Читать книгу Contemporary Cayce - Henry Reed - Страница 10

OVER THE FORTY-THREE YEARS THAT HE GAVE READINGS AND HELP to people from all walks of life, Cayce frequently counseled individuals facing every manner of hardship, heartache, and loss that, with time, their experience could be seen by them as purposeful. In other words, somehow the challenge could potentially be used to be of assistance to the individual having the experience and possibly to others as well. One of the more all-inclusive hypotheses put forward by the Cayce readings is that all of life is purposeful. To be sure, sometimes seeing the purpose in something takes a skill beyond sensory observation. It requires a change in consciousness; it can require seeing beyond the physical self; and, it often involves the intuitive imagination. To accept that there is purpose to life also requires acknowledging a reality beyond the domain of waking consciousness and personal ego. In practice, exploring Cayce’s premise of the purposefulness of life relies upon perceiving subtle truths, and exploring the hidden key to life that the Cayce information postulates for all of humankind.

Let’s begin with a simple analogy. Suppose we present a group of scientists from another planet with one of our automobiles. Being alien to our world, they do not know what this object is, but they begin to investigate it with their research tools. They measure its length, width, and height, and take measurements of each piece they can isolate on this large “contraption.” They take as many observations as possible, keeping careful records. They discover that pushing a round thing labeled “ignition,” causes many of the parts to begin moving and making noise. They see gray vapor coming out of a tube at one end. Someone discovers that if you press on a lever down below the sound increases, the speed of movement of the parts increases, and the gray vapor is replaced by a blast of hot smelly air coming out fast!

And so it goes. There are so many measurements these scientists can make. But what are they discovering? If they did not know the purpose of the object—to convey folks to distant locations—how would they know how to make relevant measurements (horsepower, fuel economy, braking distance, handling, etc.)? Taking a friend on a moonlit drive, the thrill of navigating a curvy mountain road—these and other pleasures of driving remain unknown to the alien scientists unless they discover the purpose of the automobile.

How many of us on earth have ever made the appropriate measurements of the human being? Have we even asked the right questions? Collectively, we’ve certainly accumulated enough observations, and we’ve proposed many theories. Evolution is a theory based on many observations of nature. The idea of “cause and effect” is a meta-theory, a universally applied assumption about how the world “works,” which is to see all living processes as functioning like a machine. Another term for this worldview is “the clockwork universe.” More recent advances in science have introduced the mysterious “uncertainty principle,” concerning the unpredictability of the moment and direction of the “quantum leap.” Cayce’s own vision of “God” displays both of these properties—the ironclad chain of cause and effect that describes God like electricity—a force that acts upon the physical world; and the highly personal “I am” that is within each of us as our awareness and capacity for free choice, which becomes more and more unpredictable the less we are driven by the cause-and-effect force of determinism.

Ultimately, the Cayce information suggests that the “why” of life is to encounter a series of experiences that will ultimately awaken each of us as individuals to an awareness of our true divine self. Somehow, collectively, we have forgotten the truth of our divine origins and the fact that we were created—as Cayce puts it—to become “companions and co-creators” with God. From this premise, all of our life experiences (both challenging and wonderful) and each of our relationships (also challenging and wonderful) have the potential to expand our limited consciousness beyond the ego self.

Just as Cayce asked the question as to the “Why?” of life, for thousands of years countless stories and myths have arisen in respond to humanity’s asking “Why?” Their existence demonstrates our tremendous need for an answer to this question; a question to which science alone may not be able to provide a response.

What is it about humankind that we wish to know our meaning, our purpose? Where did we get that quality of curiosity, and how does it play into creation? To answer these questions, we need to look at the ways in which humankind has responded to the need to find meaning and purpose through myths. What are myths? One could say that myths are stories about our origins and its challenges. A myth can sometimes be presented as fictional, and yet in your heart, you know it’s true.

In a fashion similar to that provided by Hinduism, Cayce describes the creative principle as awakening from a slumber to begin a cycle of exploring possibilities. Just as a person might paint a picture to make what’s inside visible, to gain a sense of self, Cayce’s view of the Creator’s motivation for creation was for the joy of self-expression and the desire to experience oneself through that expression. Sound familiar? Sound human? Give a kid a crayon and he or she will scribble on the wall, and then look at what was created. The creation of souls was part of God’s expression. God expressed Himself as souls. The purpose of that expression, as with any self-expression, was for God to experience Himself through His creations. In the case of souls, God gave souls all of His own qualities so that God could experience the companionship of these souls. The reflection of God that souls provide gives God the desired companionship, and thus the greater self-awareness.

In thousands of readings, Cayce explored the gradual growth in collective humanity’s consciousness by examining the mythic tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, and other ancient civilizations. Told from the perspective of specific individuals and their personal journeys through various lifetimes, these readings portray the fact that a soul “grows” when it explores its own divine consciousness and its relationship with others whereas it “loses” (opportunities and consciousness growth) whenever it focuses only on the physical world and its perception of self alone.

A similar worldview can be gleaned from the Mayan culture and their religion’s approach to an understanding of God’s desire for companionship and the challenging opportunity it presents us as participants in creation. Their mythology is such that the Mayans claim to be the fourth “people” of the planet. They believe that God destroyed the first three “peoples,” because they could not say the prayers correctly. Was God simply being capricious? No. The Mayans believed that God requires reflection and acknowledgement in order to experience His own existence. The purpose of humanity is to allow God to become conscious of Himself. Our willfulness has distracted many of us from this task, but it is this task that makes life truly meaningful.

Most creation myths include a chapter on humanity’s “fall from grace.” In the Bible, we have the story of the serpent tempting Eve to bite the apple. Cayce’s version tells a different story, and helps us realize how we experience the “fall” every day. There are two parts to Cayce’s version. The first part has to do with our use of free will to go our own way, rather than the way that aligns with the divine purpose that God intended for us. We get caught up in our creations, our life dramas, our things, and become “willful.” The second part has to do with how our willfulness in exploring our abilities in the three-dimensional earth world keeps us hypnotized to the sensory world, rather than to the intuitively given spiritual world. It’s the separation two-step: “I can and will.” Although definitely agreeing that at one point in the history of the world there was the physical appearance of humankind (the Adam and Eve story), Cayce suggests that the “fall of man” was ultimately a descent in consciousness; however, rather than being a “bad” choice it was part of our evolutionary growth to bring divine consciousness into the physical world.

A summation of Cayce’s story of creation is told in the “Philosophy” chapter of There Is a River, the Edgar Cayce biography by Thomas Sugrue. Elsewhere, in Edgar Cayce’s Story of the Origin and Destiny of Man, author Lytle Robinson provides perhaps the most complete summary of the Cayce perspective on these topics. Scholars have shown that Cayce’s intuition is as we might expect to echo the oldest of humanity’s notions about essential metaphysical truths. He echoes the mystery religions, whose concern is the problem of freeing oneself from the chains of materiality, having sensed a spiritual or non-material dimension of experience, such as in dreams. The question of “why” takes us to the original purpose. Cayce’s intuitive view of creation and its purpose gives an important creative role to the human being in the history of creation. At the same time, his version of creation doesn’t fail to point to the foibles of humanity that have affected the course of creation’s history.

During that same period that Cayce was delving deeply into his intuition into “the Beginning,” the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was looking deeply into the human unconscious. His method was to compare the dreams of his patients with the world’s mythology. He asked the question, “How did the idea of God enter into the human mind, and with what purpose?” His conclusion was that when someone is born, they arrive with the full instinctive intelligence of the Creator, but soon learn that the social network, upon which the child is totally dependent, does not want a little godling, but requires a well-behaved social citizen. Hearing “no” and being sent to bed with no dinner, getting criticized by the teacher, one’s peers, and other setbacks lead a person to suppress more and more of their natural repertoire in favor of socially acceptable and rewarded styles of awareness and being. Such is the source of separation from the Creator, through such judgments and the suppression of life they brought about. Yet Jung found that his patients’ dreams suggested that a person get past such judgments in order to discover and have the courage to live out their authentic self. “Whom the gods cannot lead, they drag,” was one of his favorite quotes. If we ignore or refuse “the call” to wholeness, Jung observed, then life seems to bring about circumstances to force change. Jung noted that “character is fate,” meaning that those who remain unconscious experience that “stuff happens” to affects their life, but those who embrace the creative life force find their destiny in going along willingly with God’s will, even when it takes a lot of effort to discern it. He speculated that synchronistic experiences sometimes point the way. Jung called the source of this activity the psyche. He envisioned it as a non-material, but active force in creation, in our experience, and in life’s response.

Cayce’s intuitive understanding paints a very similar picture. It has a storyline with the same dynamic of an intelligent life force, operating through the Akashic Records, to bring about circumstances that encourage a person to realize, as Cayce would put it, “all we meet is self.”

It is the evolutionary purpose of the Akasha to bring about circumstances that will awaken us to our oneness with God. It is up to us to recognize the opportunities in these experiences. It is not to ask, “What is God’s purpose here?” as if there was a specific purpose set in stone prior to the event. The purpose is always the same, generally to give us the opportunity to expand in consciousness and become aware of our divinity. Cayce often pointed to Jesus as the role model for how to live that ideal consciousness of oneness, what he calls the “Christ Consciousness,” which, simply stated, is “the awareness within each and every one of us of our ultimate Oneness with God.”

Jesus does provide an important lesson on how to experience life as purposeful. In doing so, he gives a spiritual correction to our usual interpretation of the metaphysical thought medicine, “You create your own reality.” When Jesus and his disciples meet a blind man on the road, the disciples ask Jesus if the man’s blindness is the result of the man’s own sins or that of his parents. Jesus responds in the negative, dismissing the retro-consciousness of cause and effect, in favor of the proactive perspective of repurposing the circumstance to fulfill an agenda of Jesus’s own choosing, thus acknowledging his role in creation. Jesus says that he will dedicate this man’s blindness to demonstrating God’s healing power. Then Jesus goes on to demonstrate that his own hands and God’s healing power are one. When we use the idea, “All you meet is self—you create your own reality,” to explain a misfortune, and we understand it in the three-dimensional causal world manner, then we feel guilty for our failure. That is a misuse of the idea. The true healing power of the idea is released when we embrace the event and use it to discover our divinity by our choice of response.

Practically speaking, how are we to use the events in our lives in such a way that we come into consciousness of the purposefulness of life? We might learn how to ask ourselves a question, such as, “What is it that I can learn from this experience?” Or, “How can I use this experience to help someone else?” Another tier might be to even learn how to respond to adversity with a sense of gratitude, “I wonder what the silver lining might be?” Gratitude fosters a sense of abundance, confidence, and curiosity. Gratitude paves the way for experimentation, for ways to create a stepping stone from a stumbling block, for ways to make lemonade from a lemon. It is this tendency to put toward good use the circumstances that come our way, to repurpose adversities into strategies for innovation that reflects our divine spark of creativity. It is a creativity that has an evolutionary basis, a purposefulness that invites our awareness and participation.

Finding out for ourselves how life engages us when we engage it is a significant spiritual milestone. No longer are we separate, having to fight for our own survival. Instead, we experience ourselves as part of a team, a member of the divine network of learners. As we engage life as a purposeful encounter to create consciousness of our divinity, we can rest assured that the divine is helping out!