The Edgar Cayce Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy. Harold J. Reilly

work when properly administered. They now can be made available to thousands of readers seeking some sensible way out of the polluted maze of modern living.

      Despite the overtones of mystery that are present when a clairvoyant of Cayce’s reputation is involved, there is no great mystery in the affinity between the two men—one a psychic and one a physical scientist. They shared an identical philosophy of health: in Dr. Reilly’s words, “Medicine and most doctors aim at curing a specific ailment. The Cayce ‘readings’ and the Reilly therapy aim at producing a healthy body which will heal itself of the ailment. We try to understand Nature and work with Nature. Then the body cures itself.”

      When Dr. Reilly closed the Reilly Health Institute in 1965 and “retired” to his farm in New Jersey, he donated his physiotherapy equipment to the A.R.E. and established a physiotherapy clinic there, trained its therapists, and agreed to serve as its supervisor, a post he held until his death in 1987. He also set up the Physiotherapy Department of the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, and trained its personnel. However, it was not easy for Dr. Reilly to stay in retirement. When some of the patients he had been caring for—for example, David Dubinsky, who had been a “Reilly regular” for over forty years—insisted on their weekly treatment, Dr. Reilly agreed to come to New York one day a week and made arrangements to share an office with another doctor in the Capitol Theatre Building. But the time spent in the New York office expanded into two and then three days a week, and soon Dr. Reilly was working almost as hard as he had been when he was running the institute.

      When the Capitol Theatre Building was demolished, Dr. Reilly embarked on what he hoped was his second retirement. It didn’t last any longer than the first because, with the publication of Edgar Cayce—The Sleeping Prophet and other books, a steady stream of men and women from all over the country began making pilgrimages to his New Jersey farm.

      Helping him at the farm was his hard-working associate, Miss Betty Billings. She was a graduate of the University of North Carolina, where she received her B.S. in nutrition. She served her residency at Dayton Miami Valley Hospital in Ohio and worked as a clinic dietician at Duke University Hospital and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. She also held a degree in physiotherapy.

      Miss Billings first became acquainted with Dr. Reilly in the late 1950s, when she came to him seeking help for her paralyzed mother, after all the orthodox medical avenues of help had been exhausted. She was so impressed by his treatment of her mother that she left the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where she had been working as a nutritionist-dietician, and joined the Reilly staff at Rockefeller Center. She worked with Dr. Reilly—later marrying him—until his death at 92, and both she and the doctor were in great demand as speakers and health consultants.

      Dr. Reilly said of her: “I always had a feeling that Betty Billings was sent to me by Edgar Cayce ... Nutrition is so important in the Cayce therapy, but I was pretty weak in the technicalities of counting grams of everything, figuring recommended daily allowances, and keeping up with all the new research in this complicated field. I guess Cayce wanted us to work together.”

      To Harold J. Reilly, who would have made me as voluptuous as Marilyn Monroe if I had been a woman.—Maurice Zolotow

      In Edgar Cayce—The Sleeping Prophet, Jess Stearn describes Dr. Reilly as a “portable repository of practical Cayce therapy.”

      Dr. Reilly, like Edgar Cayce, specialized in “medical rejects”—those who had abandoned all hope of obtaining help from conventional drug-oriented therapies. His success in treating “hopeless” patients further spread his fame, until the patient pressure at the farm grew far beyond his capacities and those of Miss Billings to handle. As a consequence, he announced that he would have to limit his practice to members of the A.R.E.

      “I wanted to discourage patients—especially those who might not take the therapy seriously,” he explained. “And besides, if they do not understand the Cayce philosophy of the unity of body, mind, and spirit, and their consciousness is not attuned to the necessary level, it takes too long to get results; sometimes it never happens.”

       The basic philosophy of all my work is that I consider myself a teacher and interpreter of the Cayce readings; for the Cayce readings were given for individuals, and I have had to draw on my own background and knowledge and experience to interpret what he wanted, and then teach people what to do.

       —H.J.R.

       He is a great professional and a wonderful human being.

      —Nelson A. Rockefeller

Part I

      1

      Prevention: The Key to Lifelong Health

      A forty-two-year-old man asked Edgar Cayce, “How long should I live in this incarnation?” (866-1)

      “To a hundred and fifty!” the sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach replied.

      To other questioners, Cayce replied that if a person lived properly, ate wisely, didn’t worry too much, and kept an optimistic outlook on life, he could live to be 120 or 121 years of age.

      To someone who asked, “Then also it is true [that] one may preserve youth?” Cayce answered, “One may preserve youth even as [it] is desired, will they pay the price as is necessary.”

      “That is, one must consider the diet, as well as application of knowledge obtained from within?” the man continued, pressing for more details.

      “To be sure,” Cayce replied. (900-465)

      Cayce’s view of our potential longevity and youth is consistent with the natural laws of the universe as we find them in the animal kingdom. According to biologists, the life span of a species is from eight to ten times the age at which it is first capable of reproduction. Theoretically, then, humans should live to at least 120 to 150 years of age.

      Scientists working on geriatrics and longevity in countries all over the world are saying that the average life span of a human being should be about 140 years. Cellular researchers believe that, since it is possible to keep certain cells alive indefinitely in an optimum nutritional environment, theoretically it could be possible for humans to live forever.

      Dr. Augustus B. Kinzel, former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, predicts that “man’s dream of never aging will become a fact and notable progress will be evident as early as 1980.”

      Even a past president of the conservative American Medical Association, the late Dr. Edward L. Bortz, of Philadelphia’s Lankenau Hospital, speculated that there is no reason why, by the year 2000, we should not all be living to at least 100 years of age.

      For as the Mind is the Builder—or “as a man thinketh so is he”—so does that mind, that body, that soul, expand to meet the needs of same. (564–1)

      . . . all strength, all healing of every nature is the changing of the vibrations from within—the attuning of the divine within the living tissue of a body to Creative Energies. This alone is healing. Whether it is accomplished by the use of drugs, the knife or what not, it is the attuning of the atomic structure of the living cellular force to its spiritual heritage. (1967–1)

      . . . there is within the grasp of man all that in nature that is the counterpart of that in the mental and spiritual realms and an antidote for every poison, for every ill in the individual experience, if there will but be applied nature, natural sources.

      (2396-2)

       ... it is upon Health, not upon ill health that our sights should be fixed.

       —Dr. Roger J. Williams

       In fact, there are places in the world where men and women are presently alive, healthy, and capable of reproducing well past the century mark. —H.J.R.