Читать книгу True Tales from the Edgar Cayce Archives - Sidney D. Kirkpatrick - Страница 13

The ghostly appearance of Tom Cayce was the start of a revolving door of spirit entities in Edgar’s life. His first childhood playmates were the “make-believe” kind—so his parents believed. Only the “Little Folk,” as Eddy referred to them, were not your usual imaginary friends. They had names, distinct personalities, and they told him stories about Egypt and Persia—subjects not ordinarily discussed by rural farm children in Beverly. The only things that troubled Eddy were the facts that the Little Folk never seemed to get wet when it rained and they didn’t like being seen by other people. They would disappear. Troubled by their precocious child’s overly vivid imagination, Edgar’s parents were relieved when Eddy made friends with neighbor Barnett Seay’s daughter. Hallie, a petite dark-haired girl a year older than Edgar, was called “Little Anna” because she shared the same first name as her mother.

Little Anna and Eddy were always together. In the winter they would run through the fields trying to catch snowflakes and play under a covered bridge. Their summer activities included chasing dragonflies and picking flowers, playing on the banks of Little River, or watching the farmers at work. As Edgar later told the story, the Little Folk liked Anna as much as he did—only she got to know them better because she was always asking them questions.

Edgar and Anna’s favorite hideout was in the rafters of a neighbor’s barn, where they hollowed out a space for themselves in a haystack and played house together. Anna was his wife, he was her husband, and the Little Folk were their children.

On one occasion they borrowed a neighbor’s flat-bottomed skiff and drifted downstream on Little River, where they came upon a small island near a fork in the river. Here, too, they were joined by the Little Folk. But as Edgar later related the story, they were also joined by creatures that were not much larger than insects. He called them “sprites” as they gave off unusual sparkling colors. He and Anna didn’t get to visit with them long because they didn’t like to play with children or, for that matter, any other humans.

Little River in Beverly, Kentucky, where Edgar and Little Anna played together.

Edgar’s family naturally dismissed the notion of sprites, but Edgar never did. Like the vision of the angel and the Little Folk, they were all part of the multifaceted spirit dimension. Only sprites, Cayce came to believe, were “energy forms” which lived in and among plants and trees and played an integral role in their growth process. Just as the Little Folk appeared to him as children, the sprites appeared to him as twinkling stars, which was how he, an adolescent, could best understand or decode what he observed in his mind’s eye. That Edgar shared the experience with another, Little Anna, made it all the more real to him.

The eighteen months Edgar spent with Little Anna were the happiest of his childhood. They ended when Leslie sold the cabin where they were living and moved into a hunting lodge several miles from the Seay homestead. He and Little Anna’s separation was made permanent when she contracted and died of pneumonia. Edgar was reported to have walked six-and-a-half miles through deep snow to be with his friend when the end came, only to arrive too late to say goodbye. She was buried in a small coffin near her home in Beverly, where she was joined a month later by her father, Barnett Seay, who is believed to have died from pneumonia contracted while nursing her. The remaining members of the Seay family eventually sold the Beverly farm, and their descendants settled in Virginia and California.

This story, however, does not end with a bereft young boy and the tragic death of his only friend. As with Edgar’s grandfather, Little Anna, too, would make another appearance, only not as a delicate brown-haired young girl with whom he had explored Little River.

Nearly five decades after Little Anna died, Edgar Cayce received a letter from a twenty-nine-year-old bookkeeper, Beatrice Coffing, from Altadena, California. She had read an article about Cayce’s medical clairvoyance in “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” which had run in the popular Coronet Magazine. She sought and then received trance advice from Cayce on behalf of her fiancé, Richmond, a violinist and music teacher, suffering from a blinding case of cataracts.

Edgar, then sixty-two years old and living in Virginia Beach, provided a remarkable medical diagnosis. He described her fiancé’s condition as stemming from an injury his mother had sustained in pregnancy, which had resulted in his premature birth—information which had not been provided to Cayce, but was later confirmed as true. Further, Cayce said that Richmond’s cataracts could be cured and recommended a treatment comprising of specific osteopathic spinal adjustments in his upper dorsal and cervical area and his taking Codiron, a health supplement composed of cod liver oil and iron with vitamins A, B, C, and G.

After undergoing these and other recommended treatments, his condition rapidly improved. As Beatrice and her fiancé reported several months later, for the first time in nearly half a decade he could read the notes on a page of sheet music. Before the New Year his cure was complete. So successful was the experience that Beatrice wrote to Edgar to request readings for herself and to say that she and her fiancé would be driving from California to Virginia, a distance of nearly three-thousand miles, with her fiancé behind the wheel, to thank Edgar in person.

Beatrice Coffing’s fiancé, Richmond Seay.

The information that came through in Beatrice’s reading was quite a surprise to the Cayce family for rarely did a trance session speak directly to events and karmic connections with Edgar’s childhood in Beverly. Beatrice, age twenty-nine, hadn’t even been born when Edgar, in 1893, had moved from Beverly to Hopkinsville.

Edgar Cayce and Beatrice Coffing in Virginia Beach.

Reincarnation, at this point in Cayce’s career, was not a new subject. In addition to upwards of nearly ten thousand medical readings, he had given several hundred “Life Readings,” in which a soul’s previous incarnations were identified and descriptions were given that would help the recipients of the reading understand how their behaviors and relationships in previous lifetimes impacted their present lifetime. In Beatrice’s case, many of those relationships in her previous lifetimes had been with Edgar.

Something highly unusual during the Life Reading happened when the reading began with the curious statement, “This isn’t the name! [But] yes, we have the records here of that entity now called Beatrice Coffing.”

Then, the reading continued:

In the present, then, we find that the entity is one of those that may indeed be said to be the consistent thinker and exponent of all for one, and one for all, in those things in which it has enjoined itself in active service. These attitudes make for hardships at times in the material experience in the present. But in those activities in which there may be the outlet for the greater home building, and the expression of same, may the entity find the greater field of service, the greater harmony, the greater outlook for peace and joy in the experience of this entity.

In other words, she would find her greatest fulfillment at home and in the life she would share with others. In terms of previous lives, the reading would further reveal that she and Edgar had been together as recently as Edgar’s present incarnation in a rural farming community in Kentucky through which flowed the Little River. And yet, in the correspondence Edgar sent to Beatrice with her Life Reading, he remained unusually circumspect about sharing with her how they had known one another, only that they had.

It was not until he met Beatrice in person that Edgar let the “secret slip out.” He had to “see the truth” for himself before he could, as he later said, “be absolutely certain.” That day, when Beatrice and her fiancé arrived in front of the Cayce’s Virginia Beach home, Edgar stood on the porch, unable to move. He couldn’t even speak to her as she had exited the car and raised her hand to greet him. Tears began to pour down his cheeks. He could barely put together more than two words. “Little Anna . . . Little Anna,” he repeated. “It’s true.”

Before coming to Virginia Beach, Beatrice had read everything she could about Edgar, and though she believed him to be a “kindred spirit,” she was not prepared for the curious way he addressed her. Who was Little Anna? Why the tears? Edgar’s wife Gertrude and secretary Gladys Davis were equally mystified. They, too, had never heard of Little Anna nor could guess why Edgar was moved to tears.

When Edgar and Beatrice sat down in his study and talked together, she began to understand what seeing her meant to him. She also gained a startling insight into the greater message that came through in the readings. She had not only known Edgar in her previous incarnation as Little Anna, but she had also known her fiancé, Richmond Seay, whom she had cared for during his years-long ordeal with cataracts. He was none other than Anna’s father, Barnett Seay, who had cared for her when she contracted pneumonia. Little Anna and her father Barnett Seay, who had both died of pneumonia in Kentucky in 1887, were now in 1941 Beatrice and Richmond Seay, soon to be husband and wife.

Beatrice cared for Richmond in his hour of need as he had once cared for her. That’s how karma, which is so fundamental to the process of reincarnation, often worked out in the cycles of reincarnation described in the Cayce readings. Mothers in a previous incarnation often became daughters or sisters in the next. And invariably there was at least one family member who returned within the same family, as Edgar’s grandfather, Tom Cayce, eventually returned as Edgar’s grandson, Charles Thomas Cayce.

What was begun in one lifetime was continued in the next, bringing forth lessons and learning experiences crucial to what the readings described as the essence of human evolution—the development or growth of a soul preparing to meet or return to its maker. Family members could be construed as team members working together in this life and the next.

Once Beatrice and Edgar began to compare notes about their present lives, they realized how much they had in common. Both loved gardening and frequently spoke to their plants. Like Edgar’s childhood in Beverly, she had spent her formative years in Attica, Indiana, playing alone in the woods and conversing with “imaginary” playmates. Their respective spiritual paths, though very different, had also brought them to the same deeply rooted belief in Christianity.

Edgar and Beatrice would become fast and devoted friends. She and Richmond, who soon became her husband, would move to Blackstone, Virginia, and became active leaders in the fledgling A.R.E.—the association that would carry the Cayce work to future generations. They never referred to one another as Edgar and Beatrice, but simply as Eddy and Anna.

Edgar with son Hugh Lynn, Beatrice and Richmond Seay, and secretary Gladys Davis in Virginia Beach.

Beatrice frequently poured out her affection to Edgar in letters:

I have a great many things to be thankful for, Eddy, but I think you are one of the greatest and deepest of those things that I am thankful for, so I’m always so very grateful to you for giving us some of your time and blessedness,” she wrote. “I’ve just finished reading through and pondering all of your letters since first you addressed me . . . Although at that time I had no idea that “Little Anna” or “Little Eddy” ever existed—something flickered even then. And what a wonderful revelation and what beautiful things have come out of finding a certain Mr. Edgar Cayce.

Later, Beatrice would write: “The beauty and wonder of it! I could not understand what pulled and tugged at my heart and soul from the moment I heard of you and your work, until little by little you have told me of experiences that have helped me to understand . . . It seemed as though you were part of my heart and soul.”

Edgar felt likewise.

[For me] you stand between the living and the dead, and the plague of doubt in my own mind is stayed . . . when [I] am with you . . . All doubt slips away, and when I allow myself to slip back to days long since gone, a part of the whole business of living, [I] am just transported into another world. A world that one cannot help but see, feel, hear the goodness and the love of God. I now am never able to put into words what I feel, but it is there, and [I] know I am better able to at least try and serve others better when I have been with you.

Three years after meeting Beatrice, Edgar suffered a stroke which resulted in complete paralysis of the entire left side of his body. He was sent to Roanoke, Virginia, to recover. Knowing the end was approaching and wishing to die in the company of friends and family, he asked to be driven home. But on the drive back to Virginia Beach he requested the ambulance take a detour to Blackstone. He wished to see Little Anna one last time.

Beatrice and Richmond Seay were not home when Edgar’s ambulance arrived in their driveway. They, too, had sensed that the end was near and had driven to Virginia Beach in hopes of seeing him for one last time. They had left for Virginia Beach while the ambulance was driving to Blackstone.

Beatrice never got to say goodbye to her beloved Edgar, just as, some forty-years earlier, Eddy had been too late to say goodbye to Little Anna.