Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season. Harmon Hartzell Bro

aching back,” or how one could not “stand” a person or activity. Indeed, just such metaphoric illness was the basis of part of what Cayce called karma in the physical dimension. One reading told a man that his asthma (which almost suffocated him) was set up by his squeezing the life out of others in a prior existence. The implication was that how we pressed ourselves and others, or how we invested ourselves, shaped our health as truly as what we discharged or ate.

      Since one dimension of “push” was failure to push enough in useful directions, Cayce in trance spoke firmly about health consequences to those who drifted or indulged themselves, not using the treasures of their talents or experience. He often asked people who sought his aid why they wanted to get well, daring them to set a better life direction. One could see the pattern he addressed in questions from correspondence that betrayed narcissism, hypochondria, or other over-absorption in self. In the view of the readings, bodies were made to be used, love was for creating, and life was for spending. Not infrequently someone given medical counsel might hear a burning citation of the needs of the poor, lonely, or downtrodden, alongside drugs, rubs, and enemas.

      But failure to push was no more destructive to health than the opposite pattern—pushing too hard or in the wrong directions. This problem was prominent among Cayce’s counselees, since he tended to draw for counsel independent thinkers who drove or dominated themselves and others. So he offered relaxation procedures, with places and times for getting reflective and refreshed, along with admonitions about balanced lives in which work and play were intertwined under the star of high purpose. Changes of pace were presented not simply for stimulus or distraction, but for survival, since the body could not sustain the compulsive ways so often visited upon it by strong-minded people. Even Cayce himself was sternly warned in his own readings to take breaks, seek contrasts, go on trips, play and go fishing, lest he grow ill and fail to serve the very people for whom he drove himself.

      To relieve pressure and stress, there was massage given by someone loving, just as setting out to massage another would help to awaken one’s own sense of unforced vital energies. Exercises were spelled out for each region of the body, and for internal needs of various organs, to implement the proper, unhurried use of “push.”

      There were exercises to prepare pregnant women for delivery, exercises to reduce or eliminate the need for glasses, and exercises helpful to meditation. Walking was enjoined on everyone, and swimming often encouraged. A healthy body had to be used physically, but rest and relaxation were a necessary counterpoint to the effort. A period of rest after lunch was often advised, a thrust that might delight those from cultures featuring siesta. Travel, vacations, and sport all got their due. Cayce took prompt account in his readings of limits from injuries and congenital impairments, or exposure hazards to chronic body weaknesses. But a fundamental note was sounded. Like a fine musical instrument, the body would perform best and keep its health if it were used in balance to bring joy into the world.

       Investing the Mind

      In the mental dimension of health, push also appeared. How an individual used the conscience or control systems of his or her life would be reflected in tissues. Self-indulgence under faulty controls would lead not only to flaccid muscles and poor circulation, but to organ impairment, depending on whether the indulgence were food, sex, alcohol, self-importance, or some other. Cayce pressed those whose life circles had collapsed inward to reach out to others in need, to take up new hobbies, to take on new friends, to read, to risk. Yet by contrast he warned those who allowed their mental controls and expectations to press them too hard that they would have their own health problems. They would find effects on tissues in congestion, inflammation, and other destructive consequences of too much adrenaline in the system. Correcting either excess required sorting ideals to discover what was really worthwhile and then changing what was not truly and wisely self-chosen.

      The entranced Cayce did not use Freud’s concept of phallic character structure to represent personality trends toward exhibitionism or overly competitive striving against others. But such processes seemed well represented. For example, the first law of growth in the sequence of tasks that made up the spiritual manual developed anonymously by Cayce and his friends, called A Search for God,³⁶ was not assertive self-improvement but cooperation. Such an emphasis was useful for those of his counselees who were perfectionists caught in their self-appointed striving, or so gripped by ambition as to eviscerate their humanness. Yet the other pole of behavior—not being sufficiently self-assertive—also caught Cayce’s attention because of the self-pity and self-damaging anger which it so often generated, as well as lonely lives. “Every tub must sit on its own bottom,” he urged, and added for some, “So live that you may look anyone in the eye and tell him to go to hell.” For those who had sold out to a symbiotic relationship with parent, spouse, or some other guarantor, Cayce stipulated a self-inventory to take full responsibility for one’s own life, lest illness mirror the protesting spirit of the person, through the rebellion of cancer cells, the irritation of an ulcer, or the throb of headaches.

      Cayce did not offer an ascetic model as the optimal means for balancing push and relaxation in the body, though he did not condemn it for those who chose it wisely. Like the Buddha he offered a middle path, which brought together ecstasy and responsibility. Joy should be the spirit of a vital life at all levels, including the sexual as well as the intellectual when these were responsibly chosen. Bodies were viscera as truly as muscles and nerves.

      A special trap to the mind, as one sought to give effective “push” to one’s life, lay in excessive fear and doubt. Over and over the readings pointed out that these normal processes could, if exaggerated, produce dismay, consternation, depression, and even disintegration of personhood. Fear and doubt were the primary sources (other than organ impairment) of mental illness, both in their corrosive action on self-respect and judgment, and in their debilitating effects on nerve circuits and body organs flooded with anxiety. Those caught in the twin mires of fear and doubt might well need to be rescued by others. Yet such persons must not be left in dependency but encouraged to formulate their own governing ideals and values and to begin acting on them (precisely as modern psychotherapy so often attempts). To tame fear and doubt, each person could well inquire about the difference between what Cayce called one’s “personality” and “individuality,” where the former stood for the self necessarily set before others to be seen, appreciated, and engaged in workaday affairs, while the latter stood for the true nature of the unique being. (The distinction was a solid match for Jung’s contrast of persona and self.)³⁷ Both structures, in Cayce’s view, had to be brought into alignment, until the outer person expressed the patterns of the inner person and one could affirm self-worth without exaggerated fear or doubt. Cayce’s formula for both self-appraisal and the appraisal of others was “What ye measure in others will be inwardly measured in you.” While biblical in origin, it was congruent with the perspectives of psychotherapy.

       Investing the Spirit

      For my entries of push in the spiritual dimension of health, the first question was who did the pushing: the ultimate author of an individual’s life and opportunities. Self-responsibility was a strong, recurrent theme in the readings. It was prominent, for example, in the treatment of reincarnation and karma, where both suffering and creative talents were frequently presented as fruits of choices and deeds undertaken long ago. But self-responsibility and trying to author oneself were not the same. In Cayce’s view the biblical metaphor of call and response was most often used to address the question of destiny. Each soul had been called into being with certain unique possibilities, talents, and gifts. It was not finally self-invented. Being responsible, then, meant responding to that original call of the Creator, however dimly or clearly heard, in activities which plucked the vibrating string of central purpose set within each person by the Maker. At times Cayce drew on Isaiah 6:8, urging, “When the call comes, ‘Here am I; send me; use me!’ ” to suggest how the individual’s pushing might best be shaped in relationship to God. Such an approach could forestall the cramp and rebellion of a self-contrived life, sure to manifest itself in disorders of the body.

      The spiritual issue of sacrifice came up inevitably in notes on the “push”