off inspecting someone ill. And on the few occasions when they had tried successfully, years ago, to get Cayce to locate murderers, he had sometimes wakened shouting, “He’s killing her! He’s killing her!” as though he had witnessed the very event. The distress stayed with him for days. An additional health hazard in years past had been violent, persistent headaches after giving readings, which he had traced to occasions in which a conductor sent his mind off for business and financial counsel when Cayce thought he was giving medical aid. Whatever he was entering with his trances, it involved his whole being and could threaten his health, his sanity, and even his life, since in the process, as one reading put it, “the soul is near to leaving the body.” The danger was greatest to him when he was overtired or ill, and that was just what threatened us as he tried to match his efforts to the stacks of unanswered letters.
As a result, we entered his study with soberness in the backs of our minds, even though we often joked and teased a bit to achieve the relaxed atmosphere which experience showed was optimal for the best readings. We were like those sending a diver to unknown depths, whose equipment was not designed to assure his safety at such far reaches but somehow continued to function. Adding to the seriousness of our effort was another possibility which Cayce had been forced to face. It was the chance, however small, that his counsel might prescribe a powerful medication in error and cause an injury or a fatality. Back in the Cayce Hospital days, when he had worn himself out not only by giving readings but taking on the administration, a full medical reading had been given for someone already dead, not noted in the counsel. Each day, each session, then, was the one in which his gift might prove lethal. Only the sense that he was bound to One who would protect him and others, Cayce observed with no little feeling, allowed him to go on taking this risk.
To start his journey into another kind of awareness, Cayce would sit down on his studio couch and loosen his tie and shirt collar, belt and shoestrings, while his wife seated herself beside him to give instructions. After we had talked enough to create a mood of unforced expectancy, Cayce grew silent and we all joined him in inward prayer. This was, it seemed, the decisive act. It expressed a desire for connection, not private attainment. Essentially it defined the trance which followed as an extension of the prayer process—exactly as Cayce saw it. Many who visited and wrote to us sought to understand his feats by using patterns from hypnosis, which was certainly involved. And in later years Cayce would be studied by me and others in the context of research on altered states of consciousness,18 not only those drug-induced, but those derived from intense concentration, sensory deprivation, sensory invariance (white noise), as well as states initiated by pain, sex, or dying. But the model that always seemed to me closest to reality was prayer, with which he started the entire process.19
Next Cayce stretched out on his back on the couch and pulled an afghan cover to his waist. He put his hands together, palms up, on his forehead, and kept them there while breathing regularly and perhaps a little deeper than usual. Then with a bit of a sigh he lowered his hands, taking a few moments as he crossed them at his waist. This was the point at which suggestion to do his counseling had to be given to him. Otherwise he would drift off into a deep sleep from which he could not be awakened for hours, even for a day or longer, if he were tired.
He told us what was going on in his mind, which often gave him the cue to lower his hands and enter more deeply into trance. The experience varied but usually involved following a small dot of light. Particularly vivid was the process of avoiding entanglement with the dead, who seemed to be ready to press into his consciousness in the fashion reported and used by mediums. Here was yet another threat to his effort and one he felt more severely than most outsiders realized. This danger became even greater if a seeker actively hoped for a message from some dead relative. There had been times (relatively few, to be sure) when someone had broken in and spoken through him. Avoiding this outcome was, in part, the intent of asking seekers to be in a prayerful, meditative state, asking for help from the highest source, or the divine, not from discarnate entities. It was also the intent of his own prayer, where he sought to serve God, not to plunder hidden realms. One description he dictated gave an account of going for the records he needed to give a life reading.
As he described to me his inner signal to proceed, it was a flash of brilliant white light, sometimes tending toward a golden color. Without this, he knew he could not give a reading that day. There were also times when he went to what seemed to him a hall of records, following that same light and aware that he must not stop, so that he could secure the counsel for life readings. On the journey he passed through what appeared to be several planes, which he experienced as realms of experience after death. First there was a level of humanoid forms which were like exaggerated expressions of particular human desires. Then came a level with individuals in forms familiar on the earth, satisfied with their condition and having even homes and cities. As the light grew stronger and he followed it onward, he came to a realm where all was like springtime; some desired to stay here while others pressed on for greater understanding, more light. Finally he came to an ethereal, lovely place where records of earth lives were kept. Here he picked out what seemed to be volumes or scrolls of information, or—for what proved to be specially developed souls—he was handed the material he needed.
On a Narrow Ridge
Cayce’s eyes in trance at first stared sightlessly until his wife gently covered them, as she spoke words become familiar in their decades of journeying together into invisible regions and bonds: “Now the body is assuming its normal forces, and will be able, and will give, such information as is desired of it at the present time.” The term “the body” simply meant the person, in the language of the readings. But what was meant by “normal forces” was not so clear. The phrase demanded attention. If Cayce’s readings were given by normal means, as implied by these instructions approved by his readings, then what of the rest of us? How normal were we? What was our true nature and destiny? How ought we to be related to the source or sources of Cayce’s extraordinary aid?
His working vocabulary in the trance (apart from technical terms), as well as many of his figures of speech and illustrations, were similar to his usages while teaching or dictating letters. At times in his counseling, especially as he neared the end of a period, his typical colloquialisms or homey aphorisms popped into the discourse. But, as though to foster the relationship into which he sought to enter, he leaned part of the time toward relatively archaic usages of King James English so familiar to him from the Bible. The impression was that to his deeper mind nothing would have sufficient dignity, grace, or amplitude of spirit for the task at hand or for the Source whose help he sought. “Ye” and “thee” crept into the readings, with associated verb forms not always perfectly matched. Often he spoke elliptically, as most of us do in conversation, leaving out modifiers and referents which the inflections of his voice implied. All in all, he seemed to be the man we knew outside of trance but on a serious errand. Yet there remained puzzling bits of his unconscious word usages, where he used roundabout phrases such as “those of” for “the,” creating an effect like transliterated German.
His speech was spare, never loquacious, and grew more terse as the reading period came toward its end. The mood was that of a man traveling a narrow ridge with no time or effort to waste in showing off. Getting technical or factual information seemed no problem, provided that it served the autonomy and well-being of the seeker. It was there instantly as needed. But sometimes he groped to find the right words—not so much stumbling as having a concentrated expression, nearly a frown. Often he used synonyms piled on top of each other to make a point, as though he could only reach us by the intersection of related terms. And he obviously chose images to awaken and fire each petitioner as needed, not just to deliver information.
At times one would wonder whether he saw reality in visions like that of the poet/artist William Blake. His frequent use of the term “forces” suggested that he viewed directly the dance and swirl of molecules, the flow of bright blood and nerve impulses, the pushes and blocks of psychological and spiritual thrusts, the tides of history, all moving in their courses through time and space, yet all related to an indescribable Center. Those of us listening had to think in terms of solid chunks, while he may have been trying to show us naked reality, shimmering and bouncing and transforming. The riddle of his actual vision came closer