Area : ESPRIT
Date : Oct 31 '95, 23:03
From : Silverstreak, 1:3418/3.6
To   : All
Subj : Edgar Cayce


Posted to Esprit with Permission from Editor/Publisher David Sunfellow

NHNE News Brief 11 (Monday, October 16, 1995)
Copyright 1995 By NewHeavenNewEarth
Published By NewHeavenNewEarth / nhne@sedona.net

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50 YEARS LATER: A TRIBUTE TO EDGAR CAYCE
By David Sunfellow

Long before Gordon-Michael Scallion was captivating international
audiences with talk of earth changes and ancient civilizations; long
before "holistic health" was a household word; long before mainstream
Americans were talking about astrology, auras, past lives and psychic
abilities, there was a simple man who laid on a couch and gave psychic
"readings" on all of these topics--over 14,000 in all. Along with a
handful of other 20th century seers, Edgar Cayce profoundly influenced
virtually every aspect of today's New Age/planetary transformation
movement. Some movements, like A COURSE IN MIRACLES, openly
acknowledge the importance Cayce and his organization (THE ASSOCIATION
FOR RESEARCH AND ENLIGHTENMENT) played in their paths. Many others may
not even realize how Cayce, his readings, and his organization helped
prepare the way for them to share their gifts with the world.

In commemoration of Cayce's passing (50 years ago this year), the
A.R.E. recently published an article by Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D.,
who is the only living person who worked daily with Cayce on hundreds
of his readings. Bro, who is also the only graduate-trained social
scientist ever to observe Cayce's readings, has spent years
challenging the idea that Cayce was first and foremost "a psychic."
Rather, Bro contends Cayce was first and foremost "a man of prayer;"
someone who, above all, longed for and sought after God. According to
Bro:  "Working with professional psychics, some of the best in our
land and from Europe, has been a special privilege for me as a
psychologist of religion. I have studied them at work, for days,
months, or even years at a time; there have been mediums,
clairvoyants, psychometrists, healers, diviners, channels, and
confidants of poltergeists. I have learned much of laws and processes
from these athletes and opera stars of psi; they have greatly enriched
my li fe and my theories. But the image that ever haunts me is not of
their impressive powers. It is of a photographer...of a man of prayer
[Edgar Cayce], who understood with Paul that powers not born directly
from loving relationship only make us booming gongs and tinkling
cymbals..."  Cayce, according to Bro, was one of those rare human
beings that lived an honest life; free, in large measure, from all the
hocus pocus and false posturing we so see often today. He had a
calling and a gift, but he wasn't perfect, nor were his readings--and
he knew it. He made mistakes. He didn't understand everything. He was
required to grow and change and give up deeply ingrained beliefs he
once thought were true. In the end, Cayce, in Bro's recollection,
doesn't emerge as someone who knew where he was going or how to get
there. Rather, he emerges like many of us might: as a person who loved
God (and Jesus) and spent his life trying to follow, often rather
clumsily, where he felt he was being led.

In honor of Cayce's 50 year anniversary and in the hopes that some of
Cayce's heartfelt devotion to God might rub off on the rest of us,
here are excerpts from two articles written by Harmon Bro about Edgar
Cayce. The first series of quotes come from Bro's recent commemorative
article, "Edgar Cayce Revisited: Fifty Years Later; Finding the Man
Behind the Icon," that appeared in A.R.E. COMMUNITY, October, 1995,
while the second article, "Was Edgar Cayce Really A Psychic?," comes
from an article that appeared several years earlier in the A.R.E's
VENTURE INWARD MAGAZINE.

"There was a dark shadow of self-doubt that lived somewhere inside
him. He knew that he had once lost his gift--he then thought
permanently--by using it to predict the outcome of horse races. He
remembered the time he was brought to Chicago to demonstrate his gift
for a newspaper, and the editors demanded that he levitate an
elephant. He looked back on this period of giving oil drilling
readings and heading the Cayce Petroleum Company in Texas as a time
when he had lost his way--and nearly lost his family--and when his
readings had apparently gone wrong for the first time. He was stained
by the loss of his hospital and university, when he could not provide
sufficient leadership to hold his quarrelsome backers together. He
argued hotly with his gifted elder son, Hugh Lynn, who was his
principle helper, his tormentor, and his conscience. So, as a natural
extremist by temperament, he could be moody, suddenly withdrawn, and
needful of appreciation... But if an individual is finally best known
by where he or she is headed, rather than by where he or she has been,
then we must meet Cayce as a person seeking the closer walk with God.
This was the defining relationship from which all others sprang."

 "Of all that I recall with deep feeling about Cayce the man, it is
his modesty, his God-evoked humility, which I find hardest to
represent today to my associates fascinated with his powers...
Clearly his modesty, including self-depreciation with wry humor, was a
chosen discipline, not wholly a natural posture.  For he was a man of
great bearing, who knew he was special.  Head waiters and church
ushers, grocery clerks and physicians, all showed a spontaneous
deference in meeting him...  His dreams and mystical experiences,
which he shared with me in great reticence, had shown him chosen to
help prepare the way for the return of the Christ to His own.  He did
not doubt the call nor the implications for his stature, though he
understood that the first shall be last and that love requires
preferring the other person sincerely.  He must also be described as a
man of high intelligence... and his lack of formal education beyond
grade school had been easily compensated by his rich church experience
and the astonishing array of famous people--from Houdini to Barrymore
to Woodrow Wilson--who had sought him out (he was twice brought to the
White House by Edith Wilson to give readings)."

    From "Edgar Cayce Revisited: Fifty Years Later;
            Finding the Man Behind the Icon"

"Walking closer with God was for him the whole ballgame.  The evidence
is in his letters, in his Sunday afternoon talks at the Cayce
hospital, in his sketchy but earnest memoirs, and in the questions he
asked in readings given on himself.  It is in the dreams he recorded,
in notes taken on the Bible-study classes he led, and in his deeply
felt spoken prayers which echo still in the hearts of those of us who
heard them. The evidence of the centrality for him of relationship,
not powers, is in scores of photos of individuals and couples who he
cherished and tried to serve, tacked on the walls over the studio
couch where he gave readings."

"Nobody who knew Cayce well would suggest that he got up in the
morning and went to bed at night thinking of his trances and how he
might improve and promote them.  Nor thinking of his other evident
powers, such as reading minds, seeing auras, and viewing discarnates.
Living with him made clear that he arose and lay down with prayer, not
as duty or as accomplishment, but as his hungry reaching for God..."

"The scandal of the Cayce legacy is obvious, though not often publicly
discussed.  It is that in forty years [now fifty], or an entire
generation, we have managed so little in replicating his kind of
service to others.  Successors were promised;  few have appeared,
though many have tried to pull the psychic sword from the rock.  Could
it be that we have jammed the whole process, by ardently pursuing
powers of the mind, when only relationships will work?"

"Cayce's central relationship was with 'the Father,' most often as he
found Him shown in 'the Son,' the Galilean whom he called 'the
Master.' Out of Cayce's awed and tender devotion, tested and toughened
by his failures, he found remarkable results in capacities to help
others... The point is this: the cry of his heart was not for greater
powers.  It was for a fuller relationship with his Lord."

   From "Was Edgar Cayce Really A Psychic?"

Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D., is a longtime professor of world religions
and psychology of religion, as well as a Jungian psychotherapist.  He
is also co-director of PILGRIM INSTITUTE (an organization that has
sought, with some success, to understand and replicate Cayce's central
gifts) and teaches graduate courses, which include the work of Edgar
Cayce, for students at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He
has recently created audio and video tapes on themes in Cayce's life.
Inquiries can be made to PILGRIM INSTITUTE, 62 Fifer Lane, Lexington,
MA, 02173.

--- PPoint 1.98
 * Origin: RMS (1:3418/3.6)