Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 40

What did the readings feature to place “in” the mind? That choice appeared to be more important to Cayce in trance than to most of us, who thought in terms of stimulating and equipping the mind, but not usually in terms of feeding it. Yet to him the mind was the great fashioner not only of bodily health but of human destiny, when used wisely with the will (which he saw as a primal given in the human makeup). In this view we became not only what we ate and drank, but also—in one lifetime or another—whatever we fed the mind upon, by what we thought and cared about. Cayce paid more attention to the daily working of the unconscious or subconscious than most people not engaged in psychotherapy. Often he stressed the mind’s ultimate suggestibility. The deeper levels of the psyche would build up, magnify, and manifest what they were centered on, by the remarkable creativity which was the mind’s nature. Like Paul he saw an important distinction between living “to” the flesh and “with” the flesh, because in his view, humans could be shaped to become virtual animals if they chose. Choosing reading and companionship, then, as well as play and devotions, employment and travel, arts and artifacts, was not merely an issue of coping and being pleasantly distracted. Choices set directions that would bear results in the months and years—or centuries—of personal growth and health which followed.

The unconscious Cayce did not refer to the oral-character type from Freud, which represents a lifestyle of dependency and incorporation from others. But he seemed well aware that there were both positive and negative trends in the mind’s ingesting process. There were gullibility, copying, and uncritical swallowing of people and ideas, just as there was biting or tearing at what came before the supercritical intellect. Cayce followed the Bible in counting the tongue a mighty member, and speech such a molder of reality and relationships that the Word became a symbol of God’s own creative action. He agreed with Jesus that what came out of the mouth in speech was more important than what went into it, as he stressed what the mind fed upon through the mouth’s chatter, with respect to fantasies, hopes, memories, gossip, or blessings. These would determine what later came out of that mouth as command, creation, and call. Hundreds of times he developed in his readings the theme “Mind is the builder,” connecting it to the second person of the Trinity, the Logos with whom all things were made. Yet the mind alone, as in biblical thought, could trip itself with imagination and had to be correlated with a disciplined will. In his perspective, passions were not the central human predicament so much as the directing mind and will.

Cayce assigned to the mind a remarkable degree of autonomy, rather than determinism. While he took account of influences on the psyche from parents, teachers, and other molders of upbringing (not to mention influences from past lives or experiences between these), he seemed to assign even greater weight to the individual’s capacity to feed himself or herself on prized values. Here he appeared to depart from orthodox psychoanalytic emphasis on childhood’s definitive shaping. The key to using adult autonomy, in his view, was setting ideals, to be brought before the individual’s consciousness again and again, both in coded symbolism (what would later be called right-brain activity) and in rational decision-making and planning (left brain activity.)³³ Such self-chosen feeding would operate not only on one’s loving and productivity but upon health itself. He meant by “ideal” not an arbitrary goal or what he called an “idea” as part of a governing ideology, but a thoughtfully weighed construct to which one would give unreserved commitment in a major area of life. Such an ideal embodied a direction to which one answered with the depths of one’s being, not an arbitrary, self-serving aspiration.³⁴ Vocation, in the religious sense of being called to live by chosen ideals, was a process not reserved for monastics or religious leaders, but meant for everyone.

“Draw two lines upon a piece of paper,” he often counseled, “and put into columns labeled as spiritual, mental, and physical what you would enter as ‘My ideal.’ ” The entries in the columns, he warned, would often need to be changed and correlated so that they supported and implemented each other. And often they would require erasing for restating or enlarging. Ultimately, he said, the person would develop formulations not only practical, but translucent to the divine. For those who found it helpful, the ideal could be weighed against the person and the prayer-sought presence of the Christ. In quiet times and in turbulent times, one could well ask, “What would He have me do?” A useful answer would come more quickly to those who fed upon a chosen ideal than to those who merely drifted or lived reactively upon the pressures and demands of others.

Cayce never wearied of explaining that the care and feeding of the mind required caution about projecting its contents. What we saw in others that distressed or commanded us with too prompt emotion, he explained, was often perceived because it was actually within ourselves and ready for attention. Here he took account of one of the classic Freudian defenses, as he also did of rationalization, repression, reaction-formation, and others. But he also paralleled Jung in noting that what is worthwhile and developing in us is often first discovered by projection upon others. His intent was not so much to call others to studied self-awareness at all times as to get them periodically to assess and modify what they were feeding their minds. What held their interest, what did they allow to fascinate or compel them? If they fed upon revenge, upon narrow ambition, upon sensual prowess, or upon the failings of their fellows, they would find several kinds of results in their lives: pronounced reactions to these concerns, temptations drawn their way, and ultimately physical illness or dysfunction.

The better way to feed the mind was to plunge into creating for others whatever one truly valued for oneself. “If ye would have friends, be friendly; if ye would have love, be loving.” Here Cayce gave expression to a principle which he insisted was one of the great laws of the universe: “Like attracts like.” The law was not about conjuring by sympathetic magic, or occult manipulation of correspondences, but similar to the thought of Carl Jung, where activation of an archetype within the psyche could lead to resonation with comparable archetypes elsewhere, drawing persons, objects, and events into meaningful orbit by “a causal synchronicity.”³⁵ In such a view we could be seen as surrounded not only by chains of cause and effect, but by something like great meridians of force that girdled our world unseen, which drew like towards like (as Progoff and Koestler have suggested). Cayce’s outlook seemed to embody such a perspective when he explained that what the mind feeds on is not simply a matter of gardening one’s private corner of reality. By our thoughts we each act to “redeem the times,” or to trivialize and perhaps demonize what is going on around us. From our minds would also be spun forth trends for our bodies, much as our faces as we get older reflect more and more of our essential character.