Yet if he were feeling expansive in trance on a particular day, or if something touched him in the spirit of the seeker (which could be noted in the tone of his voice), he might offer at least a partial answer on any issue important to the person’s welfare. So the challenge was to phrase and rephrase the questions carefully, conveying the best spirit in the letters. And it was necessary to keep my own interests out of the exchange, not slanting questions to elicit explanations I wanted. Several blunt refusals taught me to try harder to be a detached channel of aid.
It was reassuring that Gertrude would be scanning the typed-up questions as she put them to her husband in his strange state. She would skip those which had already been answered in the body of the reading and sometimes make up clarifying questions of her own. Her determination to subordinate her own able intellect was impressive, as she sought to stay out of the way and be the “passive” helper which the readings had indicated should be her role. She set aside her emotions, too, so as not to react to a particularly demanding or officious seeker, represented by letter or occasionally present in person for a reading. A deep dream which she told had depicted her collecting unique shells on the beach, as she loved to do. The reading taken on the dream interpreted it as she suspected: she was being encouraged to see each seeker in appreciative wonder and respect as she did shells. One could readily guess how crucial this woman must have been in Cayce’s life and work, and why the readings had grown fuller and clearer after she took on the work of “conductor,” which had been handed about to many in the years before their move to Virginia Beach in the 1920s.
Nothing in my work on questions offered any warning of what tumbled from the lips of Cayce on a few days when the pressure was heaviest to serve people in rapid order. Usually Gertrude would read the questions aloud to him, one at a time, and he would methodically repeat each before answering it. But on these days Cayce would come to the question period and simply go right down the typed list, answering each query in order without waiting for his wife to pose it. Then he would instruct her to move on to the next reading, while we would stare at each other in astonishment. There was no way he could see the sheet of queries. His eyes were covered, and the little stack of correspondence in his wife’s hands was clearly out of his line of vision in any case. Part of his consciousness seemed to be present with a person in Denver, or Bangor, or Miami, or Seattle, judging by his prompt and detailed reports. But part of his mind was still in the room with us, running over unseen papers in his wife’s hand.
A second task assigned to me was to write out for the entranced man precisely where he would find each individual. For medical aid this meant giving him the exact street address and sometimes an apartment or office at that location. In the past he had shown that he would, if directed to the wrong place, patiently describe it in full and accurate detail—right down to paint on the walls and stuffing in a mattress—while searching for the person. But when properly guided, he would repeat after his wife the complete address and then seem to move as though in narrowing orbits by citing out loud the state, then the city, then the street and the building, concluding often with an aside on what he observed at the site before firmly stating, “Yes, we have the body.” For a life reading he needed the time and place of birth, which he followed down to the point of a not infrequent aside on how it had been snowing in that locale on the day of the birth, or how the delivery was complicated, or how big the town was and what could be seen of the mountains from there. Then he concluded, “Yes, we have the records.” For those who requested it, he would supply the precise hospital and time of birth, providing one more surprising item we could then verify.
There were colorful complications. An address I supplied for a man in Los Angeles was one we later found to be incorrect. Cayce promptly commented that it was the wrong address, and his wife hesitantly suggested that he try to locate the person anyway. With something like a groan he observed of Los Angeles, “Mighty big place!” After a lengthy pause, he found the man in the huge urban tangle and proceeded to give the reading, full of accurate personal details.
By contrast, the instructions were a bit too specific on highway directions to a farm in Minnesota, exactly as if Cayce were to drive there from a nearby town and numbered highway. The last leg of a dirt road according to the correspondence was “a mile and a half.” Cayce found the state, the town, and the highway, as usual, but then corrected the final distance to a mile and two-fifths. When we asked the family of the seeker about the discrepancy, they responded that Cayce was correct, since they had rounded off the distance, as they said, “so he would not be confused.” From our perspective he was not easily confused. For a man in New Orleans the unconscious Cayce pronounced the street name in what sounded like French. Leaning toward Gertrude from across the room at Cayce’s desk, I hastily repeated twice what I thought was the right pronunciation, which she gave her husband. He stuck with the French version (one we later found was correct for local New Orleans usage) and asked the brisk question, “Who’s giving this reading?” Despite his being in trance, we were evidently dealing with a process more than mechanical hypnosis. Some sort of active agency, some wide-ranging intelligence, seemed both to be following and leading us.
It Kept Us in Mind
Whatever it was, it kept close track of us.
Gladys was seated several feet from him, making her notes on a steno pad at a little table. Cayce could not even see her notebook without lifting himself from the couch, much less read her rapid, cryptic inscriptions upside down. Besides, he knew nothing of shorthand. But he did not hesitate, though the occasions were unusual, to correct her spelling, her punctuation, her paragraphing, or her medical terms. Her eyes would flash with surprise and humor when part of his consciousness monitored her careful work, after more than twenty years of serving him. Perfection did not seem to be his goal so much as care on important details. There were a few words which the unconscious man habitually mispronounced and she corrected for him, such as “angrandizement” for “aggrandizement,” and “obogdulla mengata” for “medulla oblongata,” or “morstle and petar” for the pharmacist’s “mortar and pestle.” He did not bother with these. But he did interrupt her when the use of an i for an e, for example, might change the meaning of a medical term, or a comma change the intent of a sentence.
How he kept us in view also showed when he answered my own unspoken questions. After studying an individual’s correspondence, I often wanted to understand how a back injury had affected the person’s vision, or why certain foods precipitated a young man’s fits, or why a mother and daughter were such strong rivals for the husband/father’s attentions. Sitting all the way across the room from him, with my notebook open and my pen scurrying along, I would be trying to abbreviate technical terms and to underline key factors in a disease, a personality, or the structure of a reading. Now and then my thoughts would shoot up with a spontaneous “Why?” when Cayce linked a cold spot on a child’s abdomen to epileptic seizures, or traced a woman’s mental illness to a fall on the coccyx at the end of her spine, or described a man’s deafness as karmic consequences from having “turned a deaf ear” to the pleas of others in a previous lifetime. There were similar questions when a reading suddenly became eloquent, after proceeding as detached discourse. But I said nothing and did not stop writing, only thinking my questions. Yet on occasion, when the entranced man appeared to be in an expansive mood, he would pause, saying, “As to the question being asked . . .” or noting my query in some other way. He might even instruct his secretary to keep aside what briefly followed, as he had done with unspoken questions of his elder son and others before me. Then he would give a little essay on the theory, or explain a chain of medical reactions, or suggest how we should investigate further the laws he had just implied. My breath stopped a moment each time.
There was little to suggest the limits of his peripheral awareness in trance. For example, how had he known that a small boy cherished by Gladys, T.J., was out on a fishing dock behind Cayce’s house and in danger of falling into the little freshwater Lake Holly? What prompted him to interrupt his speaking with a terse “Better go get the boy from the dock” and then wait in silence until Gladys returned?