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I’ve been asked in interviews about J B. Rhine’s opinion of psychic Edgar Cayce. I didn’t really research this a lot. But I did learn that at one point Upton Sinclair had suggested that the lab study Edgar Cayce. Rhine was less than enthusiastic.
They’d gone to Virginia Beach once to test Cayce, Rhine told Sinclair, and Cayce charged them $25 per trial (and he missed), plus $40 for medicines only Cayce’s supply housed. Nonetheless, Rhine said they were planning another test when Cayce died.
When I went back to Duke in March I came across a March 3, 1966 letter where Rhine made a statement about Cayce.
“There is no reliable information, so far as I know, of any other source for the late Mr. Edgar Cayce’s statements, made in what is claimed to have been an unconscious state, than Mr. Cayce’s mind itself. I would not want to put any confidence in the claims that this information came from other sources. To determine that it did would require a much more carefully controlled study than was made during Mr. Cayce’s life time.
“Our own researches has led us to the working hypothesis that everyone has some potential psi (psychic) ability such as has been claimed for Mr. Cayce, but that Mr. Cayce had more than the average person has, as I have said, not been satisfactorily proved so far as I know.
“Naturally I cannot and would not want to say that Mr Cayce did not possess unusual psi ability, but I would insist with strong emphasis that it is not responsible to make a cult out of belief in these powers in an individual without the careful scientific study of the claims that were available throughout Mr. Cayce’s lifetime.”
Edgar Cayce exemplifies a remarkable phenomenon. (As did someone a great deal like him, Andrew Jackson Davis, who in an earlier period became the progenitor of spiritualism.)
I am not in a position or qualified to evaluate Cayce’s work. However, I will say that I believe his case to more suitably be studied from an examination of higher states of consciousness.
We have now been given an opportunity to understand that there are higher states of consciousness. And we have an opportunity to examine them not only from science but from the wisdom and exponents of mystics from the different world religions.
Joseph Campbell probably did as much as anyone to popularize the idea that comparative religions offered us a new discpline from which to evaluate remarkable states in some people.
Mercea Eliade basically helped to kick off the study of religions from the idea that a great deal in religions are true accounts in their own way, expressing an ontological direction that could be established insofar as its own criteria would allow.
I think for someone like Cayce other disciplines need to be brought to bear. To the extent that Cayce was legitimate, it would say more about the state of consciousness that Cayce necessarily had to be in to access universal knowledge than the actual cures he may have effected. The actual cures, it seems to me, would be symptomatic, pointing at the deeper issue, which is apparently humans have the capacity to be a state of consciousness that allows the potential of an expanded idea of what a human being can be.
I think science and psychic evaluation together are an inordinate contributor, and yet only one component of a variety of epistemogical modes including comparative religion, theology, philosophy, and direct testimony of individuals and traditions familiar with higher human states.
I have heard that there is renewed interest in the chamber underneath the Sphinx that Cayce said was one of the locations of the Hall of Records.
That sounds intriguing. I don’t know anything about this.
Before his death in 1945, Edgar Cayce made several startling revelations about humanity’s origin: that Adam and Eve were not the first humans; that the first humans “materialized” here from another, higher dimension; that they were divine, godlike beings who came to this dimension as thought-form projections, and got trapped here.
They materialized in the guises of the hybrid fantasy creatures mentioned in mythology–the Sphinx, the unicorn, the satyr, the mermaid, etc.
These Cayce readings fascinated me to no end. I have spent the last 15 years researching antiquity to see if there was any empirical evidence that supported these bizarre Cayce readings. The number of ancient mysteries this theory resolves is staggering and is a type of validation that Cayce was on the money on this one.