Edgar Cayce

Edgar Cayce in 1910

Edgar Cayce, known as the “sleeping prophet” was a famous clairvoyant whose medical readings from trance state astounded scientific experts and continues to challenge those who know him the world around.

Cayce completed only the seventh grade, but he went on to provide the most profound teaching advice in his life readings. Through his unique gift, he dispensed medical diagnoses and described natural remedies that healed many who came to him for help. These readings are on file at the Association for Research and Enlightenment at Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Early life

Cayce was from an old conservative Kentucky family of Christian origins and upbringing, born March 18, 1877, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. As a boy he prayed that he might be able to help others, especially children who were sick. He claimed to have visions of a woman of radiant light who assured him that his prayers were heard and that his wish would come true.

In those days, Edgar fared poorly in school. One night after his father had quizzed him for three hours on his spelling lessons to no avail, the angelic woman told the boy to sleep for a few minutes, promising to help him. He fell asleep on his schoolbook while his father went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When father and son took up the lesson again, to their surprise Edgar could spell every word in the book—and remember the page it appeared on. From that point on, Edgar memorized passages from all his schoolbooks in the same way, and none of the other students could keep up with him.

At the age of twenty-one, while he was working as a stationery company salesmen and insurance agent, he developed a gradual paralysis of his throat. The doctors could find no physical cause for his condition and could do nothing to help the young man, who risked losing his voice permanently.

Finally, someone helped Cayce go into the same sleep state he had entered as a boy to memorize his school books. In this trance, Cayce diagnosed his own condition, suggested the treatment, and was cured.

A gift of healing

Doctors in Kentucky began to put Cayce’s clairvoyant gift to good use. They found that he could successfully diagnose patients long-distance with only their name and address in hand. After the October 9, 1910, issue of The New York Times reported Cayce’s miraculous powers in a two-page article with pictures, people from all over the United States wanted his help.

Over a forty-three-year period, Cayce gave fourteen thousand readings for eight thousand different people. He dispensed medical diagnoses and described natural remedies for many sicknesses. The people who sought his advice asked him not only about their illnesses; they wanted him to tap the wisdom of his Source about everything from marriage and dreams to careers and finances.

Cayce and reincarnation

Cayce’s remarkable readings, however, were not limited to advice about personal issues. Out of answers to seemingly mundane questions came profound teachings about spirituality and our relationship to God. Cayce himself was startled at the content of some of his readings.

A devout and orthodox Christian, Cayce revealed while in his sleep state—to his utter surprise—that reincarnation is indeed a reality and that our past interactions with others determine the course of our present life and of future events. More than twenty-five hundred people learned about their past lives through Cayce’s work. He revealed how their interactions in past incarnations had determined the course of their present life. In many cases, he told them how karmic patterns woven through lifetimes had resulted in their emotional or physical afflictions.

Prophecy

Cayce’s readings also contained unexpected prophecies of world import, such as how World War II would end, the future liberation of Soviet states, and the dramatic transformation of the surface of the earth.

One of the prophetic themes in Cayce’s readings is the shifting of the earth’s poles and the subsequent earth changes that could literally reshape the face of the earth. In one famous reading, he is shockingly stark. He says Japan will disappear into the sea and the upper part of Europe will be changed “in the twinkling of an eye.” Upheavals in the Antarctic and Arctic will cause volcanoes. “The earth will be broken up in many places,” and South America will be “shaken from the uppermost portion to the end.” The shifting of the poles will cause cold and semi-tropical areas to become more tropical.

According to other readings, many areas of both the east and the west coasts as well as the central portion of America “will be disturbed.” There will be greater and lesser changes all over the country. Cayce said the greater changes would take place along the North Atlantic seaboard.

He specifically pointed to New York and Connecticut as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco. The main portion of New York City, he said, will disappear. The southern coast of California as well as sections between Salt Lake and southern Nevada could be inundated by earthquakes, he added, but there will be more quakes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Cayce also alluded to changes in land features in a reading that predicted which lands would become the future breadbaskets of the world. In this reading, Cayce was speaking to a man about his birthplace—Livingston, a town in southwestern Montana—and said the area “will have much to do with many, many nations.” The prophet advised his client to become involved in the granary business in Montana and went on to say that portions of Saskatchewan, South Africa and the pampas in Argentina along with some parts of Nevada and Montana “must feed the world.”

Cayce himself had a dream that seemed to verify his radical visions. While returning by train to his home in Virginia Beach, he dreamed that he was reborn in A.D. 2100 in a town in Nebraska that was now on the western coast of the United States. As a child in his dream, he told others that he had been Edgar Cayce, who had lived two centuries earlier.

Men with long beards and thick glasses were summoned to observe the boy and they took him to the places where he had lived and worked as Cayce. They traveled in a fast-moving “long, cigar-shaped, metal flying ship.” In the dream, Cayce noted, Alabama was partially covered by water, “New York had been destroyed either by war or an earthquake and was being rebuilt,” and most homes were made of glass.

Although Cayce’s new map of the world seems foreboding, like other prophets, Cayce explained that prophecy is not set in stone. The changes we make in our own lives, he said, will have a great impact on what the world will look like in years to come.

While some of Cayce’s readings predict major changes, he saw his prognostications, like those of the Old Testament prophets, as warnings. He believed that the final outcome was in our hands. He saw several factors that can change the future—our free will, our harmony with divine law, our trust in God, our faith in “a divinity that is within.”

When asked, for instance, what form the physical changes he had predicted for Alabama would take, he replied that it would depend in part upon the “metaphysical.” He said that people’s thoughts and actions often keep “many a city and many a land intact” as the people apply spiritual laws in their relationships. And when asked what we could do to counteract serious events in the earth, Cayce replied: “Make known the trouble—where it lies, that they who have forgotten God must right about face!”

God gives us prophecies as a warning. The prophecies tell us what will happen if we do not act in time.

Cayce and the violet flame

Edgar Cayce recognized the healing power of the violet light. In over nine hundred of his readings, he recommended an electrical device—a “violet ray” machine that emits a violet-colored electrical charge—to treat several ailments, including exhaustion, lethargy, poor circulation, digestive problems and nervous disorders.

Sources

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, October 13, 1984.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet with Patricia R. Spadaro and Murray L. Steinman, Saint Germain’s Prophecy for the New Millennium, chapter 6.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Patricia Spadaro, Karma and Reincarnation: Transcending Your Past, Transforming Your Future.