Thursday, May 20, 2010


On many TV documentaries I've watched, Edgar Cayce's name gets bandied about. Cayce (1877-1945) was a well known psychic who is often referred to as the "Modern Day Nostradamus" and the "Sleeping Prophet", because of his alleged accurate predictions of the future. More than 300 books have been written about him. His family set up a foundation called the Association for Research and Enlightenment, located in Virginia Beach, VA. , to carry on research about his predictions and readings. Thousands of people today study his works at Edgar Cayce centers in 35 countries.

Call me a skeptic, but until one of these psychic guys can tell me for certain the Dow Jones Average next week, tomorrow's lottery numbers, or who's going to win the Super Bowl next year, I won't believe in psychics. Actually, at one point in his career, Cayce was hired by businessmen to attempt to predict commodity markets, horse races, and the like, but found that he was no smarter than anyone else. Attempting to do this for profit left Cayce tired and distraught, and he resolved to use his gift only to help the sick and distressed. Thus, except for writing books, psychics' God-given powers don't work for profit making activities.

Promoters of books and documentaries about Nostradamus often cite his predictions of modern day events like World War II and 9/11, but if you read his works, they don't really say that. That's somebody else's interpretation of what he wrote 500 years ago. The wording of his couplets (written in Latin) is so broad as to be almost meaningless. Anybody could write that stuff today about the 25th Century and predict there will be wars, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc., and unfortunately, there probably will be. But since the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 (according to the interpretation of the Mayan calendar), we won't have to worry anyway. If you believe that, you might as well quit your job now and start spending all your money.

Cayce was an interesting character. He was born on a farm in Kentucky and quit school in the 9th grade. At some point, under hypnosis, it was discovered that he could cure people's illnesses and predict the future. While in a trance, he would prescribe esoteric cures for the people who came to him. Some people were cured and declared Cayce a genius, but no scientific analysis was made to determine whether there was a placebo effect or the person was really cured by his home remedy. The ones who weren't cured didn't talk about it. His alleged cures were anecdotal and not scientifically proven. Like most psychics, he used vague statements in his readings like "I feel that..." or "perhaps...", rather than positive declarations of fact.

His assistants included an osteopath and a homeopath which, of course, would be helpful in giving medical advice (Cayce had no medical training), but provide no way to determine whether the cures were discerned by Cayce or his assistants. His proposed cures while in a trance include home remedy poultices like "the raw side of a freshly skinned rabbit, still warm with blood, fur side out, placed on the breast" to cure breast cancer. For breast, thyroid or glandular cancer, he prescribes serum from the blood of rabbits. (Where's Elmer Fudd when you need him?--I'm hunting wabbits!) For tuberculosis, he prescribes "fumes of apple brandy from a charred keg."

When presented with a cancer patient, he prescribed ground up almonds or apricot pits. Essentially, that is the components of Laetrile, a compound which was touted as a cure for cancer but which was proven to be ineffective.

Cayce predicted that the lost continent of Atlantis would be discovered in 1968. In that year, some odd stone formations were discovered on the ocean floor in the Bahamas, but to this day the evidence is inconclusive whether the formations are man made or natural. We know that during the last Ice Age, sea level was several hundred feet lower than it is now because of all that ice locked up in glaciers, and it is certainly possible that early man lived out on the continental shelf. There are even ancient roads in Europe leading into the ocean. However, Atlantis, as described by Plato, hasn't turned up yet.

Cayce also predicted that California would slide into the ocean around the same time. While I enjoyed the Curt Gentry novel, The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, written in 1968 and although many Easterners were keeping their fingers crossed, it's still there. The theme of the book, foretelling several years in the future, was that California suffered a catastrophic earthquake as divine retribution for electing Ronald Reagan governor. Although Cayce was probably familiar with Ronald Reagan movies, he made no known readings predicting Mr. Reagan's political future.

During his lifetime, Cayce amassed a large body of works, giving several thousand readings while under hypnosis, most of which were duly transcribed by stenographers. These have been published and are available for research.

Cayce's supporters, who are now called "New Agers" assert that his mind was linked into the Akashic Record, a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. It is said to contain all knowledge of human experience and a history of the cosmos. To explain it in our terms, Cayce was plugged into the Internet more than 50 years before it was invented by Al Gore with the help of Tim Berners-Lee.

Another major theme of his work was reincarnation. In his trances, Cayce regresses back to past lives, all the way back to the good ol' days in Atlantis. My opinion is if the Atlanteans were that smart and advanced, they would have built on solid ground--at least not on a flood plain. Moreover, they would have addressed climate change. Cayce, a religious and righteous man, believed in karma, and his readings indicate his belief that human souls are a part of God, and although the body dies, the soul in reincarnated into a new body. He emphatically states that Man did not descend from monkeys. That's a relief! An example of karma would be if a man had been a woman in his previous life or two, he might exhibit gay tendencies in his current life.

Once again, nothing can be proven. In the 1950's, a hypnotist-author named Morey Bernstein performed deep hypnosis on a Colorado housewife named Virginia Tighe (1923-1995) who regressed to a previous life in 19th Century Ireland as a young girl named Bridey Murphy. The book created a sensation world wide, and everyone wanted to know who they were in past lives. Hollywood even made a movie called the Search for Bridey Murphy. With the popularity of the book, an army of investigators went out and found no record of such a person in Ireland although many of her descriptions of the country were accurate. The church Bridey said she attended, St. Theresa's, in fact existed, but wasn't built until 1911, long after her supposed death. Ms. Tighe had never been to Ireland, although her parents were partly of Irish descent. Then it was discovered that a Wisconsin woman named Bridey Murphy Cockrell had lived across the street from her in Pueblo, Colorado when Ms. Tighe was a youngster. While it was an interesting story, all it tells us is that a person in a hypnotic state can remember long forgotten events from childhood and is open to suggestions by the hypnotist.

So while there is much we don't know about ESP, there is much we do know, and that is not to put too much stock in the veracity of the reading. A skilled psychic will make many statements and watch closely how the subject reacts. When the psychic gets a "hit", he or she will expound on that and draw the subject into a conversation. The subject doesn't realize how he had led the psychic into these insights about his life, thinking the psychic came up with these conclusions on his own. It reminds me of the football tout who sells predictions about a game. The client doesn't have to pay unless he wins. The prognosticator will tell half of his clients one team will win and tell the other half the other team will win. Half of his clients will think he is brilliant and recommend him to their friends, and the losing half will walk away and try a different prognosticator. But he makes a nice profit anyway. As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."




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