Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season. Harmon Hartzell Bro

But again and again it seemed as we listened that each of us could well be appointed to grow toward a love so strong, so steady, so clean that we could become channels of resources from beyond ourselves, where love would be surprised by wisdom.

      As visitors came (often to hear their own readings), I asked them what they made of the process as they left the room. Two themes dominated their responses. One was best put by a thoughtful student: “We are known, all the way. And not just by Cayce.” As did others, he felt the astonishing certitude, almost alarming in its force, that he was known to the smallest details of his bodily organs and the deepest recesses of his thoughts. Who did the knowing and supplied the helpful responses to it? He answered that no sparrow falls without that same knowing.

      The other response which I heard in varying words was this: “How we are loved!” Here even the fact of intimate knowledge was absorbed in the sense of being cared for and called by name. Something greater than Cayce seemed present to these people in the peculiar trances at the edge of the ocean, during a shattering time of history.

      The next task was to see the larger outlines of Cayce’s work. What was he essentially called to be and do in his resurrection process? But as the days slid into weeks in that rainy fall in a blacked-out resort town, it was evident that a portrait of the unschooled but immensely creative Cayce would require painting on a very large canvas indeed.

      ¹⁷Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy, 1923.

      ¹⁸See Tart, Charles, Altered States of Consciousness, 1969, and States of Consciousness, 1975.

      ¹⁹See Bro, Harmon H., Dreams in the Life of Prayer, 1970.

      ²⁰Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, 1954.

      ²¹On the anima, see Jung’s most systematic statement of his theories in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, vol. 7. Also, Jung, Emma, Animus and Anima, 1957.

      ²²I Corinthians 5:3.

       CHAPTER 4

       No Disease without a Cure

      One rainy afternoon a car pulled up at the foot of the walk that curved to the Cayce home and offices. A woman in her thirties climbed out, hoisted herself onto crutches, tugged her crippled legs to the steps, and entered the door to the library, where half a dozen of us were working. She had stopped by before to see a volunteer on our small staff who was giving her daily massages at her home for her poliomyelitis handicap. “Watch!” she commanded us. Laying down her crutches, she slowly walked the length of the room unaided, then back again while we shouted and applauded. There were tears in the room. Her achievement had climaxed two years of intensive daily work in a taxing, multiform regimen specified by readings. We all knew how rarely, anywhere in the country, limbs were restored after damage by this frightening disease. She had more rebuilding of her body to do but left using her crutches jauntily, delighted with her small but triumphant excursion.

      Soon after came another case just as forceful. A naval officer in uniform arrived with his wife and infant from the Chicago area for a reading which seemed their last hope. The child was crying, and I offered to hold it while the parents went into the study. It never stopped crying. The little boy had been in and out of hospitals, suffering with cancer of the head and eyes, which had made him blind. His pain was continuous. When the parents emerged from the reading an hour later, it was bewildering to see them smiling and energetic, for the case had seemed impossible to cure. According to “the information,” they could expect a full recovery. They must undertake without deviation a complex treatment under the care of a Philadelphia physician. (I followed the boy’s dramatic case all the way to complete cure and restoration of his vision, keeping the doctor as a colleague and friend for thirty years.)

      We had to be mindful of spontaneous remissions. And there were faith cures; how the mind could influence the body had been shown in studies of what was called the “subliminal” region by William James²³ and F.W.H. Myers²⁴ and so brilliantly elaborated by Freud²⁵ and others as the unconscious. Such influences could not and should not be ruled out in remarkable cases of healing. But one could not overlook, either, Cayce’s specific clinical procedures, used under medical supervision. Months or years of tedious effort were often required. To be sure, the demanding nature of this effort sometimes seemed part of the cure because it taxed and fired the faith and active love of all those involved.

      The faces of the cripple and the tormented baby stayed with me as I interviewed scores of other subjects and talked with their family members. Especially compelling were children whom Cayce had guided through threatened births or rescued from life-imperiling illnesses. Even while I played and teased with them after interrogating their parents, I weighed the thought: this youngster might not be here at all but for a photographer who took better pictures than our culture thought possible.

       I Never Read One of Cayce’s Readings

      A few doctors in the Virginia Beach and Norfolk area took referrals from Cayce seriously and were willing to talk with me. Most were osteopaths. But there was also an M.D. who would on occasion write prescriptions that Cayce recommended. He insisted that Cayce’s transcripts be read aloud to him so that he could affirm to any suspicious colleagues that “I never read one of Cayce’s readings.” There was the local pharmacist, a college classmate of Cayce’s eldest son, who had for years filled Cayce’s prescriptions, even those that seemed to his training to be dubious, hopeless, or dangerous. So far he had never regretted it. He reported case after case to me in which an unorthodox chemical resource from Cayce’s readings had produced surprisingly effective results.

      Suppose Cayce’s process could one day supplement medical care? How would it work? Would there be one or more gifted figures attached to clinics or hospitals, busy with baffling cases? Though it seemed unlikely, we had already processed a request to Cayce from the dean of a Harvard graduate school and had discovered that Still-Hildreth osteopathic hospital in Missouri found Cayce’s aid so valuable that they routinely sent him reports on patients he referred. Decades later I would witness the unobtrusive use of psychic specialists by multi-staff clinics run by medical doctors. But the prospect seemed dim in the mid-1940s.

      Would medical education include courses and supervision in heightened perception, equipping physicians to use their intuition and prayer guidance? I could not guess then that within two years I would be meeting with a medical faculty in Chicago to explore just such options, and in later years be invited to medical centers (several times to the Mayo Clinic) to conduct workshops and consultations on maximizing such resources for physicians. Would patients be pressed to use self-help intuitive guidance, with nightly dreams checking their daytime impressions? This, too, was difficult to conceive, though in fact I would later lecture for national medical groups on just this process and watch it gain surprisingly wide momentum. It was more reasonable to picture researchers providing the decisive parallel to Cayce, working in teams to follow leads from him and other gifted figures on particular illnesses. Given the perilously small number of researchers interested in Cayce during wartime, it seemed unlikely. But later I would meet with faculty from Johns Hopkins and a whole cluster of Philadelphia medical schools to work on just such projects.

      In the years that followed, the potent impact of observing and studying Cayce’s medical service would lead me into my own second vocation of health care alongside my teaching in psychology of religion. As a professional counselor and psychotherapist, I would labor for decades with Cayce’s concepts of health and treatment, not only in private practice in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere, but serving several years apiece as a consultant and staff member in teaching hospitals. In due time I would teach psychotherapy in graduate schools and institutes, supervise graduate counselors, design a major Veterans Administration hospital program for substance abuse, serve in a residential farm community for young psychotics, run a multi-unit hospital research program, and even find myself cited in American Men of Science.²⁶ June would also get her doctorate