friends and have shared many experiences. His mother Jenny told me a story many years ago and then followed it up with a letter because she was so deeply involved with the Cayce work. Her experience is the kind of thing that happens to people as they come to sudden—or gradual—awareness about something they know but have not yet made real in this world by putting it into action.
“When my daughter, Jody, was twelve, the children were playing on the road. Their ball went down a sewer covered by a manhole cover. The children pried up the heavy, filthy cover but it fell down again on Jody’s bare toes. Her big toe and the next two were crushed.
“We rushed her to UCLA emergency center. An orthopedic surgeon was called in. He cleaned it up as best he could and instructed me to soak it four times a day in Epsom salt solutions and to use a Q-tip® each time to clean around the nailbeds. She was put on antibiotics.
“Four months and three orthopedic surgeons later—one wanted to do a debriding (removing foreign matter and devitalized tissue) in the hospital, which would also shorten her toe—she was on crutches. Her toes would swell with pus every few days. She was still on antibiotics.
“I had your book on the Palma Christi. There is a case of a man who dropped a drum of tar on his foot. Cayce recommended castor oil. The man, I believe, was back in shoes and at work in a matter of weeks. But it takes a whole different brand of courage to defy doctor’s orders when it concerns your own child and not you yourself. I didn’t have the courage, at first. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, I was soaking her foot as usual and could see it was again swelling with pus. This was after four months of the trouble. It was a painful, awful mess. We had an appointment with the doctor on the next Wednesday. I decided to risk the castor oil and simply poured it on from the bottle. The toes could not have tolerated flannel or a pack. Epsom salt soaks and the Q-tip® cleaning were stopped. Just the castor oil.
“On Wednesday, we went to the orthopedic surgeon’s office, your Palma Christi book in hand. I told Jody not to say anything to the doctor. We would wait to hear what he would say. Well, he looked at the toes and said, ‘We sure cleaned it up this time!’
“I then told him what we had done and handed him the Palma Christi book and he read that case. He handed it back to me, shook his head, and said, ‘I don’t care if it’s mud. It worked!’
“Well, Jody’s toes healed quickly after that. She never grew the nail on the large toe and the toe is a bit deformed. I am sorry I waited four months to try the castor oil. I’ll bet her nail would have grown in, too.”
There are castor oil proponents throughout the United States, and I hear from many of them. One is an owner of a clock shop, but I suspect he sells more castor oil than clocks. He had such good results himself by soaking a pair of socks in castor oil and wearing them with an old pair of shoes (his problem was aching feet) that he told a friend about his methods. His friend worked in a factory and was on his feet on the hard concrete all day long—and his feet ached, too. He didn’t say anything to his friends at that point, but his results in developing happy feet were so resounding that he told the clock-shop man that he spread the word around and “You can hear the sloshing of castor oil feet nearly everywhere in the factory.”
We learn about simple things in many ways, and the seed is planted for growth in awareness.
HYPERACTIVITY
Much has been written about this affliction which also has the name or is associated with what is called dyslexia, an impairment of the ability to read. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is to look at the deeper causation of problems rather than the end product of a process.
The development of physiological abnormalities is the process. On the causative side of this process are those factors that create the abnormalities. On the resultant side of the same process is the manifestation, which is termed a disease or syndrome. Everything in the human body is changing for the better or for the worse as life continues, and we are always creating at the level of the mind and the emotions. This creative activity impacts the physiology for better or for worse.
In this instance, hyperactivity was the end product. The deeper problem must lie somewhere in the relationship among the activity of the mind, the emotional nature, and the neurological impulses which either bring information into our consciousness or cause the body to act. This places the cause, then, directly inside the nervous system.
It’s truly interesting to let the creative part of yourself loose and consider that the same application which helps a man stop snoring and become a cooperative instead of an antagonistic individual might also have a beneficial effect on hyperactivity. Both conditions lie in the realm of the autonomic nervous system.
This kind of speculation does not currently reside in the scientific field, but it might indeed have a reality if we acknowledge that most of the nature of humanity cannot be quantified, but has its ultimate meaning in a spiritual realm about which we know very little.
I recall one woman, in her late fifties, who reported to me that the castor oil pack which she had put on for the very first time was the best tranquilizer she had ever used. Others have told me that it helps them sleep, it relaxes them, and it soothes them. One might say it helps to normalize the body when applied over the abdomen, where the solar plexus is to be found—the largest accumulations of autonomic nerve cells in the lower part of the body.
It was in 1960 that we had our first real encounter with severe hyperactivity. Tommy’s mother told about his lifelong problem while she picked up torn magazines that Tommy had worked over, pushed drawers back in place in the examining room, pulled Tommy from the tops of furniture time and again—trying to restore order where he was creating chaos. He was everywhere and could not be quieted down.
He was in our office for a mild belly ache. The hyperactivity was a daily occurrence to which his mother had adapted. Mother was instructed to use a castor oil pack for the abdominal problem and to bring Tommy back if he was not doing well.
The next visit, three weeks later, was a revelation. Tommy was quiet, sat on a chair reading a book, turning the pages without tearing them out, answering questions like the average child, and showing no signs of hyperactivity.
What was happening? Every evening, his mother placed the castor oil pack on Tommy’s abdomen while he was watching television. She didn’t like having him watch television but she knew he would stay quiet. In a few days, he started reminding his mother to put the pack on because it felt so good. Her life was changed. Tommy was no longer a threat to the sanity of his parents nor to the furniture, wall-paper, or glassware. He was a normal five-year-old boy getting ready to go to school.
Ever since that experience, we have been treating hyper-activity with a good diet and castor oil packs, not with medication. Tommy grew up, got married, and now brings his kids in for a checkup occasionally. There is no hyperactivity now in that family.
THE LIVER AND GALL BLADDER
Part of my awareness of the healing qualities of substances offered us by Mother Nature came about as I watched one kind of disturbance of the body after another respond to the application of a castor oil pack. We first used the packs on hepatitis because of the frequency with which Cayce, in his readings, suggested that they would be beneficial. Gall bladder conditions received much the same sort of attention in the readings.
Consistently, through the thirty years I have worked with the Cayce information, the use of castor oil packs for liver and gall bladder conditions has remained our standard. Rarely, if ever, have they failed to perform advantageously.
A nursing student, recognizing the onset of hepatitis, took a week off, loaded up with water and more water, and wore a castor oil pack continuously. She also had people pray for her. The following Monday she returned to school with no sign of the yellowish tint to her skin or conjunctivae of the eyes. The diagnosis had been confirmed early in the course of her illness, so there was no question about its validity. She would not have been able to continue in her training if she had missed more school than she did.
In