The Essential Edgar Cayce by Mark Thurston Read Free Book Online Page A

of Cayce’s formula for physical well-being, a model that has become the foundation from which many health care professionals have attempted to research and apply what Cayce had to offer. They spell out the anagram CARE:

    C irculation. Paying attention to the body’s need for both blood and lymph circulation. Poor circulation can result in a host of ailments.

    A ssimilation. Eating nutritionally and breathing properly. Also, creating the right conditions in the body so that nutrients can be absorbed and used by the body.

    R elaxation. Practicing stress-releasing techniques. Our bodies can quickly become out of balance and toxic, and illness is sure to follow. E limination. Just as important as assimilating nutrients in the body is eliminating waste products from the body. Many of Cayce’s remedies involved not so much putting something in the body as stimulating the body’s nature wisdom to get rid of what is no longer needed.

EDGAR CAYCE AS CREATOR OF A NEW CULTURAL MYTH

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    Some of the most fascinating material presented by Edgar Cayce involves stories that seem to fly in the face of modern historical scholarship. Tales of Atlantis. Tales of ancient Egypt and the building of its great monuments, but with a timeline that violates the timelines of virtually all mainstream Egyptologists. Tales of elaborate ancient civilizations in the Gobi Desert and in Persia completely unknown to historians. What are we to make of these remarkable pronouncements?

    In short, Cayce proposed that Atlantis is not a whimsical legend or metaphoric myth but rather a long-standing culture that actually existed. He dated its final destruction to 10,500 B.C., and he proposed that remnants of the lost continent and its artifacts can be found under the waters of the Caribbean. While intriguing anomalies and seductive hints suggest that there is more to ancient history than we ever realized, clearly there is no definitive proof that Atlantis existed. For many people, Atlantis remains a provocative yet unsupportable part of Cayce’s overall philosophy.

    Egypt is another matter, perhaps, since the monuments and artifacts do exist and are sometimes subject to debate. Cayce’s perspective on Egypt is quite controversial. He suggests that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were not built around 2600 to 2500 B.C., the traditional dating, but some eight thousand years earlier. And the pyramid was built as a kind of temple of initiation and not as a tomb for a pharaoh. Cayce claims that records of prehistoric civilization, including Atlantis, are buried in a chamber hidden in the sands not far from the Sphinx, a chamber as yet not uncovered in spite of diligent efforts over the past twenty-five years.

    Edgar Cayce’s theory of ancient Egypt is not without its contemporary supporters. His timeline, for instance, coincides with that of Egyptologists John Anthony West and Robert M. Schoch, who maintain that water erosion on the Sphinx suggests that its oldest portion was built thousands of years before the widely accepted date of 2500 B.C. In his book Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, Schoch dates it between 7000 and 5000 B.C.—not quite as old as Cayce suggested but close nonetheless.

    In spite of the intriguing evidence, many experts would argue that all of this material on Atlantis is not history at all but a precognitive vision of what lies ahead for humanity. Others would say that Cayce’s account of Atlantis as well as Egypt are best understood as myth in the most positive sense of the word, that myth is a story that explains the meaning behind things. It’s unfortunate that, in our time, myth has become virtually synonymous with erroneous thinking. Myth attempts to speak the unspeakable, and, in trying to explain the extraordinary in ordinary terms, myth must use metaphors, analogies, and symbols. Edgar Cayce’s stories of Atlantis and Egypt at the very least can be taken as powerful and valuable stories that account for how we shape