Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos. James Mullaney

beings from other worlds! The fifth reading actually refers to “people of the universe,” clearly implying that life exists throughout the cosmos. In these readings he was surely correct, for there is now very solid evidence that at least one planet in each solar system will lie within the so-called “zone of habitability” of its sun, where liquid water can exist and life-giving “solar” energy is plentiful. Had he been asked about the existence of physical beings on the planets orbiting some of our bright stellar neighbors—about their presence in the case of such well-known stars as Vega or Arcturus or Capella or Betelgeuse—his response might well have been most enlightening. But sadly, no one at that time thought to ask such a question!

A Cosmic Christ

      So the Cayce readings on this subject (relatively limited in number as they are) do not rule out the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, but rather they accommodate and support the growing awareness that we are certainly not alone in this vast cosmos. And there’s still at least one other fascinating reading by Edgar Cayce that not only allows for the possibility that other worlds are populated—but strongly implies that they indeed are inhabited! We find this amazing statement: “Not the Christ, but His messenger, with the Christ from the beginning, and is to other worlds what the Christ is to this earth.” (262-71) The implication is that the Christ Spirit has enlightened many other civilizations throughout the long history of the universe. As the poet Alice Meynell so beautifully expressed it in these lines taken from her 1913 poem Christ in the Universe:

       Nor, in our little day,

       May His devices with the heavens be guessed

       His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

       Or his bestowals there, be manifest.

       But in the eternities,

       Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

       A million alien gospels, in what guise

       He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

       O be prepared my soul!

       To read the inconceivable, to scan

       The million forms of God those stars unroll

       When, in our turn, we show to them a man.

      In mentioning Christ, two well-known Bible verses have always seemed to the author as inferences about other planets and other beings. In John 10:16 we are told, “And other sheep I have which are not of this fold.” While generally taken to mean those outside of the faith, in a larger context Christ may well have been referring to those other worlds that His Father has created and populated. The other verse is “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” found in John 14:2. To my mind as an astronomer, “mansions” (sometimes translated as “rooms”) is a reference to other planets and “house” to the very universe itself!

Alternative Life Forms

      When considering the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos as we have so far in this chapter, the assumption is usually made that it’s life in a physical form that’s being discussed. But as Sir Fred Hoyle suggested in his novel The Black Cloud, mentioned above, it may also be found in the form of beings without bodies—ones consisting of pure thought and energy. Interestingly, Edgar Cayce talked in a number of his readings about highly evolved “energy beings” consisting of individualized “thought forms” without physical bodies that came to our planet millions of years ago. Through a process known as “involution,” they pushed or infused their consciousness into the matter and primitive life forms existing on the Earth at that time. Here are a few of those readings pertaining to such entities:

       … there came first those in the earth as thought forms that were able to partake of that about them; and so absorb them, much as we see in the lower forms of material manifestations in life, and moved by the spirit to become that they found or absorbed in their being.

       5756-11

       Hence as we find, when souls sought or found manifestation in materiality by the projection of themselves into matter—as became thought forms—and when this had so enticed the companions or souls of the Creator, first we had then the creation in which “God breathed into man (God-made) the breath of life and he became a living soul,” with the abilities to become godlike.