Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky on 18 March 1877, died Virginia Beach, January 1945. Cayce was an uneducated man who found he could put himself into a sleep state in which he had access to a collective mind or universal consciousness. Cayce was a very Christian man and couched his statements in a Biblical manner. In his sleep state, however, he could verbally respond to people’s questions and, using medical terms he did not know consciously, diagnose illness in people, even at a distance; speak foreign languages he had never learnt; get information he had no conscious access to. Because of this he was asked to the White House twice. At one period a hospital was built in which he worked with six doctors, diagnosing from his sleep condition. In this state, when asked how he could get information about the past, about people at a distance, etc., he replied that every person has access to what he called the cosmic mind while they sleep, but few people can bring this contact through to conscious expression. He also maintained that prolonged working with one’s dreams gradually made conscious this contact with our cosmic life.
For Cayce, humans are cosmic beings.
A lifetime was a brief interlude of learning in an eternal pilgrimage through time and space.
The conscious personality we so often raise so high is but a temporary experience assumed by an older larger being, the Individuality, or Self as Jung called it.
The ego dies at death, but the Individuality absorbs its experience. Dreams are the meeting point between this older self and the personality it assumes but briefly.
(Cayce’s biography is There Is A River by Thomas Sugrue. Cayce dictated 14 million words from his sleep state; a record of these is kept at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Virginia Beach, Va.)
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