Edgar Cayce

The teaching

Taught from the readings he gave in trance, as the Association for Research and Enlightenment keeps them.

How a reading was given

A reading began with Cayce lying on a couch, his shoes off and his collar and tie loosened, his hands first on his forehead and then folded over his middle. He breathed deeply and passed into what looked like sleep. The one conducting, most often his wife Gertrude, read a suggestion naming the person and the place where they were and asking for their condition, and he answered in a steady voice while a stenographer, for most of the years Gladys Davis, took down every word. When it was done he would say that they were through for the present, and he woke remembering nothing.

The readings explain themselves. In that state, they say, his mind reached the unconscious of the one who asked and drew as well on a universal source: the record that every soul writes upon time and space, which they call the Akashic records or the Book of Life.

Spirit, mind and body

One formula runs through all the readings: the spirit is the life, the mind is the builder, and the physical is the result. Every state of the body has its roots in what the mind has built and in the spirit that moves it, and healing, in their teaching, is the bringing of the three back into accord. The body is held to have its own power to mend, and every treatment is meant only to help that power along.

The counsel for the body

The health readings were given one by one for particular people, and they return to a few ideas. The body is to be kept in balance between what it takes in and what it gives off: digestion, the circulation and the eliminations. The diet they advise is mostly of vegetables and fruit, which they call alkaline-forming, with little fried food and care in what is combined at a meal. They advise packs of castor oil laid warm on the abdomen, osteopathic adjustment and massage, and they sent people to doctors and osteopaths to carry the treatment out.

The house teaches all this as what the readings held. They were given for single persons in their own time, no reading is medical evidence, and no cure is promised by them or by the house: an illness belongs with a doctor.

The soul and its lives

From 1923 the readings began to speak of past lives, and the soul became their subject. Each soul, they teach, was made in the beginning as a companion to God, and has lived many times: in Atlantis, in Egypt, in Persia, in the Holy Land, in the colonies of America. Between lives it dwells in other realms of consciousness, which the readings name after the planets, and the influence of those sojourns shows in a life as the urges that astrology describes.

Karma, in the readings, is the soul meeting itself: what a person meets is what they have built, and no one is punished from outside. A debt may be met under the law, measure for measure, or lifted by grace, which the readings tie to the Christ, so that the one who forgives is freed from the round of cause and effect. The purpose of every life is the same: to grow in the awareness of being one with God, and to help others toward it.

Atlantis

The readings give Atlantis a long history. It was a land in the Atlantic whose people mastered great powers, drawing the energy of the sun through great crystals, among them one they called the firestone. Its people divided into two parties: the Children of the Law of One, who held to the one God and the right use of power, and the Sons of Belial, who used power for themselves and made servants of beings they called things, part human and part beast. The land broke up in three great destructions, the last about ten thousand years before Christ, and its people fled to Egypt, to the Pyrenees and to the Americas. In Egypt, the readings say, a record of Atlantis was laid in a hall of records near the Sphinx, to be found when the time is right.

That is the story the readings tell, and the plain facts stand beside it: the floor of the Atlantic shows no sunken land, and no hall of records has been found at Giza. The lost worlds art's branch Atlantis teaches the story where it began, in Plato.

The ideal and the silence

Before anything else the readings ask a person to set their ideal: to write down, in three columns, the spiritual ideal they mean to live by and the mental and physical ideals that follow from it, and to measure their days against it. Prayer, in their teaching, is speaking to God, and meditation is listening: emptying the self of what hinders, so that the creative forces may rise.

Their way of meditating is plain. Sit upright at the same hour each day. Bend the head gently forward and back three times, then to each side, then circle it slowly each way. Breathe slowly in through one nostril and out, and then through the other, a few times. Hold a short affirmation of the ideal until it settles into silence, rest in the silence, and close by praying for others. The house adds its own limits: the breath is never forced, and anyone with trouble in the neck leaves out the turning of the head.

A Search for God

From 1931 the readings gave a course for small groups of ordinary people, who met each week, meditated together and took one lesson at a time, studying it for months and trying to live it before they went on. The first lessons run in order: cooperation, know thyself, what is my ideal, faith, virtue and understanding, fellowship, patience, the open door, in his presence, the cross and the crown, the Lord thy God is one, and love. The order is the teaching: a person learns to work with others and to know themselves before they speak of faith, and the course ends where it meant to lead, in love.