That last sentence is the way I understand Edgar Cayce’s dream for the future of each of us and our world. His view of the individual soul and of the God that created it was huge! He saw the future bright with the magical love and wisdom of the Creative Forces. When we souls can get in step with the lovely design laid out for us and make the right choices, one step at a time, we can be made whole and help transform the world into something like the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s “peaceable kingdom.” That is the promise within Edgar Cayce’s life story.
CHAPTER 1
I Don’t Do Anything You Can’t Do
There was literally a loaded gun on my hip when I began a journey into the scarcely believable life of Edgar Cayce. It was wartime in the mild June of 1943, and I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, holding a night job as a civilian guard under military command. Between my rounds through the laboratories in a large wooden building (given a deceptive exterior to mislead saboteurs or spies), I perched on a stool under a naked light bulb and read chapters from a biography published the year before, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce.1 Now and again I glanced around and fingered my gun when there were creaking sounds in the woodwork or the dogs barked hoarsely in the animal lab down the hall. There was real danger from enemy agents, according to the supervising Army captain. Recent break-ins had threatened research secrets and cost the life of one guard. Often I wondered, while trudging hourly routes through the night, whether I would hesitate for a critical second before firing to kill a man who sprang from behind a table of chemical retorts or around the great humming transformers.
Such images of violence, making all too real the daily reports of GIs meeting sudden death on European and Pacific battle fronts, were utterly incongruous with the images in the book before me. There the author, Thomas Sugrue, a respected editor and critic for the Saturday Review of Literature, described how an elderly ex-photographer in the oceanfront resort of Virginia Beach, Virginia, regularly entered a quietly creative state so potent that it mocked all the university technology surrounding me. The gun on my hip and the book on my knees represented radically different approaches to power. One stood for the skilled violence we guarded in an advanced and top-secret weapons research project. The other reported valuable knowledge about a staggering array of targets, reached peacefully and swiftly in a calm trance state.
Had I known the full nature of the research in my care, the contrast with Cayce would have been even more stark. The intricate equipment was part of the Manhattan District or Manhattan Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Of course, we guards tried discreetly to learn what was happening in our cluster of buildings across the rolling, grassy Midway from the main campus. We could not puzzle it out, because some rooms with flasks and bubbling tubes were clearly for chemical research, while others were crowded with electrical apparatus that suggested work in physics. And why did we have live animals, such as dogs, monkeys, and rats? What was the connection between living flesh and the technology we suspected was connected to the university’s atomic accelerator across the campus? When I tried to question my friend and neighbor from boyhood, the distinguished physicist Arthur Compton, I got only pleasant generalities.
The well-hidden truth of the Project was known in 1943 only to a score or so of scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer (working at the level of Compton and his Chicago colleagues under Enrico Fermi), selected military chiefs, and President Roosevelt plus a few advisors. Just a few blocks from where I was reading through the night about Cayce, a team of researchers in quarters created under the west stadium grandstands of Stagg Field had achieved the first controlled atomic reaction, which they were now turning into an atom bomb. At the end of the same football field, where I had so often flung my javelin towards the sky and watched its distant puncture of the soft earth, they had created a new weapon that would make even warships and tanks seem as archaic as javelins. Just months ago, in the cold and blowy Chicago December, they had turned loose a power which in two years would create an agony of screaming in Japan—enough to drown out all the throaty roars of Saturday football fans that I had heard throughout my youth near Stagg Field. In the very playground of the University, these gifted scientists had fashioned an instrument to suddenly kill some ninety thousand human beings at Hiroshima, with an equal number maimed. Nobody would ever know the exact casualties there and at Nagasaki, because so many civilians would be vaporized and incinerated in the August days already destined at our gracious campus.
A Kind of University All by Himself
Power was in the air, in the whirring machines and humming electrical circuits of the laboratory in my keeping. It was our American genius, our gift for know-how which we hoped would win the war. We raised the banner of technique over university campuses and assembly lines alike. This was the Century of Progress celebrated at the World’s Fair in Chicago a few short years ago, where I had viewed with awe the sparkling technical displays in the Hall of Science, with my father in charge of the University of Chicago exhibits and programs.
But power of a different sort was the theme of the strange Cayce story. If the facts reported of him were even partly accurate, he had an extraordinary capacity that made him a kind of university all by himself, without technology at all.
Twice a day for decades, he had entered a trance state for up to an hour or more. In that unconscious condition (so unlikely that it had never appeared in any of my courses in psychology, religion, or the history of cultures) he seemed able to examine and describe whatever was posed to him by someone in genuine need. Most often the unknown goal had been a sick body and the treatments to heal it. But under certain conditions the target could also apparently be a virus, an ancient kingship, a marital conflict, the movement of the stars, the ontological foundations of human existence, the political affairs of nations, or a teenager’s heartbreak. His descriptions of these many objectives came in discourses of uneven rhetoric, for he was not educated beyond the eighth grade. He appeared to observers to struggle as he described what he saw as fluid “forces” (to use his word) or fields and flows in intricate dynamics, as structures his listeners could recognize and use. But he was reported to demonstrate stunning accuracy, typically using medical and technical terms not known to him. How could one even begin to think about such skill?
The university employed precision hardware to unlock structures of reality, under the direction of trained minds that formed themselves to secrets of nature and history, supplying power on demand, from engineering to medicine to politics. But Cayce had no tools. He had methods and routines, such as not entering his trance too soon after eating, and praying before he went unconscious. But what were these devices, compared with the university’s electron cloud chambers and huge libraries? Cayce’s power came without equipment, in quiet. He appeared to empty himself, to hollow out his consciousness as a receptacle, a conduit. Yet in his seemingly artless art he produced flashes of useful knowledge that could leave behind not only unspeakably potent weaponry but perhaps an entire civilization built on tools and technique.
It was not easy to keep an open mind about the story that occupied my June nights. Cayce was triply an affront to learning. First, the untutored Southerner’s knowledge was encyclopedic. He could describe and analyze in dozens of fields what only advanced specialties should tell him. Second, he accomplished his reports by means that no professor would dare to claim. He did his analyses at a distance from his absent medical subjects and removed by continents or centuries from many other targets. Third, he had no mentors (of the sort that graduate students expect) to chronicle for his developing ideas or achievements. Either the reports about him were fraudulent or deluded, or—if his skills were stable and could be taught to others—he represented a breakthrough of staggering scope.
His own