Edgar Cayce on
Religion and Psychic Experience

by Harmon H. Bro., Ph.D.

Edgar Cayce Sharpens the Puzzle

The frustrating puzzle of such events, the subject matter of parapsychology, would be easier to ignore were it not for the modern figure of Edgar Cayce.

He did not publicize his abilities, nor make extravagant claims for them. But during his lifetime he was several times the subject of extensive newspaper investigation, as well as of a sensitive biography. His work led to the building of a small but accredited hospital and a modest liberal arts university, though both expired with the Depression. He became the center of a pioneering but knowledgeable national research society of hundreds of laymen and a few professional people.

He kept records of everything he did, after the halfway point of his career, so that at his death he had a fireproof vault almost as large as his study, jammed with filing cabinets for fourteen thousand transcripts of his trance discourses, together with many more thousands of relevant letters, medical reports, engineering and geological reports, records of historical digs, and results of psychological studies of his abilities.

He made his records, his person, his work, his finances, his family, and his friends and relatives open to investigators who came from Harvard, Duke and elsewhere-just as the present writer came for eight months of study, midway in a graduate program at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Cayce did not claim to explain his abilities, though he had theories by the end of his life. He did his work, and he tried to increase its helpfulness by following it up with letters, personal friendships, a few study groups, and an informal "congress" of people he had helped, held every June.

Not other-worldly, he based none of his work on communication with the dead, though he was sure from his personal experience that the dead were not dead. Not worldly, he never got beyond making a good living as a photographer who built up several studios and never managed more than a modest and irregular income from the research society that sponsored his work for the last twenty years of his life.

Not a showman, he turned down all offers from theaters, circuses, lecture bureaus, moviemakers, and radio (the writer watched him refuse a lucrative radio spot for a cereal company, not long after rejecting a trip to Hollywood pressed upon him by a star he admired). Not a recluse, he took his ability straight to the countryside of gushers and derricks, when he tried to raise money for his hospital by locating oil in Texas; he also went twice to the White House and traveled to nearly every major city in the U.S. in a long lifetime of trying to discover how best to use his abilities.

Not a saint, he had a temper and moods that sometimes strained, though they did not break, the mutual bonds of his family and many relatives. Not a religious fanatic, he taught Sunday School all of his life because he enjoyed it and was good at getting people to think fresh thoughts about the Bible. Not a simple man, he was an inventor, a prize-winning photographer, a raconteur, a green-thumb gardener, a memorable though rambling lecturer, an organizer of regional church activities, and an articulate letter-writer. And through most of his life he was a walking museum of psychic abilities. When he once needed a label for the door to the room where he gave free trances in early manhood, he called himself a "psychic diagnostician." Yet it was clear to the observer at the end of his life that he did not think of himself primarily as a chapter in the history of psychical research.

He knew psychics great and small and once exchanged trance "readings" with the gifted medium, Eileen Garrett, in which each described from an unconscious state what he saw the other doing. He knew the jargon of psychic circles well, from "apport" to "yellow aura," and had a personal experience to tell about each classic phenomenon from ouija boards to levitation. He met or was studied by investigators of many kinds. And he encouraged his son to put on a New York radio program on telepathy, as well as to submit materials from his records for study projects at two universities.

But in his own mind and memoirs Edgar Cayce was no more a psychic wonder than he was a hypnotic freak-and he probably spent as much time in hypnotic trance as a busy corporation executive spends on the telephone. He thought himself, as his dreams and diaries showed, a man with a job to do-like other men with other talents.

He knew he had a talent and that it was at its best a remarkably good one. But he also knew it had missed a few times when he was under heavy strain and that he was using it on medical matters where a mistake could cost a life, however much he warned that his trances were only "experiments" completely subject to medical interpretation and counsel.

He learned that his talent functioned best when he stuck close to his own religious norms. After reading the Bible or praying or teaching a class that discussed forgiveness, he was more fun to be with, more sure in his judgments about using his outrageous abilities, and more accurate and detailed in his next trance session. He saw his talent as operating lawfully but knew that he understood only a little of the laws and that while learning the laws he had better try to help others more than himself and to stick as close as he could to "the Giver of all good and perfect gifts."

The question sounds redundant. If Edgar Cayce was a "psychic," how does one speak of the "psychic dimensions" of his talent? He was a psychic. But it must remain an open question whether his chief talent, even in his trances, was extrasensory. For anyone who heard a number of his unconscious sessions, Cayce's work was as much poetry as prediction, as much renewing as reporting. He dealt in lives. Facts were instruments, precise and important for him to retrieve.

But his "readings" were not readings of dials, nor even of omens and trends, and the name of "readings" only betrays how barren is American speech on this kind of phenomenon. Cayce's twice-daily trances had the character of encounters. They were speech between man and man which made all parties liable to think hard about life or even God, at any point in the exchange, though the readings be on colonies or colonialism or colleges.

There was a danger in his work that the visitor did not always see. His family and staff well knew that there had been times when it had been impossible to waken Cayce from his trance state, when none of the hypnotic suggestions worked and when the passing hours were marked by his flagging respiration and pulse, until they ended up quite simply on their knees, asking for his life. Little was said of these occasions, and good spirits prevailed at the entry of Cayce's "reading room" twice each day.

But something more than a performance, a feat, was undertaken, as they saw it; the man's life was on the line, each time. This meant that his trances were to them not only "phenomena," however practical and concrete, but events which involved them all at their core. Not surprisingly, they distinguished carefully between what was said by the waking Cayce and what was said by "the information," as they called the unknown source or sources of his trances, which they viewed as inclusive of Cayce, yet independent, intelligent, impersonal, and in keeping with Biblical faith.

Still, Cayce was a psychic. Whatever else he might be remained a worse puzzle than his psychic ability. Perhaps his trances were wisest in the term they habitually used for him" a channel," or "this channel"; it was precisely the term used in the same trances to describe every man, as each fulfilled his vocation.

He appeared to the careful observer to be psychic in three different states of consciousness: while he was awake, while he was asleep and sometimes dreaming, and while he was in a self-imposed trance-also sometimes dreaming.

In each of these states his ability could be observed to operate in three levels that shaded into each other: (a) a "natural" or relaxed level, (b) an "enhanced" or focused level, and (c) an "elevated" or visionary level. Observation gave little cause to expect flawless performance at any of these levels, but the impression grew on the observer that the chances of accuracy and helpfulness were better as Cayce entered the "elevated" level. Paradoxically, it was this level where evidential material was lowest, though breathtaking when it occurred, for Cayce seemed in this level to be primarily concerned with the life-situation of a man or groups as they stood before God and their own souls. 

Cayce Awake

Awake, Edgar Cayce had a flow of psychic experiences sufficient for an exceptional lifetime without trances. He had to work to keep down the waking flow of impressions, he said, so he could enjoy normal relationships without seeing too much. He invented card games, including a noisy one called "Pit, or Corner the Market," which became an American staple for a generation, so that he could play cards, which he thoroughly enjoyed, without reading the minds of opponents who concentrated as they did in bridge.

He told stories to strangers, more often than he engaged in real exchanges with them, partly because story­telling kept him from getting too close to them psychically. He kept his family and secretary and good friends and relatives close at hand, to be ready buffers between him and the problems of others and to allow him to relax without stumbling onto unwanted material.

At the "natural" or spontaneous waking level of psi, or psychic ability, he seemed daily to pick up moods and thoughts of those around him, both in direct impressions and in casual glimpses of auras. Because of this, Cayce was not easy to live with, as the writer can testify; one could never be sure of privacy of thoughts or whether Cayce might react to someone's ugly mood which nobody else had noticed. He seemed to have swift effects on the moods of others, even of those who were quite used to him, as though he were broadcasting depression or love or joy to those about him.

Working with him was like working in a tank of fluid where everyone's movement carried promptly to Cayce and might come bouncing back with doubled force or a special twist. Just policing one's thoughts and emotions became a daily task for those who, like the writer, attended the twice-daily trance sessions, because experience showed that the quality and helpfulness of his productions would vary, though in narrow compass, with Cayce's sense of the buoyancy and peace of mind of those around him.

It was not unlike the man awake to mention someone he thought would telephone soon or to observe that a certain letter or visitor was coming-and be correct. When several times he told his wife and the writer that he would never again see his two sons in the service, he refused to be consoled by encouragement-and his own death bore out his prediction.

Surprisingly, he showed relatively little "natural" ability to affect objects or induce healing, although these abilities of "mind over matter" (which researchers call psychokinesis, or PK) were thought to run in his family.

A few moments of earnest concentration could lift his waking ability to an "enhanced" level. Holding a letter in his hand as he dictated, he would pause to tell a secretary what the sender looked like, of whether there was hope for the case. Dictating to the writer's secretary when his own was overloaded, he stopped to tell the girl she was pregnant, and to mention the sex of the coming child; he startled her, for while she had just been to the doctor and confirmed the pregnancy, she had not yet told her husband.

Cayce had found years ago that he could send for others to come to him by concentrating on them but had also decided not to play around with his ability. Probably some part of his "enhanced" waking ability further showed in deft probing and equally deft listening when friends and relatives came to him for informal waking counsel, approaching him not as a psychic but as a good man whom they admired and loved. Not infrequently they reported, "He helped me make my own decision and it worked out right."

A similarly unspectacular ability might be suspected as he sorted out and responded to serious seekers among those in his Bible classes, where he would illustrate a point in imagery familiar to the questioner or amplify a thought in an observer's own phraseology. In another kind of psychic event where only friendly interest appeared at work, he reported to the writer seeing a dead husband present in the room where he conversed with a widow.

What might be called "elevated" psi came to Cayce more rarely while awake. But there were visions, such as that of a chariot in the sky and a man beside him in full armor, when he looked up from gardening; these sights he associated with the devastations of World War II, and they shook him severely. Like other earnest Christians before him, he cherished a few times when he thought he saw and spoke with his Master, recording these experiences in his diary notes. Less dramatic instances of possible psi at an "elevated" level may have appeared when he prayed with great simplicity and sincerity until there was such deep peace in the room that nobody wished to leave, and one could see tears glistening in eyes across the room. Something like a current or field of goodness and promise seemed built up around him at such times, and not by eloquence.

Cayce Asleep

Even when Cayce went to sleep at night, he had his share of psychic happenings. Early in life, as the writer verified with townspeople from his boyhood home, he had discovered that he could pray over a schoolbook, touch down to an inward "promise" he had once received in a vision, and go to sleep with the book under his pillow. When he awakened, he would find a photographic image of the desired pages in his mind. It was not studying, but it was a help on tests. His classmates resented his unusual ability, enough to recall the feeling for the writer many decades later.

Once in early manhood Cayce had done his sleep-learning so well, with the catalog of a book firm from whom he wanted a job, that at the end of his life he could still recite from it. Perhaps a similar process worked for him in his daily Bible reading, combined with lifelong teaching of the Bible, to help him to "know by heart" practically all of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament, as the writer repeatedly verified.

By concentrating and praying, Edgar Cayce seemed to have been able to affect his recovery from illness during his sleep, speeding up the recuperative process. However, during an illness of some six weeks which the writer witnessed, he did not succeed in doing it, and his own trance given on the subject told him that taking a sulfa pill had slowed down recovery more than usual for him.

Dreaming at night, Cayce seemed to be as naturally psychic as awake. He dreamed of stock market quotations, of people he should see to increase his income, of greed among associates, of trips he would take-right alongside dreams which a psychologist would recognize as normal accompaniments to daily living. But there were also "enhanced" levels of dreaming, in which he previewed step by step the development and loss of his hospital or building up of study groups. Far more than most people, although still only a few times a year, he dreamed of detailed scenes and events from ancient times: Egypt, Greece, Israel.

It had become his conviction that such dreams were accurate recollections from his own past lives, but of course such supposed retrocognition was impossible to verify. He had dreams of meeting on another plane some cherished relatives and friends who had died; to him, these experiences were real encounters and the kind of psychic dream experience which many could have if they chose. Once he dreamed of his own death, with a physiology not unlike that of his final illness, and followed by h Js wife's early death-which proved accurate; in the same dream he saw sweeping geological changes in the U.S. as scheduled for late in the present century, when he saw himself again on earth.

"Elevated" psychic experiences may have been present in a few dreams of his being summoned to another plane and charged with a work to do; but this too eludes verification. Real to him were a few dreams of meeting Christ-the more real because not pompous but built around themes of eating, talking, walking with "the Master."

Cayce in Trance

His trance activity also seemed to an observer to operate at different levels of psychic acuity. He had dreams during some of his trances, while busy exploring faraway scenes and talking in an unconscious state with some other part of his psyche; these were likely to be "enhanced" dreams, better focused than were many nighttime dreams-teaching him a lesson about laws of growth, or helping him understand the person for whom he was giving a reading, or taking him back to a vivid scene from another time in history, or showing him his own stages of consciousness while he was active in a trance state But there were other dreams from the trance periods that had a visionary and "elevated" character' introducing him to the figure of Death or reminding him of Christ.

In Cayce's trance speech itself, the level which appeared most like that of "natural" psychic pickup in daily life showed primarily in little asides, made before the start of the formal discourse of the trance. On medical or business or other practical readings Cayce was directed by his wife to locate the person in question, and after locating the state, the city, the street and address, he often astonished his listeners in Virginia Beach by commenting on the weather where "he" was, in Florida or Alaska, or by describing a sweeping view down an avenue in Denver, or by mentioning whether his subject were asleep or reading or talking, or feeding a pet.

These observations proved so incredibly accurate and detailed, as they were investigated over the years, that they became one of the least controversial aspects of Cayce's clairvoyance. They were matched by equally brief asides as he gave "life readings," or vocational and character counsel, when he might mention items from the place and date of the person's birth-such as a dangerous storm that morning, or for whom the new baby was named, or how many boys were born in the U.S. that day, or whether there had ever been suicides in that county.

In the same undertone he also went back through the years of his subject's life, starting from the present and running back to birth, mentioning times of severe stress, or noting, for example, that as a girl the subject had been "a very good little flirt" or pointing out just when the decision to become a teacher had been made. To the listeners these comments suggested eerily that everyone leaves somewhere in creation an impression of all he has been and done, which may be recaptured and reviewed by another intelligence, sometime, somehow.

Besides these comments, however, his readings contained occasional answers that seemed to originate from a "natural" level of ability-especially when he seemed impatient with a questioner's manipulative attitude. At such times the listener had the feeling that much of the waking Cayce was near the surface-as when he told one man asking about organizational activities to do some thinking for himself, lest he begin asking whether to blow his nose with his right hand or left.

In stately and rhythmic language, the content of most of Cayce's readings and trance experiences seemed congruent with "enhanced" psychic perception while awake or dreaming. In this formal vein the trance speech never failed to identify an individual for whom counsel had been given before, though the person might have sought aid decades earlier and have been forgotten by the waking Cayce and his secretary.

In the same measured prose the unconscious source continued by describing where in the U. S. to find the best physician for surgery of nasal passages, or how to combine certain drugs that pharmacists averred would not combine, or which colleges a given teenager ought to consider, or the face of a woman to be met some years hence and best chosen as a counselee's wife, or how a given subject remarked that one should "Work hard, play hard," or the tide and winds that would make the best day of the month to dive for a sunken treasure, or how to study the camber of airplane wings, or the form of government of ancient Inca civilization, or when World War II would end. The rhythmic-breathing Edgar Cayce touched upon these matters instantaneously, as though some cosmic file or computer were open to him on any subject where he was directed by an individual's need.

The trance source seemed simultaneously aware of how much could be effectively communicated to the listener. Repeatedly the trances began with the warning that only as much would be given as could be helpful to the person listening; not surprisingly, specialists got more technical subjects than laymen, and conscientious listeners more encouragement and information than dabblers. While some kind of swift intelligence seemed to be moving through space and history and realms of present knowledge, not to mention commenting on happenings on planes beyond death, another part of whatever consciousness was at work in the sleeping Cayce was watching and correcting his secretary's spelling across the room, or answering typed questions before they could be read, or responding to unvoiced inquiries of a listener, or insisting on giving a reading for a seeker whose letter of application had not yet arrived.

The enhanced abilities of Edgar Cayce would have been striking if they had been separate bits, strung out as long lists of targets for him to shoot at. When, however, he produced an intricate medical diagnosis of every organ system of a body, or a picture of the layers in the character structure of a busy human being, or a comprehensive sketch of ancient Judaic schools of the prophets, or a discourse on the warring financial interests that precipitated the Depression, or a report on the fault lines that underlay a series of earthquakes, or the history of tensions and in a marriage, or a review of real estate prospects in a resort town-the probability of each little hit was compounded by its linkage with the others in meaningful wholes, and the reflective observer could only gasp.

There were a few times when personalities identified themselves as speaking through Cayce as though he were a medium, usually at the end of a trance session; here, too, enhanced abilities seemed to be at work, but not of a "direct voice" type so much as mediated through the personality and vocabulary of Cayce-similar to the process which the writer has observed at work in the medium Arthur Ford. Generally, however, Cayce and his associates were convinced that discarnate personalities were not giving his readings.

There were also times when the language of the trances changed to a more stately and more urgent style, woven swiftly around Biblical quotes and paraphrases. When this "elevated" level appeared in trance material, it was likely to be the freest of all in time and space. There might be comments on the details of a Biblical incident, such as the walk to Emmaus, or predictions of the fate of nations, such as racial bloodshed in the U.S., or observations on cosmic events, such as the coming of Christ to His own. But these factual items seemed incidental, noted as one might pick jewels from the wall of a cave one was hewing for safety, when jewels mattered little.

For the elevated material had the strong note of urgency which the scholar Rudolph Otto had noted years before about moments when man feels himself close to "the Holy." Typically this elevated material came in the midst or at the end of readings, and once Cayce had moved into the heightened state, he was not likely to return to the more detached discourse in which most readings took place. What raised Cayce to the elevated level was not predictable; usually it was something very beautiful or very serious in the person for whom the trance was being given, but sometimes it could be a need in someone else in the room, or a note that had great meaning to Cayce the man.

On very rare occasions the elevated material came in a style of severe warning and call to righteousness, as stern as from some archangel of old. Even more rarely, the voice of the sleeping Cayce fell to a hush, and he said, "the Master passes by," or spoke his encouragement "as from the Master"; yet this material was handled with great care to claim no special authorization, but only that which every Christian may have as he "prepares" and "attunes" himself with his Lord.

In one trance session which the writer heard, a group of Cayce's associates and board members of his little psychical research organization were asked, "What will ye do with this man?" It was a question they found hard to answer, and in less than a year Cayce was dead, largely through self-imposed overwork of trying to give six or even eight readings at a session where he formerly gave but one-hoping to catch up on the backlog of misery which thousands of letters brought him each week. The same reading warned that what Cayce did and said was nothing new, and should never be made the subject of a "cult, schism, or ism."

His listeners were not being asked to glorify Cayce, which his trances had uniformly refused to do (reserving for Cayce the most curt readings given, though also patient and helpful encouragement). And his listeners were not being asked to promote an organization or movement, the historic response to an unusual phenomenon with religious dimensions. They were being asked instead what they would do with their own lives, with their own abilities; they were being asked to understand and use the laws they were seeing at work in Cayce, seeming to produce goodness and health and joy in people's lives.

What were those laws? Neither parapsychology nor any other psychology is in a position to explain what Cayce did for so many years. But parapsychology is at a point in its history when it is ready anew to consider theories, ready to consider even unusual programs for developing psychic ability, so long as they work. Perhaps it is time to see how the Cayce source explained the workings of psychic ability at various levels, and how it coached a group of determined laymen for fourteen years in developing productive forms of such ability, in a series of tasks later written up as A Search for God.

THE CAYCE VIEW OF PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE

Psychic activity was not a phylogenetic remnant from an earlier state in animal evolution. To be sure, man had once found psychic ability more readily available to him than now. But man in that dim prehistory was not at first an early anthropoid. He was, according to this view, at first that part of creation called a "soul," given freedom to roam the universe and create playfully with the rest of the cosmos.

Some souls went their way, glorifying God by fashioning, through psychic energies, realms of beauty and form which had only to be intensely thought to be objectified. Other souls came upon the earth, tumbling its way through the heavens in its own plan of evolution through "kingdoms" of inanimate and animate matter; these particular souls used their native psychic force to interrupt and toy with earth's evolution, fashioning such beings as they wished out of animal forms and entering into those forms to enjoy the play of earth's energies.

Earth's energies and beings were good, as Genesis says, and fashioned by God for earth's own becomings. But the exploring souls, like wayward children, used their great psychic energies to divert genetic streams, forming their own mutants and monsters, as well as sexual playthings. Eventually these particular souls millions on millions of them-trapped themselves in the kingdoms of earth, until they forgot their full destiny to become co-creators with God and sought rather to identify altogether with animal "instinct" and life cycles.

To enable the self-snared souls to discover the goodness of earth as God's creation without hopelessly distorting themselves and earthly evolution, they were given their own "evolutionary" process. They were programmed to reincarnate in successive human forms, interspersing human lifetimes with periods in other planes of specialized consciousness that built intelligence or beauty or kindness or courage or purity. In living as human forms, souls would find their great psychic energies more difficult to tap, available only under stiff requirements, so that they could do less damage than before. But their original energies were still there, awaiting human development to a level of shared goodwill where souls might again be trusted with so much power.

In this picture, the state of the soul in between-life planes of "death" was nearer to its true nature, and accompanied by more free psychic ability, than the state of the soul in a human body, except when that human body was-as in devout men of God-bent wholly in service of its fellows. From this perspective the usual question of psychical research, "Does man survive death in some form which uses psychic powers for communication and manifestation?" was inverted, to become "Does man survive birth-with what measure of his true psychic powers?"

This cosmic mural from the Cayce source had elements to offend the common sense of modern man. The hard-won scientific truths of animal evolution would seem threatened by affirmation of a separate order of "souls." The Church's long battle to affirm the goodness of life here and now would seem lost in a view that might lead to escapism from earthly reality. And the claim of great psychic powers as the birthright of souls would seem an infantile wish to think man as a god, despite the evidence of finitude that crowds upon human life.

Yet the Cayce source picture was not that souls had ever possessed all knowledge or all creative power in some psychic super-state. They had available to them as lasting knowledge and power that which came from use; whatever they tried to build in the universe became permanently theirs. They could draw upon an infinite set of patterns and energies which the Cayce source called "the Creative Forces" (and which others may have at times called archetypes); what they used responsibly became a permanent resource to them.

He who truly and unselfishly "loved" became increasingly capable of psychic awareness of the needs and states of those he loved, as well as increasingly capable of giving healing energies and refreshment to those whom he sought to love. What a man did, he had. He who built unselfish beauty had ESP to find the materials of beauty, and PK to bring people and things into actual relationships of beauty.

The source of all human becoming, whether psychic or any other, was "the Creative Forces"-those pattern-giving and energy-releasing designs or fields that danced forth from the One, affecting two other orders that also proceeded from the One: mind and matter. Creation on earth was a blend of matter with mind (however primitive, mind was there in the tropisms and reactions of microorganisms, and in the polarities and valences of chemicals); but the driving, evolving Force was superordinate to either matter or mind alone, and expressed itself through these.

The soul of man was a microcosm of the One, containing as potential in itself all the "Creative Forces" which God Himself had so far seen fit to call into being in creation. Each individual soul was made in the beginning with all other souls, and bore the character and drive of the Creator so faithfully as to be "in His image." Each soul was destined to be a full companion with God, creating and sustaining untold galaxies and planes of reality with Him, using its resources by free choice in harmony with the purposes of God and relinquishing its wayward self-indulgence while remembering all it had been and done.

As the Cayce "information" so often described the destiny of the soul, it was "to have that estate with Him which was in the beginning, and be conscious of same." In such a view the long journey of discovery and becoming of the soul was eternal gain not only to the soul but to God Himself, Who delighted in free and conscious companionship of souls. Yet God did not allow souls to turn from His ways forever, for after untold opportunities some who continued to reject His ways would be returned to their original estate with Him-without consciousness of what they had been and done, won and lost.

In this cosmic history-beyond-history, psychic ability was the birthright of every soul, part of its native creativity, ready to find and affect whatever the soul needed for its unselfish work in the universe. Psychic capacity was as native to the soul as were love, inventiveness, patience, integrity, wisdom; it came into play to serve these.

Psychic ability was not, from this perspective, a special prerogative for souls in planes which man calls "after death," though disembodied "entities" might use telepathy to communicate and psi to precipitate invisible or visible forms by concentrated thought. A soul who had lived a miserable life or series of lives would find at death little to draw upon in his treasure house of activated psychic ability; he might be a psychic cripple on other planes as he had been but partly alive on earth. Quoting Jesus about the degree of creative force available to a soul after death, the Cayce source often reminded, "As the tree falls, so shall it lie." The popular view of jumping out of bodies into a "heaven" of freedom of awareness and productivity had little support in this picture of psychic abilities of the living and the dead.

Nor was psychic ability a strange, occult force to be mastered by alignment with stars, by the aid of spacemen, or by the invoking of principalites or demons or powers. Seeking along these lines might so concentrate the consciousness of a living person as to awaken for better or worse some realm of the soul's developed treasure of psychic capacities. But enduring growth in psychic ability was completely synonymous with growth in spirituality, growth in grace, growth in that Godly love which preferred others. Growth in psychic ability on whatever plane of life or death was growth in high creativity with God.

A given level of psychic ability in a human being could not, then, be used as a measure of his present spirituality; for he might be presently misusing this resource as he might misuse any of his talents. To be sure, a high level of ability was an indication that somewhere, somehow, the soul had chosen and used the psychic resource for good-exactly as high levels of musical or mathematical ability indicated. But the proper spiritual question for any man to ask of himself was not "What have I got, in which I may take my pleasure?" but "What am I doing with what I have?" The latter question alone was the question of spirituality.

There was no point in seeking psychic development as a shortcut to revelations, a shortcut to potency with one's fellows, a shortcut to supposed higher realms. It was fruitful to seek "the higher gifts" of psychic abilities insofar as they emerged for each as potentials from the One Spirit who "divideth to every man as he wills," but such gifts should be sought and used in "faith, hope, and love" or they would either disappear or actively harm the soul who sought them­ even through mental or physical illness.

The effort to force psychic manifestations by dissociation or trance would bring some results for almost anyone who tried these methods assiduously, for every soul had some psychic inheritance both built up and native. But the last state of hose who forced psychic ability by these or any other . methods might be worse than the first, if complexes from the unconscious were to rush into the void made by abdicating consciousness or if unwanted discarnates took over the vacated personality.

Three Levels of Psychic Experience

According to the Cayce "information," every soul in a human body had some measure of psychic ability as its birthright from creation, helping the person to protect his existence and enhance his daily function. This was a level of "natural" psychic experiences, awake and in dreams, which operated to warn an individual of threats to himself and his loved ones, as well as to alert him for opportunities he was constructively seeking, and to guide him into better relations with other souls.

Hunches, apparitions, premonitions, glimpses of auras, moments of healing energy and radiance, delicate outreach to affect other persons and things-all of these would stream into consciousness, through the unconscious; or stream out from the person, in greater or less degree depending on his awareness and use of them. These were the "natural" psychic happenings available to every soul whose life was not so cluttered with defenses and guilts as to block off the flow of such energies in the same way that he blocked off impulses to love, to play, to learn, to build.

In addition, each soul had ever available to it an avenue of psychic awareness and action which far transcended its own native inheritance. The soul might, when fears were laid aside and purpose and practice quickened it, reach beyond its natural endowment to the unspeakable riches of God, which flowed into consciousness to match the soul's resources.

There were no necessary limits to psychic experience here, when need and opportunity joined with intent; as Jesus promised, "Greater things than I do, shall ye do," and "I will send you the Holy Spirit, to make known to you all things from all times." Yet this overall process of joining the native resources of the soul to the resources of the "Universal Forces" was not capricious or magical, but lawful and developmental in its general outlines, however freely the laws might be transcended on occasion by divine mercy.

A soul might expect its natural psychic ability to be enhanced by Universal Forces, along lines of its past endeavors and application of talents. One who had served at healing of any kind, not just healing by prayer, might expect readier hunches on medications for a sick child. One who had been an explorer of new lands might expect clearer impressions of buried mineral deposits to appear in his psyche-more readily than one whose preoccupation had been with sculpture.

One who had sought to awaken and coach talents in others might expect to find rising in him the energy to psychically affect others by direct action, more quickly than one whose gaze had been upon interpreting languages. In such a process the natural psychic endowment of the soul was enriched by the overlay of specially developed psychic talents; enhanced abilities followed naturally upon concentration, or preceded shock, either to widen the aperture of the soul's native abilities or to join the soul to the larger resources of the divine, or both.

These were the usual lawful forms of psychic ability. Yet under pressure of great need and great love souls might at any time slip into harmony with the One so that treasures not yet fully earned might be poured into consciousness, either as knowledge and insight or as force and outreach. In these "elevated" states not only useful facts but the very bones of the universe, the pulse of creation might come into reach-as they did for Job of old when the vision from Yahweh broke upon him.

Psychic ability then became not simply a useful tool for man's day-to­day operations, but an unforced awareness of "the way things are" and an invitation to work with the grain of life. Rightly seen, psychic ability was ultimately not a phenomenon of unusual perception but part of the everlasting quickening and guidance called "faith"; it was not as a mysterious esoteric power but part of the overflowing goodness which humans called "love." It was part of the eyesight of the soul into creation, part of the muscle of the soul to build and to give.

When and how was the soul given access to the largest psychic awareness? This was not for the soul to dictate, though it might build its readiness by use of chosen gifts and interests. What the soul could attempt, however, was to respond to a force like itself, loose in the universe, which "ever seeks his own." That force the Cayce source called "the Christ Spirit," answering to the "Christ consciousness" originally given to every man. Souls who had tangled themselves in the web of instincts and energies, in the panics of animal creation, might have great difficulty in finding their way out, great difficulty "in even beginning to think and love aright."

But they would find as part of their natural psychic inheritance that they had an ability which they need never lose; it was an ability to turn toward the Christ Spirit, which would awaken answering chords within themselves. This Christ Spirit was not a vague ideal or idea, but a vital, living reality-a shaft of Light ever shining in a particular way, "the Light that lighteth every man" if he chooses it. The key to the highest psychic ability, then, was the effort to attune the deep springs of personhood to the Christ Spirit, whose life and being served to "reflect" God to man, focusing the One to become believable and bearable for the confused consciousness of man. Over and over the Cayce source spoke of the "other Force," the "Christ Force," ready to "bear witness with the soul," to meet and strengthen and guide the natural divine energies welling up in an individual.

This Christ Spirit did not take a man over, nor make him an automaton, for that would frustrate the plan of creation for each soul to reach its own powers, its own full consciousness. And no soul's becoming was a matter of indifference to the Christ nor to the Father, for, according to the Cayce source, each soul was created at the beginning with its own unique inherent design, as original and delightful as each snowflake, and capable of glorifying God as could no other design. The primal energy and dream of each soul held the qualities of goodness and inventiveness and purity that men ascribed to the Godhead; but buried within this glowing field of forces was the soul's own seed of unique becoming-a seed which might predispose a soul to one kind of psychic gift or another, at various times in its journey.

The Process in Psychic Experience

The imagery of the Cayce source was one of fields-fields exemplified by the dance of atoms in a bar of steel, or the play of energies in a thought, or the radiant presence of an angel. In this view, everything had its fields, and all fields had complex patterns of "vibration" of the One Force. When fields of the human psyche were set into phase with a given field "out there," then psychic perception or psychokinesis could take place, in greater or less degree-sometimes even by accident, or without conscious intent, as the phenomena of poltergeists suggested, or the phenomena of medieval saints having to be restrained from levitation, or the accurate perception of a future event in which the percipient was only marginally involved.

As a rule, however, active desire and focus were needed along with attunement of fields to bring about psychic events. Accordingly, the Cayce source added to the word "attunement" a companion term, "service," as the other necessary pole for effective psychic happenings. What man sought to use in service to enhance human life and had trained his psyche to employ creatively, would meet the possibilities given him by attunement and yield what are called psychic phenomena.

A wide range of variables might affect one's "attunement" with other event-fields. Important among these variables was the capacity to conceive what might be going on "out there"-whether in another person's mind, or in an event of geological importance. Psychic ability could operate most readily to validate or shape the natural flow of impressions from memory and the unconscious, or the natural flow of energies through habits and the unconscious into events, by way of psychokinesis. If the flow were barren, through disuse or inexpertness, then the heightening push of psychic force had trouble proffering itself. Accordingly, experience, application, cultivation of talents were essential to enlarge the range of options upon which creative psychic impulses might assert themselves. Service created the tunes for attunement; there was no magical way to attunement.

Yet psychic attunement to desired persons and events, or to object fields, had its methods and procedures, yielding greater or lesser effect in a given situation.

Essentially, these procedures were what the Cayce source described as "turning within," or "seeking the still small voice," or "asking God's help." But in specific physiological terms, the Cayce source spelled out a chain of states in the fields that made up a human being, activated for effective ESP or PK. There was first of all an invisible force-field that surrounded and interpenetrated each cell of the organism; it was called "the real physical body," and guided the maturation of the body, as well as its healing. Psychic activity first of all took place in the real physical body, through seven vortices in this invisible lout important field-vortices which Hindu tradition called "wheels" or "centers."

Each was associated with an underlying endocrine gland in the physiological body, which it affected in delicate ways, stirring the discharges which in turn stimulated the flow of sensory imagery into the central nervous system-yielding ESP impressions-or stirring a flow of vital energy which poured out through the vortices as PK These responses in the physiological body to the invisible "field body" were not random, but occurred in chains of interaction affecting the endocrine glands and both the autonomic and central nervous systems. The optimum interaction patterns within the body were those which the Cayce information called by the Hindu term of "kundalini"-a welling up of creative energy and focus in the person, a raptness which was also productive.

Active in study, in work, in play, in loving, in suffering, in worship, this kundalini circuit was called into play in the best and safest psychic experience and kept in alignment by the deep purposes or ideals of the person, as expressed in the choices made, insights reached, productive service rendered, and prayer and meditation undertaken. The channel for the best psychic activity was therefore kept clear and effective by all forms of creativity, not by isolated acts of incantation and concentration. Yet each individual had his own memories, symbols, hopes, intentions, places that aided his best flow of kundalini.

The physiological side of psychic experiences, according to this view, was affected by whatever affected the endocrine gland function or the function of the body's two great nervous systems. Injuries might cause sudden activation of unwanted and uncontrolled psychic abilities (as the history of psychic research well illustrated), while changes in endocrine secretion or medication might quickly affect or shut off an ability (as the history of the field again showed). Variations of rest, of balance, of anxiety and tension, even of diet, might be traced in their effects upon psychic ability. And in the actual moment of a psychic flash, or psychic impulse sent outward, particular processes of breathing, posture, and even the invisible action of the force-fields of gems upon the body, might be traced.

Over and over the Cayce material stressed the lawfuless of psychic happenings. Yet the total picture developed was not a mechanical one. The body, including its delicate chemistry and nervous impulses, was in the last analysis a servant of the mind. What the mind chose and held before itself either quickened the body as one tunes a musical instrument or let it go slack to psychic impulses.

If the mind and will were turned toward shared creativity, whether of loving or of fashioned forms, then resources would be drawn from the soul to yield helpful psychic impulses for these tasks. If, in addition, that creativity were carrying on creativity built in some earlier lifetime in the soul's journey, then the psychic capacities could be expected to flow yet more freely.

And if the person achieved purity of heart and enduring love toward his fellows, he could expect to find as well those times when the psychic stream overflowed its usual channels, and he found himself supplied with whatever was needful for the situation, from the Giver of all good and perfect gifts. These were the basic variations in psychic performance, psychic gifts, psychic phenomena, according to this source.

Psychic Experience as Creativity

Ultimately, there was only one category which affected the development and safe use of psychic ability: creativity. Not creativity in the narrow sense of novelty, nor self-expression, nor cleverness, but creativity in the sense where God Himself was described as Creator. In this sense creativity was the soul's entering into events in such ways that the consequences were other events, each working to fulfill the promise of shared human existence. Some creativity built persons, as when a parent held the hand of a fearful child, yet released it when the youngster was ready to venture on his own. Other creativity built forms-as when an artist painted a portrait, and yet did not substitute a portrait for fully perceiving a human face, but gained sensitivity from the portrait for the next encounter with a real person.

Creativity might be as little as not forgetting to water a garden, or as great as laying the foundations for a country in its constitution or its music. But in the real, shared work of giving and building, man could find his destiny, so like that of the One whose unseen image he bore. And reaching ever fuller stature in the long journey of the soul, each individual might increasingly expect to see, by what could be called psychic ability, "face to Face" instead of "darkly," and each might expect to bless and refresh and heal and renew another, through adding to the other's natural energy an energy which might be called psychic ability, but was more often called "love."

The question of the conditions for effective psychic ability then became the question of the conditions of any creativity. What were, indeed, the essential conditions of man's creativity with his fellow man and with his unseen co-Creator, the Father of both? In the view of the Cayce source, these conditions were what men have sought to understand and practice through the intricate forms and traditions they call religion. Myths, symbols, dogmas were employed, however clumsily at times, to increase the attunement which men sought with the Source, and to increase the service of the fellow man for whom that Source ever waited and whispered and reached. Likewise, rituals, initiations, processions, sacraments, codes and commandments all were developed to focus and train man's energies into alignment with the One, in a flow of new and abundant creations. This was the ultimate function of faiths, of traditions, of religious communities and covenants, according to the Cayce source.

Yet man had freedom of will, and godlike powers in his creativity. He might choose, and often did choose, to dally, to become bemused, to squeeze for himself instead of sharing with others the fruits of creation-whether in the primal Garden or in the ghetto. And he could use his religious forms and modes to justify his turning aside, to still his doubts, to cover over his sins. So the quest for creativity, for the effective conditions of creativity, must be made over and over again, in each generation, by each people, and at one time or another by each soul. For the altar which was supposed to reflect the glint of the One Light might easily be turned to reflect the face of the self-seeker.

He who would develop safe and useful psychic ability, then, had no choice but to work upon his religious understanding and practices, whether these were overt in theological propositions and duties, or covert in personal codes of honor and generosity. He must sooner or later ask about his relation to the ultimate Source of good in his life and in the lives of others, if he were not to coast on the achievements of a past life, or to slide into narcissism, or to develop that cruelty which seeks to force from others the secrets of life buried by his own concerns for power or possession or position or passion.

A group of Edgar Cayce's friends from Norfolk and Virginia Beach, who had together been attending various religious lectures and study groups, asked him one day in 1932 whether he could give them lessons in spiritual development through his readings. They were especially interested in developing some measure of the astonishingly helpful psychic ability which each of them had experienced through Edgar Cayce's trances-whether that aid had been medical or vocational or financial or marital, or something as elusive as peace of mind and soul. Cayce agreed to try, and together they sought lessons from his source.

Promptly they learned that the lessons would be given them only slowly, under the requirement that they live out and talk through and practice each lesson in turn. There was no pressing ahead for secret wisdom; it would not be given them. They learned that the life of each one would come under examination of his own conscience, and under the loving concern of others in the group, stimulated by terse but firm encouragement and coaching from the trance source. And they learned that they had to undertake daily disciplines of prayer and meditation at times they agreed upon, as well as less scheduled but equally important disciplines of guarding their tongues and thoughts, or sorting out their ideals, or training themselves to see the best in one another, in spouses, in strangers.

They did not secure lessons in breathing exercises, or in concentration, or in astrological charts, or in crystal balls, or in dream prognostication, or in visualizing, or in laying on of hands-although all of these were mentioned and some treated at length, while a few processes such as healing became the subject of yet another group and project. What they received were lessons in the major conditions of creativity, one by one. There were twenty-four such lessons, later published in two little volumes which they wrote up together under the title of A Search for God, and a twenty-fifth which was to have been the start of another series interrupted by Cayce's death. They were required to develop their own insights on the themes suggested in the trances, and to write these up in their own words, not parroting Cayce. Likewise, they were to work out their own illustrations from daily experiences of growth, not simply quoting from the Bible or from biographies.

Their task was long, and some of the personnel of the group changed. But over the years the members each grew. And they developed a startling variety of psychic experiences, of each major type, and at each level of intensity-some awake, some in dream, and some in vision or in rapt state of prayer or meditation. They developed helpful energies for healing and blessing those who needed their, aid.

They did not become great psychics. None became an Edgar Cayce. Yet the development of their own limited talents to full flower was for them a greater source of satisfaction than the showcasing of genius.

For they were seeing and working out for themselves the conditions of creativity, step by step, together. And they were finding rewards of joyful, productive lives that far exceeded the novelty of psychic manifestations alone.

In struggling to grasp the mystery of psychic experience posed for them by the work of Edgar Cayce, they opened in their studies the way to a yet greater mystery-the mystery of man's full partnership with God. This, rather than blinding revelations or marvelous signs, became for them the religious significance of psychic experience. The unknown opened into the known, the hidden into the near at hand, and the mysteries of phenomena into the mysteries of the gracious love of God meeting each man on his way.

What was the path they took towards a creativity which was psychic and more than psychic? Exactly how did they find phenomena linked with fulfillment, happenings linked with habits, impressions linked with intentions, psi linked with the soul, service linked with the Servant?