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Preface

Every story has a beginning—the precipitating event that kick-starts the action into motion. This book is no exception. It began many years ago when I stumbled across the name Edgar Cayce and read about his life and extraordinary psychic readings during a time when I was searching for more meaning in my life. At first I was leery. Was this some kind of cult or religious scam perpetrated by a skillful con artist out to fool gullible people? I promised myself then that if I ever discovered anything in the work attributed to Cayce or the organization he founded—the Association for Research and Enlightenment—which didn’t ring true or deviated from my highest and best sense of what was right, I would run away as fast as possible. I never did.

By the end of his lifetime, the renowned seer Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) had given more than 14,000 psychic readings on subjects ranging from the mundane to the mystical. A humble man with only an eighth-grade education, Cayce hailed from the small town of Hopkinsville in Christian County, Kentucky. Ever since he was a young child, this simple tobacco-country farm boy had demonstrated remarkable psychic abilities. Luckily for young Edgar he was brought up in a loving family surrounded by people who accepted his prodigious gifts. Cayce always believed his unusual talents to be God-given and decided early on to make it his life’s purpose to use those powers for the greater good of humankind.

That decision eventually led him to give psychic readings for thousands of individuals suffering from dis-ease of body, mind, and spirit. They had heard about his remarkable abilities, at first mostly by word of mouth, and approached him in person or by letter, asking for help. Even as the numbers of requests for readings increased and his reputation grew to the point where celebrities and highly placed public officials were seeking out his advice, Cayce made no claims to being someone the world should set apart as special. In fact, he believed that by holding onto the right ideal and making a sincere effort to develop their own gifts, everyone had the innate capacity to do what he did.

It is difficult to imagine the deep faith and personal commitment to service it must have required for Edgar Cayce to set aside the immediate circumstances of his life every day, twice a day, and to lie down on the couch in his office in order to give readings. (And near the end of his life, he was giving multiple readings per day to try to fill the thousands of requests for help from people with loved ones embroiled in the conflict of World War II. Overtaxing his body in this way would take a huge toll on his health, which eventually led to his death.) After lying down and putting aside his conscious mind, Cayce would enter into a semiconscious state, totally unaware of his physical surroundings and the people around him or the words he might utter in answer to their questions. This outgoing but gentle man had to trust that those present in the room conducting and transcribing the reading had his best interests at heart. He also had to hold fast to the conviction that whatever emerged from his unconscious state would do no harm but bless those individuals who needed it most.

Remarkable information came through this sleeping prophet during those daily sessions, including medical prescriptions and advice, information about the history of the human race since the beginning of time, and material on astrology, dreams, world events, planetary sojourns, previous lifetimes, religion, and philosophy to name several. In addition to some of the amazing events that transpired during the time Cayce was actually asleep, such as his proclivity for describing in detail the state of health of people located thousands of miles away, what has always struck me about his body of work is its astonishing breadth and consistency. Taken together the 14,306 readings Edgar Cayce left behind present a formidable record of important but heretofore unknown information. Many decades after his death we have only begun to plumb its depths.

Edgar Cayce was a deeply religious man who read the entire Bible once for every year of his life and attended church regularly, yet many of the ideas articulated in his readings veer away sharply from mainstream religious beliefs. It’s easy to overlook the fact that in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, during the period when Cayce was most productive, topics such as reincarnation, meditation, and astrology were not widely acknowledged or discussed as they might be today. The taproot of the philosophy outlined in the readings is the Christian tradition as defined by the ideal of the Christ, but its branches spread across cultures, traditions, centuries, and the world. The readings paint a picture of history as the story of the movement of consciousness through space and time as human beings seek to fulfill the soul’s deep longing to return to its Source, to God.

In the years since Edgar Cayce’s passing, numbers of outstanding books and articles have been written expounding on the wealth of information compiled in the readings. And more than a few have served as guideposts on my own spiritual quest. My aim in adding to that library was to try to explain in laymen’s terms Cayce’s story of the soul and its passage through the earth as viewed through the lens of one particular soul: Jesus of Nazareth. In general, the mystical thread running through the Cayce material begins with Spirit, manifests in the multitudinous religious philosophies the world has embraced throughout history, reaches its apex with the appearance of the second Adam, Jesus, and will culminate one day in the expression of the risen Christ in each and every incarnated soul.

The approach this book takes is to synthesize information scattered among a cross section of the readings with select passages from the Bible, especially the New Testament, in order to highlight the congruity of the two messages. The significance of the Christ sits front and center in the Cayce philosophy, but it is difficult for most people to get their arms around the somewhat presumptuous notion that the man called Jesus really did lay out a pattern others could follow in order to do what he did—a pattern detailed in the most practical way by Edgar Cayce who interpreted the Master’s message for people living in the twentieth century and beyond. Despite the challenges posed in trying to decipher some of the convoluted syntax found in many of his readings, Edgar Cayce generally did not speak in platitudes. He was direct, solved real problems, and presented seekers with a clear plan of action for making spiritual progress.

My aim in integrating Jesus’ parables and teachings with the wisdom culled from Edgar Cayce’s unconscious mind was to merge the two records into a more cohesive whole. Seeing the ideas laid out side by side might help fill in some of the missing pieces of the puzzle about why the Prince of Peace came to earth and what he did while he was here. The Cayce information changes the picture of the Christ from an “idol” to be worshipped from afar into an ideal and presence within, and the Master soul, Jesus, to our elder brother and teacher who came to show us that we, too, have the ability to advance to the same level of spiritual understanding and expression he had achieved. My secondary objective was to try to unravel some of the symbolism coloring the Old and New Testaments, which supports this more inclusive description of Jesus’ words and work. Hopefully the result will allow others, perhaps for the first time, to catch a glimpse of the greater purpose for humanity’s sojourn in the earth and begin to understand its meaning to the destiny of the soul.

Since Edgar Cayce never attributed any of his achievements to himself, when I employ phrases such as “Cayce says” or “according to Cayce,” I am referring to the words that came through him as he slept while tapping into the universal mind. I have placed quotation marks around those passages lifted directly from the readings as well as selections from the King James Version of the Bible. In other cases I paraphrase Cayce’s words to try to help clarify their meaning while attempting as far as humanly possible to stay true to the original intent of the reading. The specific readings that appear in the book and references for segments quoted from the Bible remain with the text; citations drawn from secondary sources are listed in the footnotes.

I hope, dear reader, you will join me in fearlessly venturing into the uncharted territory of this sacred journey to find the God within.

M.K. Welsch

August 2015