She explained that from both physicians and their own readings they had discovered his state was not a simple hypnotic trance. It was a deep change in Edgar’s entire body, as we would see. They were told it was near to a death coma, with most of his body functions greatly slowed or suspended. His daily work was a kind of small dying. They had to be careful to give him a precise suggestion at each session, just before he awakened, that all of his vital processes would be restored to normal, concluding, “Now, perfectly balanced and perfectly rested, you will wake up.” Once, when Gertrude had hurried this suggestion a bit mechanically as she guided him out of the trance, a voice broke out of Cayce with the warning that he was like a window blind stretched to its absolute limits. A little more tension and the damage would be irreparable.
Indeed, there had been a few times that he gave readings while too tired or distraught, when they could not waken him with the usual hypnotic suggestion. Instead his breathing had grown slower and slower, his skin color ashen, and his body processes evidently weaker as they tried frantically to return him to consciousness. Twice the family had ended up on their knees beside his studio couch, where he lay barely breathing. They simply prayed aloud and wept, because they did not know anything else to do until he finally recovered.
Back in the Manhattan Project it had seemed a small matter for others to determine to pay the price to do what Cayce did. Now that was less clear, and I asked Cayce whether he thought successors could be found to share this load with him. He nodded, saying that his readings had promised this repeatedly. But, he added, he thought that many could be shown how to get their own answers to the problems on which they sought his aid. Part of my task (as it had been his son’s) would be to study his trance for leads and to prepare materials for future researchers on this very question. That would begin the next day.
14Pit, or Corner the Market, manufactured by Parker Brothers.
15Bro, Margueritte Harmon, “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” Coronet, September 1943.
16Bro, Harmon H., The Charisma of the Seer: A Study in the Phenomenology of Religious Leadership, unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of Chicago Libraries, 1955.
CHAPTER 3
When I Am Absent from the Body
What took place in the morning and afternoon trance sessions, in the months that followed when I heard and took notes on some six hundred of Cayce’s readings, was a profound shock. Nothing could adequately prepare one for the amount of swift helpfulness that flowed from the unconscious man.
His outward procedures were simple enough. Cayce sat on his plain green studio couch in his cheerful windowed study, across the room from his desk and little portable typewriter. He prayed, then lay down and step by step went unconscious. He spoke in measured address about each person or need to which his wife, sitting beside him, quietly directed his attention. After an hour or more of discourse and questions which his secretary recorded in shorthand, he came swiftly back to consciousness, remembering nothing of what he had said, and got up to resume the activities of his busy correspondence and office. It was all done in broad daylight and simplicity, as naturally as if he were still taking portraits in a photographic studio. But the plainness of the process did not take away the jolt of seeing him accomplish day after day what our culture said was impossible.
House Calls on the Desperate
In some ways, watching him was a huge adventure. His body was in the room with us, but his consciousness appeared to be elsewhere. He seemed to go exactly where he was sent—to a California coastal city, a Maryland suburb, a Mississippi small town, or a factory city in England—wherever he was needed that day. Like a busy doctor making house calls and phoning back to his office, he often offered little asides on what he saw as he located his patients:
“It’s raining here,” or “Rooster in the yard,” or “Right pretty pajamas,” or “You can see the capital from here.” Sometimes he made comments under his breath about the person he was about to counsel: “Quite a blade!” or “Has been a very lovely person,” or “What a muddle-puddle, yet what a beautiful, talented soul!” or “Not much to be done here but help the soul to leave the body.” His asides in a half voice, whose crisp accuracy had been verified hundreds and hundreds of times over the years (but which I promptly set about checking for myself, with letters and phone calls) set the stage for the high drama of the detailed formal counsel to follow. Often the small comments, as neatly accurate as they were impossible to explain by any normal means, assured seekers that he really was in touch with them. To be sure, a few of his observations were unverifiable, though they added to our sense of adventure by their matter-of-fact tone, such as “Not alone but accompanied by many besides those visible to the naked eye.”
People from varied stations and walks of life streamed into his far-ranging vision, one at a time. In just the first few days he addressed a secretary, an Army officer, a housewife, a newspaper editor, an ice manufacturer, a factory supervisor, and a pianist. He also took on a tutor, a salesman, a retired mechanic, a bank president, an infant, a lay preacher, a film director, a diplomat, a student, a filling station attendant, and an asylum inmate. Where else might one find such startling contrasts? Given social stratification, they were unlikely at any one doctor’s office. But many might show up at a marriage license bureau or an undertaker’s parlor—some place where common human destiny calls us all.
At first I just took notes in amazement, stunned by the unusual activity. But within a few days my attitude began to change under the pressure of such severe needs. Three died in days after getting their readings. Cayce recommended brain surgery for a six-year-old girl and surgery of the throat for a woman of fifty. He observed quietly that the body and mind of an elderly woman were just holding onto life, right while he spoke. And he told a man of forty-six with hypertension and near blindness that his condition could only be stayed but not removed. One’s feelings while listening moved from awe to compassion, pushed by the evident pain of sufferers, until fascinated observation gave way to alert desire to be helpful. The intellect alone, I thought, wants its labels, its constructs, its triumphs of understanding and prediction. It wants to cut events down to manageable size in order to group them with similar phenomena and pronounce generalizations. This was all too raw, too quick, too far-reaching to delight the mind. Being in the room was like standing at the scene of an accident or at the bedside of someone dangerously ill. What one asks is how to be useful.
More common than terminal cases in the first dozen or so days were those with chronic conditions which had taxed sufferers to their limits. A man of fifty-eight shook constantly with Parkinson’s disease, a woman of forty was a psychotic alcoholic, and an elderly woman of seventy-three was senile and weak, while a young housewife of thirty-six was desperate with asthma. A man in his thirties was dragging his leg from multiple sclerosis, and a construction worker had a chronic anxiety neurosis (whose origins Cayce surprisingly traced to an injury to his spine from a baseball bat). The seriousness of these conditions made abundantly clear how often people turned to Cayce after all else had failed. A retired woman suffered with uncontrollable sneezing, a severely retarded infant had been in and out of hospitals, a woman of sixty was paranoid and thought Cayce was attacking her telepathically, and a mid-life woman had progressive arthritis (among Cayce’s multiple treatment recommendations for her was cobra venom). While one case was a young student