press are musts for any person who wants to pursue the Cayce path to spiritual enlightenment through both prayer and meditation.