“Let us choose each day some truth, live it first for self, then for others, that they may see our good works as we put into practical operation just what we say we believe and teach. It will work.” (A Search for God, Book I.)
… for into thy hands has been committed the keeping of those records—yes, those conditions that are as records—of the foundation of that upon which the better understanding of man’s relation to the all-creative energy within self may be made manifest in the earth’s plane at this period. Keep that committed unto thy keeping against that day when there will be said, “Well done,” according to that as enacted in this present experience. With the coming of the dawn many will call thee blessed.
254-43
Why do you not think of Him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?
(Rainer Marie Rilke)
Part One
Experiments in a Search for God
 | Preface |
It is difficult to say what is the most significant portion of the psychic material given by Edgar Cayce. The more than 9,000 physical readings have opened a new perspective to health and the relationship between body, mind and soul. Readings on prayer and meditation have introduced to the Judeo-Christian world teachings well known in the Orient. More than 2,500 life readings have presented the challenging concepts of reincarnation and the continuity of life. However, for many people the readings that make up the Search for God material have had the most profound and lasting effects upon their spiritual search. These readings—only 130 in number and given over an eleven-year period to a dedicated group—provide a detailed and systematic statement of the process of spiritual awakening. The material is presented as a growth sequence: a guidebook to the unfoldment in materiality of our deeper, truer selves.
I can say that these readings have had a tremendous impact upon my life. By working over the past eight years with several groups which were applying this material, I have discovered that the Edgar Cayce readings are not just to be studied and analyzed, but lived and experienced. For me the group experience has been invaluable. We so easily go astray when we walk the path alone. The demands of spiritual transformation are sometimes not easy, and a group can be a stabilizing and sustaining influence.
I have chosen three passages which for me summarize the depth of meaning in the Search for God readings and in their application through groups. Those three quotes appear on the previous page. The first is taken from A Search for God, Book I (one of the two study books written by the group that received these 130 readings). It suggests that each day we selectively decide upon a spiritual principle and apply it in our lives. It is this approach that I have attempted to incorporate into the book.
The second passage is a promise. It says that the teachings found in the Edgar Cayce readings can form the foundation of a renewed understanding of God’s relationship to man. In my opinion, this applies especially to the Search for God material. The thousands of people working with these readings can literally lift the consciousness of humanity.
And finally, I have chosen a quote from the writings of the poet Rainer Marie Rilke. His beautiful metaphor captures the way in which all humanity is a part of a greater whole. In applying the Search for God material we wake up to the fact that we are all leaves on a tree—a tree that has a great purpose. This can be the most exciting discovery of our lives.
In writing this book I have made a careful study of the original Search for God readings as well as A Search for God. Book I. The universality of this approach to growth is illustrated by passages from parallel works. The experiments are drawn from many sources: those I have done with groups in the past, those suggested by other groups, and experiments I have developed especially for this book. I would like to acknowledge three people in my life who have had a significant influence in my writing of this book. Hugh Lynn Cayce and Herbert Puryear have been special friends and teachers over the years and I am sure many readers will feel their presence in these pages. And to Carl Bohannon I extend a thank-you for my first experience with a Search for God Study Group. His patience was remarkable in that first year-and-a-half when I was so inquisitive and skeptical.
Mark A. Thurston
| Introduction |
In these times of renewed enthusiasm for higher states of consciousness and enlightenment, it is vitally important that we remember one principle from the readings: In the application comes the awareness. We cannot just be students of the inner life. It is only as we live the concepts which we study and experience the depth of their meaning that we fulfill the requirements of being a seeker of spiritual truth. The ideal established in the readings for the A.R.E. is to make manifest the love of God and man (254-42). It is this capacity to express an aspect of God’s law that allows us not only to be a blessing to others but also to become one with that law. Such a oneness may be blocked by the intellectual mind that analyzes and discusses, keeping the seeker separate from that which he seeks.
As travelers on the spiritual path we are searching for freedom: freedom from limitation, pain and fragmentation; freedom to create and love. The promise in the readings and other spiritual teachings is that freedom comes as we experience and make applicable the concepts we are studying.
“The public in general is possessed of the fundamental error that there are certain answers, ‘solutions,’ or attitudes of mind which need only be uttered in order to spread the necessary light. But the best of truths is of no use—as history has shown a thousand times—unless it has become the individual’s most personal inner experience. Every equivocal, so-called ‘clear’ answer mostly remains in the head and only finds its way down to the heart in the very rarest cases. Our need is not to ‘know’ the truth, but to experience it. The great problem is not to have an intellectual view of things, but to find the way to the inner, perhaps inexpressible, irrational experience. Nothing is more fruitless than to speak of how things must and should be, and nothing is more important than to find the way which leads to these far-off goals.”
(Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections. pp. 265-66)
Hence, in the fruits of that—as is given oft, as the fruits of the spirit—does man become aware of the infinite penetrating,