Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 39

The little word in appeared in my notebook when Cayce counseled ingestion, absorption, and assimilation for healing. Here the focus was not emptying, but replenishing and nurture and absorption of whatever was taken into the person. The principle might be “We are what we eat” or drink, breathe, swallow, rub in, soak in, and sniff. The process was also affected by how we did the intake, whether indulgently, absently, or anxiously. And it was also important to consider what we deeply meant in the process, whether to save or to serve, to dominate or cooperate, in trust or in fear.

It was rare that a medical reading for a severe illness did not spell out a regimen or diet for feeding and supplying the body. As poisons and drosses were removed, the struggling tissues had to be given the needed resources to restore natural function. Aiding assimilation might, of course, be as simple as providing more oxygen through exercise or time out-of-doors. But even then the circulation had to be in shape to carry the blood’s freight to be assimilated, perhaps requiring massages, osteopathy, special packs, or baths. Sluggish organs charged with handling input by respiration or digestion might require stimulus or tempering, whether through osteopathic or massage action, to free and quicken nerve impulses, or through chemical or even surgical intervention, where poisons had collected or were strangling an organ or tissue. But once the body were set free to take in and use what was offered, then the game was to supply its needs soundly—and in balance. The two processes went on together, for elimination and assimilation continued unceasingly and could not be suspended for a few weeks to overhaul the plumbing and wiring or the girders and stewpots of the flesh.

Most of the diet suggestions seemed so sensible that people acted on them more readily than other aspects of his treatment regimes, even more than exercise and relaxation. To be sure, the special intervention diets or nutriments to provide substances for very sick bodies were difficult to evaluate: Jerusalem artichoke for diabetes, plantain weed poultice for certain cancers, carefully prepared beef juice for badly weakened bodies, a product called Kaldak for calcium deficiency, and much more. Preventive foods were easier to follow, not only the three almonds a day for cancer, but the lowly cabbage for pinworms.

But it was the normal diet which Cayce repeatedly outlined that appealed not only to nutrition experts but to thoughtful laypersons. Alternating eggs and cereals for breakfast, featuring salads for lunch, choosing fish, fowl, or lamb for dinner more often than the unchanging beef which Americans prize, two vegetables above the ground to one below, balancing yellow and green vegetables, eating foods grown in one’s immediate environment, adding gelatin as a catalyst to assure vitamin absorption—the list was full and varied, but sensible, and in later years would generate a number of widely read books³² as well as research.

Cayce was not fanatical in advising food distributions, and counseled moderation rather than rigidity. He was quite ready to spell out the chains of digestive responses and nutrient actions which he saw from his trance state. As in all his readings, he appeared more interested in developing independent grown-ups making their own decisions than in getting results on particular tissues, except where serious illness was present. Cigarettes (those made from pure tobacco—not easy to find) he allowed in moderation, as he did limited amounts of caffeine and alcohol, indicating that the body was equipped to turn these into foods or useful stimuli. He was less charitable about carbonated beverages, described as “slops” for one nutrition seeker (though pure Coca-Cola syrup he sometimes prescribed as medication). Many were startled, however, at his unyielding admonition over the years not to combine coffee and cream, or citrus juices and cereals, since these were on the breakfast menus of so many Americans. But the entranced Cayce insisted that careful research would show these combinations to be stressful to digestion.

Assimilation was presented, of course, as a wider process than digesting food and drink. There was taking “in” through breathing and through the skin. Fumes, special baths, and nutrient massages all had a place in the Cayce array of remedies. Peanut oil, he insisted, could in many cases prevent or alleviate arthritis when rubbed into irritated areas, especially in combination with soaking in Epsom salts and colonic irrigations, where needed. Other kinds of salves, rubs, and packs added to the assimilation process, including a compound originating with Cayce which his files showed had been remarkably effective in reducing or preventing development of scar tissue. He prescribed what to rub on or around breasts to enlarge or shrink them, and what to apply for loss of hair (part of it derived from another external covering, the peelings of potatoes). Sunlight, so widely used by Americans for tanning, he recommended only before ten or after two o’clock standard time—hours when burning was minimal.

The most sophisticated of the nutrient interventions required reinjecting the leukemia patient’s own blood after treating it, or using electrical circuits to transfer gold chloride to the body for rebuilding nerves, or applying mercury-vapor light through green quartz glass for certain kinds of cancer. Even the body’s own resources could be used to bring it special aid, he explained, as he directed the construction of a battery-like appliance to take tiny natural electrical impulses from one portion of the body and circulate them to others. In much of this unusual counsel we were surrounded by riddles, many of which would not in fact receive research attention until well after the war. But overall it was clear that in assimilation, as in elimination, Cayce was seeking to maximize natural body function rather than practice gross intervention. He insisted that the body could create, when not too damaged, all the chemicals it needed from familiar, balanced supplies.

But of course bodies brought to Cayce’s vision were often grossly upset or impaired. So he supplied the chemicals he saw as needed. His original compound to prevent seasickness and other motion sickness was widely used by those who knew about it. Other effective original prescriptions dealt with the morning sickness of pregnant women, in addition to his cough syrups and laxatives. He dictated a formula for salve to place on infected gums, which was modestly marketed by a friend as Ipsab and another for hemorrhoids called Tim. A leading toothpaste which featured prevention of gum irritation, he told me, had used a derivative of Ipsab from his readings, though I could not verify this. Further, a Hindu scientist named Dr. Bisey had come to Cayce with a plan to develop a form of iodine which released I-one molecules along with the usual I-two. A series of readings produced Atomidine, which Cayce in trance suggested in very small amounts for cleansing and regulating endocrine gland function. The range of what he saw or created to add to the body through assimilation was evidently as wide as it was cautiously handled.