Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 32

Was Cayce the waking man in competition with Cayce the entranced man? It did seem now and then that he delayed the move from the larger library to his study, especially when there were interesting visitors. Even though it was time for him to go unconscious and the conversation stumbled into awkward pauses (when those present manifestly wanted him to begin his unique process), he might extend a story as though to say, “Look, I matter as a conscious person, you know.” But when the conversation lagged further, he took the demand in good grace, laying aside his consciousness and putting his life on the line by entering a pressure chamber which none of us fully understood nor could guarantee that he would leave unharmed.

He was the only one among us who never heard a reading. He alone must take his gift on faith. The rest of us were daily reinforced in our reliance on it. The doubt he had to conquer showed all too clearly in a dream he told from some years earlier. In it he held an infant girl in his arms. (Other dreams showed her as a mummified Egyptian girl who had to be brought back to life, since the young female was often his dream emblem for his unusual talent, as what Jung called the creative anima.)²¹

She spoke precociously and was being examined by authorities to discover whether she were in fact a midget and doing nothing unusual. Inspection proved, to his relief, that she was an authentic prodigy. The reading taken on this dream confirmed that the infant stood for an ability which seemed to him at times small, of little account in the world affairs. Yet it would grow, he was admonished, to bring joy and aid to many. “Good dream!” “the information” concluded.

More poignant and revealing was a dream he shared with me which had come at one of the many times when he was out of money, facing the nagging doubt which would confront any modern American: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” The dream took place in a courtroom, where his wife—ever the bearer of rational judgment in his life—had him arraigned on lunacy charges and brought in their forlorn-looking children to show how incompetent he was to take care of them. Somehow in the trial he managed to affirm his adequacy and ended up giving what amounted to a mini-reading for each prominent figure in the courtroom, starting with the judge. He cited details of their past lives with him which none could deny, and convinced his hearers that he was mentally sound. The reading taken on this dream recognized his financial distress but urged him to be faithful. Then it added that getting in touch with the one man who had vouched for him in the dream would bring him requests for readings and needed income—as it did when he followed up the lead. Obviously in such dreams, Cayce’s unconscious during the night mirrored his fears over the sanity of having to rely on a process he only partly understood, never saw or heard for himself, and found brought him only as much money as he required for everyday needs.

But a very different, visionary dream he related set his trance efforts in a larger context. He saw himself preparing to give a reading (“fixing” to give one, was his Southern expression) and observed his consciousness as a tiny speck at the base of a great funnel or spiral which reached upward and outward toward the heavens. Between the rings encircling the funnel at different levels were located sources of the information and aid he sought in order to help others. Even the resources of whole cities were available to him, according to their quality depicted as rates of vibration. The tiny dot of his consciousness was tugged by someone’s need to whatever points on the vast spiral he should reach for aid. The dream with its cosmic, mystical scope affected him strongly, and he sought a reading on it. There he was told that his little consciousness was indeed as nothing in the great vortex or spiral of the universe. Yet by its purpose of service it could be lifted to whatever heights and specific resources were needed, “even unto the Thrones themselves,” the ultimate thrones of divine grace. The spiral he had seen was like a great trumpet of the universe, resounding with whatever was required for one who would for a time empty himself of all self-seeking.

Given the soaring imagery of such a dream, Cayce’s response was understandable when I asked him what he felt essentially transpired in his trance. He chose an image from a letter of Paul’s to the Corinthian church, and spoke of being absent in the body but present in the spirit with those who needed him.²² His image often returned to me in later years when I worked intensively with parapsychologists and gifted subjects trying to replicate some of Cayce’s doings. Typically our emphasis was on states and circuits in the psyche and in the body. Not often was the model stretched as far as his dream of the spiral suggested it might be.