Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season. Harmon Hartzell Bro

which he saw from his trance state. As in all his readings, he appeared more interested in developing independent grown-ups making their own decisions than in getting results on particular tissues, except where serious illness was present. Cigarettes (those made from pure tobacco—not easy to find) he allowed in moderation, as he did limited amounts of caffeine and alcohol, indicating that the body was equipped to turn these into foods or useful stimuli. He was less charitable about carbonated beverages, described as “slops” for one nutrition seeker (though pure Coca-Cola syrup he sometimes prescribed as medication). Many were startled, however, at his unyielding admonition over the years not to combine coffee and cream, or citrus juices and cereals, since these were on the breakfast menus of so many Americans. But the entranced Cayce insisted that careful research would show these combinations to be stressful to digestion.

      Assimilation was presented, of course, as a wider process than digesting food and drink. There was taking “in” through breathing and through the skin. Fumes, special baths, and nutrient massages all had a place in the Cayce array of remedies. Peanut oil, he insisted, could in many cases prevent or alleviate arthritis when rubbed into irritated areas, especially in combination with soaking in Epsom salts and colonic irrigations, where needed. Other kinds of salves, rubs, and packs added to the assimilation process, including a compound originating with Cayce which his files showed had been remarkably effective in reducing or preventing development of scar tissue. He prescribed what to rub on or around breasts to enlarge or shrink them, and what to apply for loss of hair (part of it derived from another external covering, the peelings of potatoes). Sunlight, so widely used by Americans for tanning, he recommended only before ten or after two o’clock standard time—hours when burning was minimal.

      The most sophisticated of the nutrient interventions required reinjecting the leukemia patient’s own blood after treating it, or using electrical circuits to transfer gold chloride to the body for rebuilding nerves, or applying mercury-vapor light through green quartz glass for certain kinds of cancer. Even the body’s own resources could be used to bring it special aid, he explained, as he directed the construction of a battery-like appliance to take tiny natural electrical impulses from one portion of the body and circulate them to others. In much of this unusual counsel we were surrounded by riddles, many of which would not in fact receive research attention until well after the war. But overall it was clear that in assimilation, as in elimination, Cayce was seeking to maximize natural body function rather than practice gross intervention. He insisted that the body could create, when not too damaged, all the chemicals it needed from familiar, balanced supplies.

      But of course bodies brought to Cayce’s vision were often grossly upset or impaired. So he supplied the chemicals he saw as needed. His original compound to prevent seasickness and other motion sickness was widely used by those who knew about it. Other effective original prescriptions dealt with the morning sickness of pregnant women, in addition to his cough syrups and laxatives. He dictated a formula for salve to place on infected gums, which was modestly marketed by a friend as Ipsab and another for hemorrhoids called Tim. A leading toothpaste which featured prevention of gum irritation, he told me, had used a derivative of Ipsab from his readings, though I could not verify this. Further, a Hindu scientist named Dr. Bisey had come to Cayce with a plan to develop a form of iodine which released I-one molecules along with the usual I-two. A series of readings produced Atomidine, which Cayce in trance suggested in very small amounts for cleansing and regulating endocrine gland function. The range of what he saw or created to add to the body through assimilation was evidently as wide as it was cautiously handled.

       Feeding the Mind

      What did the readings feature to place “in” the mind? That choice appeared to be more important to Cayce in trance than to most of us, who thought in terms of stimulating and equipping the mind, but not usually in terms of feeding it. Yet to him the mind was the great fashioner not only of bodily health but of human destiny, when used wisely with the will (which he saw as a primal given in the human makeup). In this view we became not only what we ate and drank, but also—in one lifetime or another—whatever we fed the mind upon, by what we thought and cared about. Cayce paid more attention to the daily working of the unconscious or subconscious than most people not engaged in psychotherapy. Often he stressed the mind’s ultimate suggestibility. The deeper levels of the psyche would build up, magnify, and manifest what they were centered on, by the remarkable creativity which was the mind’s nature. Like Paul he saw an important distinction between living “to” the flesh and “with” the flesh, because in his view, humans could be shaped to become virtual animals if they chose. Choosing reading and companionship, then, as well as play and devotions, employment and travel, arts and artifacts, was not merely an issue of coping and being pleasantly distracted. Choices set directions that would bear results in the months and years—or centuries—of personal growth and health which followed.

      The unconscious Cayce did not refer to the oral-character type from Freud, which represents a lifestyle of dependency and incorporation from others. But he seemed well aware that there were both positive and negative trends in the mind’s ingesting process. There were gullibility, copying, and uncritical swallowing of people and ideas, just as there was biting or tearing at what came before the supercritical intellect. Cayce followed the Bible in counting the tongue a mighty member, and speech such a molder of reality and relationships that the Word became a symbol of God’s own creative action. He agreed with Jesus that what came out of the mouth in speech was more important than what went into it, as he stressed what the mind fed upon through the mouth’s chatter, with respect to fantasies, hopes, memories, gossip, or blessings. These would determine what later came out of that mouth as command, creation, and call. Hundreds of times he developed in his readings the theme “Mind is the builder,” connecting it to the second person of the Trinity, the Logos with whom all things were made. Yet the mind alone, as in biblical thought, could trip itself with imagination and had to be correlated with a disciplined will. In his perspective, passions were not the central human predicament so much as the directing mind and will.

      Cayce assigned to the mind a remarkable degree of autonomy, rather than determinism. While he took account of influences on the psyche from parents, teachers, and other molders of upbringing (not to mention influences from past lives or experiences between these), he seemed to assign even greater weight to the individual’s capacity to feed himself or herself on prized values. Here he appeared to depart from orthodox psychoanalytic emphasis on childhood’s definitive shaping. The key to using adult autonomy, in his view, was setting ideals, to be brought before the individual’s consciousness again and again, both in coded symbolism (what would later be called right-brain activity) and in rational decision-making and planning (left brain activity.)³³ Such self-chosen feeding would operate not only on one’s loving and productivity but upon health itself. He meant by “ideal” not an arbitrary goal or what he called an “idea” as part of a governing ideology, but a thoughtfully weighed construct to which one would give unreserved commitment in a major area of life. Such an ideal embodied a direction to which one answered with the depths of one’s being, not an arbitrary, self-serving aspiration.³⁴ Vocation, in the religious sense of being called to live by chosen ideals, was a process not reserved for monastics or religious leaders, but meant for everyone.

      “Draw two lines upon a piece of paper,” he often counseled, “and put into columns labeled as spiritual, mental, and physical what you would enter as ‘My ideal.’ ” The entries in the columns, he warned, would often need to be changed and correlated so that they supported and implemented each other. And often they would require erasing for restating or enlarging. Ultimately, he said, the person would develop formulations not only practical, but translucent to the divine. For those who found it helpful, the ideal could be weighed against the person and the prayer-sought presence of the Christ. In quiet times and in turbulent times, one could well ask, “What would He have me do?” A useful answer would come more quickly to those who fed upon a chosen ideal than to those who merely drifted or lived reactively upon the pressures and demands of others.

      Cayce never wearied of explaining that the care and feeding of the mind required caution about projecting its contents. What we saw in others that distressed or commanded us with too prompt emotion, he explained, was often perceived because