In the field of philosophy and metaphysics there was need for an extensive system of cross-indexing and checking, to match what the readings said against what had been said by theologians, heretics, and teachers of religion and morals in all countries and at all times. The readings have been as democratic in this respect as in medicine: “Wherever the Law of One has been taught, there truth has lived.”
It is a stern set of ethics that emerges from the readings. No lukewarm embracing of theological virtues will satisfy them. They insist on perfection as the goal, and every misstep must be retraced, every injury undone, every injustice rectified. The newer, lenient interpretations of Christianity are not tolerated. Marriage, for instance, is treated as the Roman Catholic Church treats it, though the readings give a different reason for this attitude from that of the church Fathers. “Work it out now,” say the readings, “or you will have to meet it later.” Only in extreme circumstances, similar to those under which the Catholic Church grants annulment, do the readings advise divorce. Then one of the parties is usually hopelessly at fault, while the other is bearing an unreasonable burden. Usually the reading will say, speaking of the one who is attempting to cooperate and hold things together, “This has been met by the entity; the debt is paid.”
The art of living that has emerged from the readings has one great danger. It attracts only those who are ready to measure up to an ideal path of existence, but it offers these same people the temptation of a new religious organization, a new philosophical system. Against this the readings continually warn. The end toward which they should all work is not something new and select, but something old and universal: this is the sum and burden of their labor. In the words of a reading:
“The ideals and purposes of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., are not to function as another schism or ism. Keep away from that! For these warnings have been given again and again. Less and less of personality, more and more of God and Christ in dealings with the fellow man.
“To be sure, those phases of the activity of the Association in the material plane must take concrete evidence and present concrete evidence of its being grounded in mental and spiritual truth. But not that it is to build up any organization that is to be as a schism or a cult or ism, or to build up money or wealth or fame or position, or an office that is to function in opposition with any already organized group.
“How did thy Master work? In the church, in the synagogue, in the field, in the lakes, upon the sands and the mountains, in the temple! And did He defy those? Did He set up anything different? Did He condemn the law even of the Roman, or the Jews, or the Essenes, or the Sadducees, or any of the cults or isms of the day? All, He gave, are as ONE . . . under the law! And grudges, schisms, isms, cults, must become as naught; that thy Guide, the Way, the Master, yea even Christ . . . as manifested in Jesus of Nazareth . . . may be made known to thy fellow man!
“So, in thy considerations, seek ye to know more and more of how each organization has its counterpart bodily, mentally, spiritually, and guidance may be given thee.
“Ye have an organization then with a physical being, with a mental being, with a spiritual concept. And only that which is not merely idealistic but in keeping with God’s, Christ’s precepts, Jesus’ anointings, may be that which may grow and become as a living thing in the experience, in the bodies, in the minds; yea to the very awareness of the souls of men whom such a group, such an organization would serve.
“In the bodily functioning, then, the activities are to have due and proper consideration, to be sure. But let each phase of the work present how not only mentally but spiritually there is a grounding in truth, as is set forth in the Christ Consciousness as exemplified by Jesus, as has been proclaimed by many of the saints of old.
“And then ye may be very sure that all of those influences from the spiritual realm are one. For whether it be as ye have seen at times, the Lord of the Way or the Christ Himself as Jesus, or others be sent as an aid, depends upon whether ye hold that ideal that is One with the Universal Truth for and to man.”
TWENTY-TWO
Through the 1930s Edgar Cayce lived quietly. Each day there were a few visitors, but they were part of the pattern; without them he would have been lonely. Except for his journey to church each Sunday and an occasional visit to the movies or the barbershop, he stayed at home working in his garden, fishing, or manufacturing something in the shop he built for himself behind the garage.
Each day he got up early and watched the sun rise out of the ocean. By its light he read the Bible. Usually he got his own breakfast, because he preferred his own version of coffee—hot, black, and strong. When weather permitted he worked outside until the mail came. His garden was extensive and he had a green thumb; anything would grow for him, in profusion. As a fisherman he was average. There was no magic in his rod, but the little lake behind the house was so well stocked with fish that he always caught a few. In late summer he engaged in his hobby of canning and preserving. By September the cellar shelves were crowded with the products of his art, but by spring he had given most of them away; his hand was prodigal with those he loved. The families he held in highest esteem received an example of his ultimate skill, a jar of brandied peaches. The morning mail arrived about ten, and when it was read the first reading of the day was taken. Afterward he worked at his typewriter, answering letters. Lunch was at one. Usually it was a light meal. When it was finished he returned to the typewriter and stayed there until he was caught up with his correspondence. When the afternoon reading was finished he went out to fish, to work in the garden, or to spend a few hours at his carpenter’s bench. Dinner was at six, and he ate heartily, finishing with a cup of the same hot, black, strong coffee with which he had begun the day. In the evening he read a newspaper, listened to the radio, and played double solitaire or Russian bank with Gertrude. At eleven they listened to the news bulletins; then they went to bed. When there were visitors he talked with them in the long living room that faced the ocean and ended against an old-fashioned fireplace. If they came with troubles, he listened and did his best to give them hope; if they were to have readings, he told them stories that gave them faith in the information they were about to receive. They did not come in great numbers, but there was a steady trickle: the crippled, the malformed, the defective, the hopelessly ill, the nervously sick. Often they returned when they were well, and those were the times when he was happiest; then he listened to their stories of what the readings could do.
A listener to all of these tales was Polly, an ancient parrot full of wickedness and noise, who served a long term in the Navy and was given to Edgar by a friend. Polly was unmannerly. Often she would punctuate someone’s tall tale with “Tsk, tsk,” or whistle a long sigh of relief when a particularly tedious yarn was ended. She was devoted to her master and never interrupted him.
Whistling was her accomplishment; she whistled at all sailors who passed and at most pretty girls, sometimes throwing in a leering “Helloooo!” at the latter. She imitated any whistling she heard; association with Hugh Lynn provided her with a large repertoire of popular songs, which she faithfully reproduced, off key and out of tune. Occasionally she was allowed to leave her cage on the porch and enjoy the freedom of the living room. Once, on an autumn day, she flew into the large armchair by the fireplace and went to sleep.
It was dusk, Edgar was upstairs, and no lights were turned on. Two men came to the door and asked to see Mr. Cayce. They had heard something about him and wanted to find out exactly what he did. Gertrude showed them into the living room. They sat at the far end, which was still illuminated by daylight. At the other end, in the shadows, Polly was aroused from her nap by the noise.
“What do you want?” she said sharply.
Edgar came down the stairs just as the men were going out the front door. He reassured them, turned on the lights, and put Polly back in her cage.
His other pets were two canaries,
whose cage was in his office, far from Polly. They often sang during the readings, but it seemed to please rather than disturb him. For a while there was a big rabbit in the back yard, the gift of a friend, but one day a lame boy came to get a reading, and when he left he carried the rabbit with him.
Each summer Carrie came for a visit and usually Tommy, his wife, and their daughter Caroline accompanied her. Edgar’s sisters came, too, and friends in New York, Washington, Selma, and other places made a habit of spending their vacations at Virginia Beach. The squire died on April 11, 1937, while on a visit to one of his daughters in Nashville, Tennessee. He was buried at Hopkinsville by the side of his wife. After the funeral Edgar went to the old farm for a visit and walked through the woods until he came to the bend in the creek at the willows. There he said a prayer for his mother and father.
In June, 1939, Edgar Evans was graduated from Duke. He accepted a position with the Virginia Electric Power Company in Norfolk and lived at home. During that summer the family was happier, more united, than ever before. The Association was growing steadily and gaining strength. Plans were drawn for a new wing for the house, to contain a library and a set of offices. Construction was begun in 1940 and completed in 1941. In September of that year the building was dedicated, and the first reading was given in Edgar’s office, a sunlit room overlooking the lake.
Twenty-two years before, when President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris setting up the machinery for the League of Nations, a reading had said: “Christ will sit with the American delegation at Versailles. If the purpose for which its leader has gone there is accomplished, the world will experience a millennium. If it is not accomplished, there will be another and greater world war, which will make the one just ended seem small. It will begin about 1940, and the same forces will begin the trouble.” It was not an extraordinary forecast; men with no psychic powers whatever made the same prediction and were accurate even about the year in which the conflict would begin. But now in September, 1939, the battle had been joined. An increasing number of people came for readings or requested them by mail. Early in 1941 Edgar Evans entered the army as a private. Later he became an officer and eventually rose to the rank of captain. Virginia Beach became the site of two Army camps, and the Navy, strongly entrenched in Norfolk even in peacetime, mushroomed until its units were distributed throughout Princess Anne County. Hugh Lynn supervised Virginia Beach’s program of recreation for soldiers until the United Service Organization was able to take over. He then joined the special services division of the army, and with General Patton’s tanks followed the war to its end in Germany.
Both boys married, Hugh Lynn in 1941, Edgar Evans in 1942. By the end of 1943 Edgar had two grandsons. Hugh Lynn’s son, Charles Thomas Cayce, was born in October, 1942. His cousin, Evans Cayce, appeared a year later. Both boys came to visit their grandfather every day while their fathers were overseas. In March, 1943, the first edition of There Is a River appeared. The mail began to mount and the telephone rang incessantly. The office force had to be increased and the mailman finally was unable to carry the stacks of letters. Gertrude had to go to the post office and bring them back in the car. With Hugh Lynn gone Edgar had to take over the job of examining the letters and dictating answers to them. The pattern of his day changed drastically. He lengthened his sleeping periods every morning and afternoon, and gave from four to six readings a day instead of two.
His hobbies were forgotten, his garden neglected. The bass in the lake jumped flirtatiously, but he had no time for them. Immediately after breakfast he began dictating, and this continued until it was time for the reading. Frequently he remained asleep for two hours, until 12:30. Lunch was at one. The afternoon was devoted to the mail. After the second reading period the list of applications was examined and appointments were made. If there was time left before dinner it was used for dictating, and after dinner work continued until 9:30 or 10. From June, 1943, to June, 1944, 1,385 readings were given. By August, 1944, the strain was so great that Edgar collapsed. He rallied his strength to give a reading for himself. Its instructions were simple and to the point. He was to go away and rest. For how long? “Until he is well or dead.” He went to the mountains of Virginia, to Roanoke. Gertrude went with him. For a time he seemed to improve. He wrote letters to friends; he was cheerful about the future and full of plans for the expansion of the Association after the war. In September he suffered a stroke.
He came home in November, riding through the autumn-stained countryside where his ancestors fought against Cornwallis. In the house on Arctic Crescent he lay in his bed, looking out on the lake and the ocean. At 7:15 o’clock on the evening of January 3, 1945, he passed away. A few hours before, rousing from a sleep, he said: “How much the world needs God today.” He was buried in Hopkinsville, in the family plot.
Three months later Gertrude was laid beside him. She died on Easter Sunday at sunrise. Thus ended the love story which almost half a century before had begun on a summer night when the world was a flower-strewn field, and the future was young in their arms.
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With the death of Edgar the work of the Association began in earnest. In the files at Virginia Beach are over 14,000 readings. No other psychic has left so long and so large a record of his powers. The research staff, extracting from them what is of interest to the sciences and professions, and what is helpful for people in general, continues the work of classifying and compiling the material in its various categories, and integrating and formulating the theory and metaphysic that underlie the structure of the phenomena. The results are disseminated through the Association publications, and the members, whose number continues to increase, are the recipients of the essence of the material that issued from the subconscious of Edgar Cayce in the long period between the 31st of March, 1901, and the 17th of September, 1944. All of this information makes clear the stature and the meaning of Edgar Cayce.
PHILOSOPHY
The system of metaphysical thought which emerges from the readings of Edgar Cayce is a Christianized version of the mystery religions of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India, and Greece. It fits the figure of Christ into the tradition of one God for all people, and places Him in His proper place, at the apex of the philosophical structure; He is the capstone of the pyramid. The complex symbology employed by the mystery religions has survived fragmentarily in Christianity, notably in church architecture and in the sacrifice of the Mass, with its sacramental cup. But the continuity of the tradition of the one God has been lost. Paganism is condemned alike by religious authorities, archaeologists, and historians as an idolatrous fancy devoted to the worship of false gods.
Such was not the understanding of early Christians. Certainly the Essenes, who prepared Mary, selected Joseph, and taught Jesus, were initiates of the mysteries. Jesus said He came to fulfill the law, and part of that law was the cabala, the secret doctrine of the Jews—their version of the mysteries. Such converts to Jesus’ teachings as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were undoubtedly learned in the cabala. So, no doubt, was Paul. The mysteries were concerned with man’s problem of freeing his soul from the world. In the mystery symbologies the earth was always represented as the underworld, and the soul was lost in this underworld until freed from it by wisdom, faith, and understanding. Persephone, for instance, was abducted by Pluto, Lord of Hades. Persephone is the soul of man, whose true home is in the heavens.
The mystery religions were, then, a preparation for the coming of Jesus. He was the fruit of their efforts, and His message was a fuller revelation to the people at large of the mysteries themselves. In the scramble which Christianity made to establish itself as the dominant religion of the decaying Roman Empire, the mysteries were denied their proper place, since to grant that they had truth in them would justify their further existence.
“The early Christians used every means possible to conceal the pagan origin of their symbols, doctrines, and rituals,” Manly Hall says.* “They either destroyed
the sacred books of other peoples among whom they settled or made them inaccessible to students of comparative philosophy, apparently believing that in this way they could stamp out all record of the pre-Christian origin of their doctrines.”
It is interesting to speculate on the fact that Edgar Cayce was raised in strict nineteenth-century Bible tradition, and suffered the greatest mental and emotional shock of his life when he discovered that in his psychic readings he declared the truth of the mysteries and acclaimed Jesus as their crowning glory.
Up to that time Mr. Cayce had never heard of the mystery religions. Yet his readings check with everything about them that is known to be authentic. Much that he has given is not found in surviving records. Whether it is new material or was known to initiates of the mysteries cannot be checked except by the readings themselves. They say that all initiates, from the beginning of time, have known the full truth.
To describe the system of the readings in full, with its comparisons and parallels with the mysteries, would require a book in itself. For readers of this volume the following outline, containing all the essential points and some of the details, has been prepared.
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Man demands a beginning and a boundary, so in the beginning there was a sea of spirit, and it filled all space. It was static, content, aware of itself, a giant resting on the bosom of its thought, contemplating that which it was.
Then it moved. It withdrew into itself, until all space was empty, and that which had filled it was shining from its center, a restless, seething mind. This was the individuality of the spirit; this was what it discovered itself to be when it awakened; this was God.
God desired to express Himself, and He desired companionship. Therefore, He projected from Himself the cosmos and souls. The cosmos was built with the tools which man calls music, arithmetic, and geometry: harmony, system, and balance. The building blocks were all of the same material, which man calls the life essence. It was a power sent out from God, a primary ray, as man thinks of it, which by changing the length of its wave and the rate of its vibration became a pattern of differing forms, substance, and movement. This created the law of diversity which supplied endless designs for the pattern. God played on this law of diversity as a person plays on a piano, producing melodies and arranging them in a symphony.
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