Edgar Cayce 👁⚡👁

⚡"Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions"

―Edgar Cayce

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This continues my chronological list of The Top 10 Prophets of All Time.

Links featuring the previous visionaries that I featured are at the bottom.

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Episode #9-

Edgar Cayce—

1877-1945

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Hailed as “America’s Sleeping Prophet”, he is the most documented psychic of the 20th Century.

Edgar Cayce (pronounced "Cay-see") was born in rural Kentucky on March 18, 1877, one of six children in a fundamentalist Christian family.

As a child, Edgar claimed to be able to see the spirit of his deceased grandfather. He loved going to church, but he was bad in school. Considered slow by his teachers and by his father, he was especially horrible at spelling.

Then one night an angel spoke to him, saying, “Sleep now, and we will help you.” He dozed off with his spelling book under his head. Then next day when he awoke, he realized he had all the words cemented in his memory; he knew every lesson.

His father became upset with him, thinking Edgar had been faking when he had previously been so inept at spelling.

After that, Cayce used the same technique for every subject. He slept on all his textbooks and became the best student in the school.

Gradually, Edgar became aware of what he referred to as “the thing I do.” At the age of 24, he first used a trance to help another person. It wasn’t until he was 46, however, that he decided to devout his life’s work to his cultivating his extrasensory abilities.

Cayce had a plain green couch in a small office where twice a day he would lie down and step-by-step take himself into a state of altered awareness. While in a trance, he would answer questions put to him by people in the room, sometimes questions sent in letters, read aloud by his wife Gertrude.

Other people took notes, recording Cayce’s answers.

When they were through with a reading, Gertrude would direct Edgar to wake up.

He would open his eyes, stretch, and ask what happened. “Did you get anything?” He never had any conscious recall of the things he said while he was entranced.

Cayce was a simple Christian man who read the Bible in its entirety once for every year he was alive. He taught Sunday school, helped recruit missionaries, and was a devout member of the Disciples of Christ.

He never called himself a “psychic,” but he could see auras around people. He spoke to angels and to dead people. Since it was commonly believed that such abilities were acquired by making some pact with the devil— in his early years, Cayce agonized about whether or not his talents were truly delivered from a Higher Source.

While in his sleeping (hypnotic) state, he spoke languages he had never learned, used technical terms that were foreign to him, and seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge.

A local hypnotist named Al Layne became a proponent of Cayce, believing Edgar to be clairvoyant. Cayce accurately prescribed effective cures for ailments that Layne had while he was in a hypnotic state. It was Layne who then urged Edgar to present his gifts to the public. Cayce agreed under one condition: all his therapeutics would be given for free.

Over his lifetime, Cayce gave over fourteen thousand recorded readings. Nearly seventy percent of them were medical diagnoses, suggested treatments for diseases and other ailments. He had no medical training, and, indeed, would be arrested later in life for practicing medicine without a license. He was prescribing healing formulas made from natural ingredients. Some of his herbal remedies are still sold today. He is regarded by many as ‘the Father of Modern Holistic medicine.’

In 1910, Cayce made headlines nationwide. The New York Times proclaimed, “Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.” After that, he started getting letters from people all over the world. Cayce refused every lucrative offer to go into business with others, never using his gifts for profit.

After he became world famous, a committee of “experts” came to test him.

Edgar put himself into a trance and while he was under, these men shoved a pin through his cheek and peeled back one of his fingernails. He exhibited no pain. He didn’t even start bleeding heavily until he regained consciousness.

For years afterwards, Cayce’s finger ached. After that, Edgar refused any more investigations into his abilities. He would only do readings for people who needed helped and believed in his gifts.

Cayce believed that every person is psychic, to varying degrees, and that we can all develop our natural intuitive capabilities.

He said…

The mind, Cayce espoused, is especially powerful in shaping health and wellness. Over and over throughout his entire life, he talked about how our minds shape our own realities. And he didn’t believe we should seek extrasensory experiences to satisfy our curiosity about having them, but instead to help others. Thereby, we further our own spiritual growth.

Cayce tried to duck publicity. He was a shy man who often couldn't speak above a whisper except when he was in a trance. He hated the idea of becoming a celebrity.

When glamorous movie star Joan Crawford called him once to ask him to come to Hollywood to give her an urgently needed reading, he told her he might be able to work her into his schedule… in a year or two.

Constantly poor, he filed repeatedly for bankruptcy. His wife was often ill. Tragically, he couldn’t seem to help her with his psychic gifts and one of his children died.

Cayce was often depressed by his own unworthiness.

While he had his fans, the general public viewed him with suspicion. It was widely believed at that time that people who engaged in hypnosis were prone to going insane. Basically, he was a freak, or in his own words, “very eccentric in many ways,” but he was respected in his hometown... and that actually said a lot about his character.

Cayce was born only a few years after the Civil War ended. Kentucky was a state in turmoil when Edgar was young, dealing with a freed black population that had formerly been slaves.

Cayce's father was an alcoholic and a racist.

When Edgar was an adult and began giving his readings, everything he was saying was contrary to the general thinking of everyone around him.

He talked about reincarnation and karma, which was especially in conflict with the teachings of his fundamentalist Christian church. We have to wonder if one of the reasons Cayce went into sleeping trances in the first place was to disassociate himself from the things he was saying in his readings. In the last years of his life, Cayce could give readings for people while he remained conscious, just by looking at them.

In 1931, wealthy supporters of Cayce’s banned together on a mission to give Edgar a measure of protection and stability. Construction began on a hospital in Virginia Beach, Virginia. It became the Association for Research and Enlightenment, INC and it exists to this day. 🌈

The A.R.E. is a nonprofit organization that has cataloged Cayce’s readings on more than ten thousand different topics, everything from medical readings, to historical questions, to the metaphysical.

In April of 1929, Edgar warned all his friends to sell every stock they had. He accurately predicted the stock market crash that would happen in October of that year. Many people became rich (and/or staved off financial disaster) because of Cayce’s advice.

In 1931, Cayce was traumatized by visions of a coming World War in which millions of people would die.

He went on to later predict the rise of the Nazis, and foretold which countries would engage in World War II.

At first, he inaccurately thought Hitler's intentions were pure.

Edgar predicted that Communism would end in the Soviet Union (at a time when such a prospect seemed like madness). He knew that both India and Israel would become independent nations. He foresaw the invention of the laser. He predicted the deaths of FDR and JFK. He even gave a fascinating prediction (in 1929) of how large communication companies would one day consolidate their power.

Cayce’s critics were/are many and they were/are quick to point out how many of his predictions were spectacularly wrong.

He predicted a catastrophic earthquake in California that never happened.

He said parts of Alabama would become submerged between 1936-1938.

He said New York City would slide into the Atlantic in the 1970s.

One of his more interesting errors was predicting that the city of Livingston, Montana, would become the financial capital of the world. 🤔

He also falsely predicted that China would be a Christian nation by now.

Cayce brought back information from his trances that challenged his own worldview, especially those regarding reincarnation. Over the years, several of his readings that were dealing with ailments indicated the root cause of the condition was karma from a previous lifetime.

The word ‘karma’ is never mentioned, of course, in the Bible, but the concept is not unknown to Christian belief; it’s simply described differently, worded as “you reap what you sow.”

Yet another way of recognizing the same universal truth is stated as, “What Goes Around... Comes Back Around.”

When asked to explain his own abilities, Cayce said that he consulted “the Akashic Records”, also called “The Book of Life” and/or “God’s Book of Remembrance.”

The Akashic Records was a kind of spiritual storehouse of all the thoughts, deeds, words, feelings, and intentions of every individual who ever lived. This abiding record has tremendous influence over our daily lives and the potential we draw to ourselves. In Reading 1650-1, he described this cosmic source…

"Upon time and space is written the thoughts, the deeds, the activities of an entity – as in relationships to its environs, its hereditary influence; as directed – or judgment drawn by or according to what the entity's ideal is. Hence, as it has been oft called, the record is God's book of remembrance; and each entity, each soul – as the activities of a single day of an entity in the material world – either makes same good or bad or indifferent, depending upon the entity's application of self..."

These Akashic Records connect every living soul. They are portions of the Divine Mind, archetypal patterns of human experience that have inspired dreams and shape all levels of consciousness. The Records also embody ever-changing possible futures, shaped by our intentions and interactions.

Cayce was heavily influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung and his theory of the Collective Unconscious.

Edgar died in 1945 at the age of 69. He was labeled by the press as “America’s Nostradamus” (see Part 3 of this 10-part series ⚡😁👍 )

Despite the catastrophes that Edgar Cayce foresaw, despite the atrocities of two World Wars that occurred during his lifetime, he remained optimistic about humanity’s future.

He Believed an Age would finally Dawn when People Would Work Together to build Hope and Community for All.

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This concludes Part Nine of this Series. The final episode is forthcoming tomorrow.

⚡______________Bolt⚡

Here's the other figures I've featured, going backward in time...