Whatever the disability, the individual got a careful review of the health of his or her total body, organ system by organ system, focusing on the primary medical problem and followed by a thorough treatment regimen for rebuilding the total person—sweeping in its detail, balance, complexity, and tailoring to the individual. Alongside specific medications were massages, surgery, diets, packs and compresses, as well as electrical applications, exercises, osteopathy, and not infrequently prescribed work on attitudes and emotions, together with other interventions that ranged from ocean travel to prayer. Since most of Cayce’s subjects were already under medical care, he took pains to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and other treatments in use, explaining why modifications or substitutions might be required. Once in a while he specified an utterly unconventional treatment in these first readings I heard, as when he told a woman with cancer that it could only be retarded, but spelled out a procedure with a magnet “strong enough to raise a railroad spike.” For a small number of those with chronic afflictions, he offered, along with treatment measures, the explanation that the causes of their suffering were partly karmic from their own previous lifetimes—meaning that ultimately a soul lesson of growth was to be sought in illness along with relief from symptoms (a perspective that he did not hesitate to use about disabilities not connected to past lives, as well).
Time Travel for High Purpose
Amid the stream of physical suffering, the vocational and psychological counsel, or life readings, offered some breathing space. These had accounted for as many as one in five formal requests for Cayce’s aid since the publication of his biography. To be sure, those whom he counseled in this mode were not without problems. Loneliness and confusion were often represented in the letters asking for help, alongside marital conflicts, sexual indiscretions, mental illnesses, black moods, and business failures. Cayce himself provided the gravity in some instances, as when he told the parents of a ten-month-old baby to take special care lest the child drown again, as it had in a prior life. Yet the same reading assured them that the lad had talents for a career in chemical or electrical engineering. His brother, aged three, was the only individual I heard given a famous name from history, in the first months of my listening to such readings. Cayce said he had been Gladstone of England and could one day serve well as U.S. secretary of state, adding details of his past-life service as an imperial advisor in Rome, a governor in Persia, and an emissary to ancient Egypt from Indochina.
It was a relief to hear this latter reading tell the parents to bring the child back for further counsel at age sixteen. Unless Cayce had in his entranced view successors we did not know about, he should still be giving readings when he was nearing eighty. The same implication was in a reading for a child of three in New York City, who surprisingly received no incarnations at all in his life reading. His parents were told to bring the lad back for further counsel in ten years, after making sure they had not let the youngster dictate the terms for his own life. Perhaps Cayce was destined to be around longer than the pressures on him in his mid-sixties might suggest.
The reincarnation material, spanning centuries and touching every aspect of the personalities whom Cayce counseled, was baffling to evaluate, though it often seemed to fit well the person whose correspondence could be compared with the reading. If in trance Cayce were using the past-life material simply as a projective framework to analyze and motivate people, he was doing it rather skillfully. But the scenes were demanding to visualize. Just one morning session presented such contrasting extremes as the sands of a Bedouin caravan, the forests of an early American trapper, the bloody combat of the Crusades, the hushed halls of a Chinese temple, and a weaver’s cottage in Ireland.
Since these readings summarized many an incarnation of the past with the comment “Here the entity gained,” or “The entity lost in this experience,” or noted some combination of gaining and losing in soul growth, it was reasonable to compare vocations and life-stations in which the entranced Cayce saw people making major progress. There were salutes to the wife of a colonial American innkeeper, a trainer of future mothers in an Egyptian temple, an emissary to Africa from Hellenistic Greece, a nurse in an ancient Persian hospital, a helper to Thomas Paine, a companion to an Inca leader, an early monk, a decorator of Indochinese temples, and the daughter of Cyrus “in love with the cupbearer to the King, Nehemiah.” Evidently there was no easy division of secular and sacred callings, high and low station, male or female, educated or ignorant, which marked the growth of souls that Cayce reported. There was no caste hierarchy from peasants up to Brahmins, such as India had long conceived. Instead, the quality of each life, whatever the circumstance, seemed to grasp his attention.
But interests, once developed, were often described as surfacing in successive lives for a time, though Cayce insisted that souls had free will to develop in many directions, like plants with varied shoots and blooms. A woman now in her fifties, for example, was urged to become a physical education director for teenage girls. Previously, he said, she had lived during colonial times in the same Mohawk Valley of New York where she was born this time. There she had helped to develop “strong-bodied, long-waisted mothers,” while in an earlier Norse incarnation she had focused on a different development of her sex, as she “spread the gospel of woman choosing the companion for herself.”
Not all of Cayce’s counsel in these life readings was solemn. The reading for the Mohawk Valley woman was full of high spirits, reminding her that when younger she had played good tennis and that she should keep it up, even at her age. And a young dictaphone operator whose past lives he traced with care was told that when the present war was over, she could sing herself to glory with her talented voice, developed in other existences. When she asked how much of the confusion in her present life was attributable to a gynecological disturbance, the entranced man responded briskly with obvious mischief and a touch of a smile: “Forty-three and seven-tenths percent!” He was evidently not about to foster fatalism.
More difficult to conceptualize were past-life causes that yielded present afflictions or distressing circumstances. How could the universe be organized to bring these about? A woman now suspicious of her husband, for example, was told that she had been swapped by him for tobacco in an early American fort but that in a yet earlier life she had been unfaithful to him. “We only meet self,” the reading insisted. Could we all dimly remember such betrayals at times? Which part of us would do the remembering? Another woman, in her forties and having difficulty finding a husband, was told that some of the problem was having changed sexes often from life to life, and having difficulty settling on a feminine identity this time. But the counsel added the cryptic encouragement that she had already met the right man and had only to catch him. The recommendations were much more serious when a leader in the publishing world, from a distinguished family, was told that he had helped bring on the collapse of an ancient civilization and once again would have the opportunity to make “for success or naught.” The research task in following up these claims seemed huge.
It was easier to picture the unfolding of talents across supposed lifetimes, for here a model from nature seemed to work. Something tended and used well in the garden of one lifetime might be expected to bloom in another. A Southern businessman nearing retirement was told he had once interpreted for a high priest in Egypt and should now get trained and ordained so that in his new leisure he could plunge into the church work he enjoyed. A woman described as a deaconess in the Early Church who had argued against Paul in favor of marriage was told to make up with a man she now loved and build the home she had talked about. A young stenographer in New York was instructed that in an earlier century she had come to French America of the South and should now learn French. After the war she would have exciting opportunities for a life and career in France, “only don’t be led by men!” as she had been then. For an artist Cayce began his reading with the observation “Once a wonderful Cossack and rode a horse!” Then he went