Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 22

But his opportunity to serve was also his threat. Gertrude explained, when we asked how he could possibly schedule readings for so many people at the rate of two per day, that he had taken to squeezing several readings into each period. Now at the morning time of eleven and the afternoon time of three-thirty he was giving two or four or six—or even more, if they were short checkups. This meant he was unconscious each time not for forty-five minutes but up to twice that length or even two hours. She was obviously concerned, citing trance counsel some time ago which indicated he could safely do two to five readings a day when in good health. Under our questioning she spelled out the danger to her husband’s well-being, and perhaps even to his life, as he tried to respond to the pleas in so many letters. Cayce turned away and paced the floor, obviously determined not to be deterred.

She explained that from both physicians and their own readings they had discovered his state was not a simple hypnotic trance. It was a deep change in Edgar’s entire body, as we would see. They were told it was near to a death coma, with most of his body functions greatly slowed or suspended. His daily work was a kind of small dying. They had to be careful to give him a precise suggestion at each session, just before he awakened, that all of his vital processes would be restored to normal, concluding, “Now, perfectly balanced and perfectly rested, you will wake up.” Once, when Gertrude had hurried this suggestion a bit mechanically as she guided him out of the trance, a voice broke out of Cayce with the warning that he was like a window blind stretched to its absolute limits. A little more tension and the damage would be irreparable.

Indeed, there had been a few times that he gave readings while too tired or distraught, when they could not waken him with the usual hypnotic suggestion. Instead his breathing had grown slower and slower, his skin color ashen, and his body processes evidently weaker as they tried frantically to return him to consciousness. Twice the family had ended up on their knees beside his studio couch, where he lay barely breathing. They simply prayed aloud and wept, because they did not know anything else to do until he finally recovered.

Back in the Manhattan Project it had seemed a small matter for others to determine to pay the price to do what Cayce did. Now that was less clear, and I asked Cayce whether he thought successors could be found to share this load with him. He nodded, saying that his readings had promised this repeatedly. But, he added, he thought that many could be shown how to get their own answers to the problems on which they sought his aid. Part of my task (as it had been his son’s) would be to study his trance for leads and to prepare materials for future researchers on this very question. That would begin the next day.

¹⁴Pit, or Corner the Market, manufactured by Parker Brothers.

¹⁵Bro, Margueritte Harmon, “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” Coronet, September 1943.

¹⁶Bro, Harmon H., The Charisma of the Seer: A Study in the Phenomenology of Religious Leadership, unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of Chicago Libraries, 1955.