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A Boundless Unconscious

THE LABORED, HEAVY BREATHING OF THE MAN ON THE BED COULD BE heard outside the room in the hall. The doctor who had been listening with stethoscope turned away and spoke: “This man has one lung completely closed. The other is in bad shape. He must be moved to the hospital immediately. Pneumonia may have set in already.”

Edgar Cayce was the man on the bed. It was I to whom the doctor had spoken. For days my father had suffered with a heavy cold. We were visiting with friends on Staten Island, New York. Day after day he had met people and given readings morning and afternoon. Finally he had gone to bed. Outside a heavy snow was melting.

The doctor went downstairs to call an ambulance. Dad motioned to me to come to the bedside. “What did the doctor say?” he croaked.

I touched his hand and head. They were hot and dry. I told him exactly what had been suggested.

“Shut the door,” he said. “Don’t let anyone in here until I wake up.”

I obeyed him without question.

In a matter of minutes his eyelids fluttered; his breathing became deep, regular, and heavy. He rattled like the crackling of thick underbrush in a dry forest.

Within five minutes great beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and face and began to run down his neck. As I watched and listened, the sheet which touched his chest became wet, and the breathing grew heavier and more labored.

At the end of fifteen minutes, perspiration was running off the bed onto the floor where it stood in a little glistening puddle. The breathing was clearing and was more even now.

Someone knocked at the locked door. I tried to explain without opening it.

In a little more than twenty minutes Edgar Cayce opened his eyes, stretched, smiled, pulled back the covers, and asked for his robe. The sheets, the blankets, the mattress were soaking wet. His voice was clear; his head and hands were cool. The ambulance went away without him.

This is an example of the strange power of the subconscious to take suggestion and control automatically the internal functioning of the physical body.

Living would be difficult indeed if man consciously had to regulate his breathing, not to mention what regulating his digestive processes would entail. Just how would one plan the digestion of a carrot? What mind plans the distribution of the assimilated food? Different parts of the body need varying amounts of energy at different times. Extend this idea a little further. There is a truly magical power of the body to rebuild the tissue of an injury or a cut. The proper amount of the right kind of tissue is restored. Hair or bone does not grow where muscle tissue is needed. Such functions, along with breathing, blood circulation, much of eliminations, and hundreds of other automatic body functions are controlled from an unconscious level of the mind. This amazing control is accepted without thought until it is possible to observe a demonstration of the power of suggestion for someone in an unconscious state.

Throughout his life my father lost his voice at varying intervals. The approach he took in order to heal this situation was to enter the same state of consciousness he used in order to give a reading. In this state, suggestions could be given him to increase the circulation through the throat area to relieve the nerve tensions. Anyone watching his reactions could see the tissue of the throat change color. Generally he would awaken able to speak again.

The amenability of the unconscious to suggestion and the power of suggestion to affect the physical body are well known to anyone who has practiced or observed hypnosis. The range and degree of effects which can be produced apparently depend upon the skill of the hypnotist and the susceptibility of the subject. A responsive subject will weep over an apple if told he is eating an onion, or raise a blister when touched with a piece of ice if told he is being burned with a match.

It is frightening, at times, to consider the range of the power of suggestion. In an early report on “subliminal projection” it was stated that an invisible commercial was flashed on the screen of a drive-in theater while the regular pictures were being projected. In The Reporter, October 17, 1957, it was stated that over a period of six weeks 45,000 people were moved by the suggestion, which bypassed the conscious mind, to increase their popcorn purchases by 57.5 percent. It is not generally recognized that the unconscious may contain a record of every experience of consciousness, even though there is no conscious awareness at the time of perception.

On several occasions Edgar Cayce demonstrated an ability to read over material and then bring it accurately to consciousness after sleeping for a few minutes. This occurred first when it was suggested to him that he could remember every word in a spelling book. At a grade-school graduation he was reported to have memorized a long political speech after reading it once through and then sleeping on it for a few minutes. When he first began working for a wholesale stationery company, he learned the entire catalogue in the same manner. As a walking information center on the company’s products, he was in constant demand.

The completeness and complexity of this unconscious memory play a far more important role in an individual’s life than he is aware. Literally, an individual becomes what he or she feeds into the unconscious. This idea is taking on more and more importance with the development of psychosomatic medicine. Particular thoughts and emotions are believed to be directly related to specific diseases. The meaning of the phrase “mind is the builder,” repeated over and over again in the Edgar Cayce readings, cannot be understood fully. However, it takes on new meaning as one begins to glimpse the depths of the unconscious.

Consciousness varies from moment to moment. It is like a mixing bowl into which various ingredients are being poured through sense perceptions—sight, hearing, taste, feeling, and smell. Other ingredients which appear now and then do not seem to come from sense perceptions. It is generally assumed that these “extra ingredients” in consciousness are from unconscious memories where previously recorded sense perceptions are stored. A few adventurers in the world of the mind suggest racial memories stored in genes and chromosomes, or a collective unconscious to which we are all connected. These areas of the mind are like the part of the iceberg below water or the invisible rays of the sun. Perhaps in following Edgar Cayce as he seemed to move into the unknown regions of this inner world it will be possible to observe some of the “reaches” of the unconscious.

In the words of the readings, mind partakes of both the material and the spiritual aspects of man. It is a spark of a force of the Creator, an active principle which governs individuals and expresses itself at many levels of consciousness. At the physical level mind manifests through the senses. It reasons with impressions from the senses. This is the conscious mind.

Two other large rooms of the mind may be called the subconscious and the superconscious—two broad divisions of the unconscious. The subconscious stores impressions from physical consciousness and, as has been pointed out, picks up far more than is consciously known. The readings suggest that this mind becomes the conscious mind, so to speak, when the physical body is laid aside at death. The superconscious mind might be said to be the part of the mind which has not come into physical expression at all. It is the original spiritual pattern. An individual’s spiritual growth and development depend on the person being able to release spiritual energy from this higher area of the unconscious and bring it into conscious expression. Mind is a part of the soul.

The Edgar Cayce readings describe the soul as a particular creation, an arrangement or pattern of energy. It might be considered to be made up of spirit, mind, and will. The spirit is the essence of the life force; the mind is the creative building quality; the will is the power of choice, the birthright of every soul.

It is only natural for us in three dimensions to think of the terms—soul, mind, will, spirit—as taking form in matter. As English poet Edmund Spenser said, “For of the soul the body form doth take: For the soul is form, and doth the body make.”

In another room of the unconscious mind there seems to be at times a mechanism for establishing attunement with other minds. Some psychologists suggest that it is in a collective unconscious that such telepathic phenomena operate.

From the unconscious state Edgar Cayce described his own ability as a process of attunement with the subconscious of the person for whom he was giving information. The majority of his readings dealt with diseases of the body. The request for help seemed to set up a telepathic or clairvoyant empathetic bridge, enabling some area of his unconscious to blend with the subconscious of the seeker.

This activity of the unconscious was described in many readings. Here is one quotation:

Then in seeking information there are certain factors in the experience of the seeker and in the channel through which such information may come. Desire on the part of the seeker to be shown. And, as an honest seeker, he will not be too gullible; neither will he be so encased in prejudices as to doubt that which is applicable in his experience. Hence the information must not only be practical but it must be rather in accord with the desires of the seeker also.

This desire, then, is such that it must take hold not only on that which is primarily the basis of all material manifestation of spiritual things, but must also have its inception in a well-balanced desire for the use of such information not only for self but for others. Then there may come, as for this body in the present, that which if applied may be helpful in the present experience.

On the part of that channel through whom such information may come, there must be the unselfish desire to be of aid to a fellow man. Not as for self-exaltation because of being a channel. Not for self-glorification that such a channel may be well-spoken of. But rather as one desirous of being a channel through which the highest spiritual forces may manifest in bringing to the material consciousness of the seeker those things that may be beneficial in a spiritual and material sense to the seeker.