Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 7

Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D. (1919-1997) was a psychotherapist, an educator, a writer, an ordained minister, and an inspirational lecturer. As a young man, he lived and worked in the Cayce home and witnessed several hundred readings. That experience enabled him to come to know Edgar Cayce better than most individuals who have written about the Cayce legacy. Eventually, Harmon wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cayce’s life and work, as well as several books about the Cayce information, including this one, Edgar Cayce—A Seer Out of Season.

Harmon first came to Virginia Beach in 1943 as a young minister, just graduated from Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He came to meet Cayce first-hand, as he was both curious and troubled that his mother, Margueritte Harmon Bro, had become involved with Cayce’s work. However, what Harmon witnessed in Virginia Beach was very different than anything he might have imagined. An October 1943 letter to his wife, June Avis Bro, expressed his enthusiasm for a work that would transform his own life. That letter stated, in part, the following:

Thin tubercular women, crippled boys, cancerous workmen, arthritic grandmothers knotted in pain—they all find healing. But that’s only the beginning—what really happens to them is what has happened to Mr. and Mrs. Cayce, Gladys Davis [Cayce’s secretary] and some others—they find that “there is a river” of God’s love flowing about us all, only waiting to be tapped by humble minds. The real miracles at Virginia Beach are the radiant, transformed lives, the people who go away realizing that they can actually find God and know Jesus and live like it. They say, “I am my brother’s keeper” and their lives show it. They say, “There is only one God” and all their friends feel it. Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Catholic, Mennonite, Christian Scientist, Humanist, Presbyterian—it goes on like the “Ballad for Americans”—they all find what they are searching for in the work of the readings and Mr. Cayce . . .

Harmon and June Bro moved to Virginia Beach and became close friends with the Cayce family and worked as members of the Cayce office staff. At the time, there was a tremendous increase in requests for Cayce’s readings as a result of the publication of Cayce’s biography, There Is a River, by Thomas Sugrue, which was followed by Margueritte Harmon Bro’s own article in Coronet magazine entitled “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach.” Harmon and June listened to hundreds of readings. They had access to all correspondence, and they had the opportunity to repeatedly see how people’s lives were changed by the Cayce work.

Harmon became interested in psychology and decided to continue graduate work. He went on to Harvard and then to the University of Chicago where he did a doctoral dissertation based on a study of the Edgar Cayce readings. For this dissertation, he coined the following phrase for Edgar Cayce: “a seer in a seerless culture.”

Harmon called the story of Edgar Cayce’s life “one of the most challenging and appealing adventure stories of modern times.” He went on to explain that the story was about much more than a psychic—much more than he had ever expected when he first came to Virginia Beach as a young man:

. . . to call him a psychic is to call an opera star an athlete of the vocal cords. For Cayce’s aid was not simply raw data dumped on frantic seekers, but carefully devised counsel as fraught with values as with information. He spoke not only of organs and tissues and interventions, but of justice and love, and of beauty and holiness, as the context for healing and wholeness. Only a time so impotent for personal and social goodness that it must seize on powers ahead of meaning would be satisfied with labeling him a clairvoyant. To find his visionary yet practical gift, one must remember Judaism’s Baal Shem To combining healing with mystical vistas, Melville viewing the world from the bowels of whales, Blake painting fiery creation, Freud finding darkness and light through sexuality, and Jung glimpsing with Plato the starry heavens of archetypes within human deeps.

Cayce was not fascinated with his own prowess, though others often were. Nobody who knew him well could imagine that he went to bed at night and got up in the morning thinking about his trance skills and how to improve them—any more than he focused on his paranormal abilities outside of trance, such as seeing revealing colors (auras) around others, reading minds, conversing with the recently dead, or previewing the future. His concern was not first of all with powers but with relationships. On the one hand he sought to be deeply and helpfully related to the damaged persons that he served. And on the other hand he sought to be related to the divine, which he saw as the ultimate author of his gifts, within the kind of community and tradition that serves such a source. This was a man who lay down and arose with prayer, not as duty or accomplishment, but as a hunger reaching for companionship with God, seeking to be grasped more than to grasp, so that he might create usefully for those who wept with pain.

Harmon’s book presents an eyewitness account of Cayce at work. It draws upon Harmon’s personal experiences, as well as upon hundreds of interviews with Cayce’s relatives, associates, sufferers seeking aid, and even some disappointed detractors. It presents a story of a man with tremendous gifts, tremendous challenges, and tremendous love for God and the human creation.

When Edgar Cayce died on January 3, 1945, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, he left well over 14,000 documented stenographic records of the telepathic-clairvoyant statements he had given for thousands of people over a period of forty-three years. These documents are referred to as readings. In 1931, Cayce founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) to research, document, and disseminate his psychic information.

The readings constitute one of the largest and most impressive records of psychic perception ever to emanate from a single individual. Together with their relevant records, correspondence, and reports, they have been cross-indexed under thousands of subject headings and placed at the disposal of psychologists, students, writers, and investigators from around the world.

Today, Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. offers membership benefits and services, a magazine, newsletters, publications, conferences, international tours, an impressive volunteer network, the Cayce/Reilly^® School of Massotherapy, a Health Center and Spa, a retreat-type camp for children and adults, prison and prayer outreach programs, and A.R.E. contacts around the world. A.R.E. also maintains an affiliation with Atlantic University, which was founded in 1930 by Cayce and some of his closest supporters (AtlanticUniv.edu).

For additional information about the Edgar Cayce work, contact A.R.E., 215 67th Street, Virginia Beach, VA 23451-2061; call (800) 333-4499; or visit the website EdgarCayce.org.

Kevin J. Todeschi

Executive Director & CEO

Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. / Atlantic University