Were it not for the attention given to ultimate values, it would have been easy to view these life readings as colorful imagination. But Cayce used them to do serious business. Often he employed them to enunciate principles, such as “We only keep what we give away.” At other times his counsel was boldly practical. A mother was encouraged to let her son go, because it was his own deep choice. A wife was told that she might well divorce her husband after her children agreed to stay with her but she should not judge him for his actions. A secretary to a bank president trying to make life decisions was reminded that Thursdays were usually her bad days and to avoid them for such reflection. Then a businesswoman in Ohio was abruptly refused any past-life information at all and sternly told to apply herself to charity. When she wrote to object that her reading was defective, Cayce promptly returned her membership fee. A young engineer was guided to seek a job in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then given an essay on how General Electric at that time was a corporation “almost with a soul” (startling to one with my labor-organizing attitudes to large businesses). An editor interested in the psychic field was encouraged to proceed with his magazine on the mysteries of the mind but to stay away from Spiritualism. And a film director, considering how he might actively help the Association sponsoring Cayce’s work, was told first to convince himself on its purposes and ideals; if these did not answer to him, he should have nothing to do with it. Cayce’s counsel was evidently not interested in promoting itself.
To make sense of all this material, one would have to handle a huge array of unconscious variables. As it turned out, it would be twenty years before I found professional tools to begin exploring reincarnation in the setting of doing psychotherapy, using a Jungian perspective and such procedures as dream study, guided imagery to music, and projective tests, along with inventories of interests, attractions, and repulsions. But in the midst of war’s extremes, the whole enterprise seemed daunting indeed.
First of All an Emergency Clinic
Besides, every hour given to such psychological archaeology was an hour taken from someone waiting as though in an invisible line outside Cayce’s study, hurting with leukemia or polio, or sweating with fever, or coughing with tuberculosis. Cayce’s work was decisively medical. All that lacked to make his home and office a clinical treatment center were the smell of antiseptics and some white jackets. Everything important was molded around the relief of pain: the mail, the phone calls, the small but growing research, the day’s most earnest conversation, an unpublicized visit of a physician or nurse. Cayce’s house might have been an emergency station set up near a catastrophe, taking in each one who came with a wound or hardship.
This was not forced on him by circumstance but came from his own choice and purpose. He was sure his gift was rooted in direct service of those in need. Were he to get too far away from that, it might soon distort or wither. To him the trances were not just his private prowess, but part of a circuit much larger than he which reached from an invisible and transcendent source of goodness directly to someone’s scabs or cramps, tumors or aches, birthing or dying. If the lightning of helpfulness in our midst also lit up the far sky now and then, so that lifetimes and mysteries of the soul could be glimpsed, that was a bonus. But for him the central business was medical service. Listening to him, one wondered whether the urgent ministering to those in pain helped to keep him sane in a wholly unlikely vocation that had brought him extremes of both scorn and adulation.
Might his priorities be reversed after his death by those drawn to study the transcripts of his readings? He could be turned into a revealer of arcane truths, with his work of lifting physical suffering from others shoved into the background. There was plenty in the history of sects and movements, including the transformation of the work of the active young healer and teacher from Nazareth, to indicate how quickly and decisively such change could occur. As had happened in churches, future students of Cayce might find it too frustrating, taxing, and expensive to focus on failed organs, wrenching injuries, damaging childbirth, chronic fevers, convulsions, and schizophrenia. Where Cayce might want a hospital for the blind or deaf, others might prefer to remove the blindness or deafness of their fellows to metaphysical mysteries of rebirth. Power and wisdom were forever pushing themselves beyond their roots of caring, like mindless social climbers.
Watching Cayce at work was like staring into a flame, making the mind go momentarily numb. For despite the perplexing past-life claims, all too much of what he produced was reality that we and others could verify. The unending accurate medical data, the fitting details of individual history, personhood, talents, relationships, and choices were staggering. Had Cayce not asked me to make the trance sessions part of my job, I might well have absorbed myself in the backed-up correspondence, or editing the small monthly Bulletin of the Association, or adding to the booklets on specific diseases as his readings saw them. (We had collections on appendicitis, arthritis, the common cold, epilepsy, intestinal fever, scleroderma, streptococcus infection, and multiple sclerosis.) Then I could have attended the trance periods from time to time and settled for being amazed and stimulated. But Cayce beckoned me to his study at the appointed hours each day, and I put down my projects, preparing to be as calm and cheerful as I could before what was necessarily as shattering to my University of Chicago worldview, and therefore to my personal sense of identity, as it was adventurous.
Asking Questions of the Unseen
Cayce assigned me a task in the middle of the action, insuring that I knew more about each case as it came up for a reading than anyone else in the office. The job was to prepare the questions to be asked Cayce by his wife, at the end of each reading when the steady voice would indicate, “Ready for questions.” By comparing the discourses with what was in letters already sent in by each person, often over a period of many months, and not infrequently supplemented by notes on phone calls, it would be possible to study with some care the strengths and weaknesses of his counsel. Making maps and models of the operation would also be natural, looking for what made it go better. For one reading had tersely warned, the norm for his aid was to be “informative, constructive, enlightening, yet practical.”
Before long it became clear which kinds of questions would get helpful replies. The most useful to the inquirer elicited fresh information not supplied in the main body of the reading. Issues could be discarded which experience showed would be covered in any case, and the remaining queries carefully arranged, putting the most pressing first, for none of us could predict how many questions the unconscious man would answer before moving swiftly on to the next reading or terminating the session.
Usually there were appropriate questions about puzzling side issues in health, business affairs, or relationships. “Why have I had digestive upsets since I injured my back?” “Why do I have such difficulty with mathematics, when I am a good student?” “How can I guide my daughter, who seems to me so stubborn?” Such concerns, often urgent to the seeker, were likely to get patient replies of a few sentences, if the topic had not already been covered in the reading (as central concerns typically were). Less likely to be answered were questions on the margin of real need. Once people got Cayce on the line, so to speak, quite a few were tempted to get all the information and guidance they could. They inquired about warts, about dreams, about real estate holdings, about psychic experiences, or about marriage prospects. Cayce was not likely to mix radically different kinds of counsel, such as answering vocational questions in a medical reading. “We haven’t that” might be his abrupt reply.