by Cate Montana

For 43 years Edgar Cayce dedicated his life to assisting people around the world with their health problems, incurable diseases, personal matters and spiritual growth issues. In that time his family and assistant, Gladys Davis, compiled over 14,000 readings that flowed from him in self-induced, sleeping trances. They ran the gamut of possible subject matter; from complex health diagnoses and their correspondent remedies, to the nature of the universe, to the whereabouts of a lost pet.

Edgar Cayce

Subject to intense scrutiny by the press, continuously investigated by experts from the fields of medicine, philosophy and theology intent on busting the “hoax,” Cayce ended up impressing them all with sound medical and therapeutic advice and deeply spiritual insights into the nature of man, the universe and the unseen. Investigative Catholic reporter Thomas Sugrue ended up writing There is a River, one of several biographies on Cayce. Dr. Hugo Münsterberg, a medical delegate from Harvard University left Cayce’s presence stunned and convinced. The proof, as it were, lay in the pudding. Cayce’s recipe’s for mental, spiritual and physical health were effective and sublime.

His cross-disciplinary health approach and focus upon the importance of diet, exercise, and the effects of emotion and attitudes on physical health have lead many to call Cayce the father of holistic medicine. From homeopathy and herbal tinctures, to spinal adjustments and unheard-of homebrew remedies (fill a charred oak keg with apple brandy and inhale the fumes to clear up tubercular congestion) Cayce’s recommendations ranged far beyond medical practices of his day. Not surprisingly, many of his patients were unable to find physicians who would follow the recommended treatments

Eventually Morton Blumenthal, a New York businessman, financed Cayce’s dream of a holistic hospital staffed by accredited doctors and nurses who would unflinchingly carry out his medical advice. In 1928, a year after Cayce’s Association of National Investigators was formed in Virginia Beach, the Edgar Cayce Hospital opened its doors. In 1929, Atlantic University, a university dedicated to a holistic, transpersonal approach to education was underwritten and opened in the fall of 1930. And in June of 1931, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc. (A.R.E.) was formed as a research body to investigate and disseminate the information contained in Cayce's readings.

 
The Association for Research and Enlightenment. Click image for larger view

Cayce’s work continues today

Sixty years after his death in 1945, the legacy of America’s most famous psychic lives on. His son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, ran A.R.E. until 1982, expanding its localized membership of several hundred to an international base of thousands. Gladys Davis dedicated another 25 years to cataloguing and indexing Cayce’s 14,000 readings, including the follow-up reports and documentation. All in all, his readings contained information pertinent to over 10,000 different subjects – a staggering library of knowledge. Gladys continued working as secretary for the Board of Trustees of the Cayce organizations and oversaw the computerization of the readings until her death in 1986 at the age of eighty-one. Today, the complete set of Cayce readings is available on CD.

The Association for Research and Enlightenment now has a US membership of approximately 35,000, and the headquarters is host to over 70,000 visitors annually. Thousands of people from around the world attend the hundreds of A.R.E. sponsored workshops and conferences held in Virginia Beach and around the rest of the country.

The hospital and Atlantic University, both of which closed during the Great Depression, have reemerged. The Casey Reilly School of Massage is internationally known for its holistic approach to massage, health and healing.

Atlantic University offers a Masters Degree program in Transpersonal Studies as well as a Wellness Coach certification program and online classes in everything from the Healing Modalities of Art, to Becoming a Teacher of Dream Interpretation.

Kevin Todeshi

“Our under-girding mission is best phrased as ‘helping people change their lives for the better through the ideas in the Edgar Cayce material’,” says current A.R.E. Content Director Kevin Todeshi. “And whether it’s help from a physical illness or problem, or help understanding the purpose of life, or understanding a psychic experience, or learning how to meditate, or effectively use prayer, whatever it is, our main purpose is to help individuals become the very best that they were meant to be, regardless of their background, status, or religion.”

Under Edgar Cayce’s leaderhip, the work at A.R.E. focused primarily on healing and assisting people to understand their innate spirituality. Psychic to the degree that while in trance he could answer multiple lines of questioning while accessing two levels of thought simultaneously - and then turn to a person walking through the room and respond to their thoughts as they passed – Cayce supported the development of psychic abilities in others, but with a caveat. Grounded in his Biblical studies and a profoundly devout man, he believed that psychic ability was a gift that would naturally result from an individual’s spiritual evolution, and was not something to pursue exclusively for its own sake.

Click image for a larger view

Since the passing of Hugh Lynn Cayce in 1982, the focus of A.R.E. has expanded to match the changing times, the undeniable evolution of the consciousness of the planet, and the demands of a mushrooming international New Age, New Thought, New Paradigm population. Seminars and conferences now include the workings of ESP, meditation, spiritual healing, developing intuition, the importance of dreams, and the study of life after death. Any given month highlights seminars like Accessing Nonlocal Mind Through Remote Viewing with Stephan Schwartz, Shamans and Shamanism with Stanely Krippner, Ph.D., Advanced Hypnotherapy Training and Neurolinguistic Programming with Janis Ericson, and UFO’s the Full Spectrum with the likes of Jacques Vallee and Stanton Friedman. From spiritual youth camps, to guided tours of ancient power sites, to its impressively comprehensive esoteric library, A.R.E. has something for everyone who finds themselves on the journey of personal evolution.

The Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies

Henry Reed, Ph.D., a former psychology professor at Princeton and researcher at the C.G. Jung Sleep and Dream laboratory in Zurich Switzerland, has been developing courses since the early 1980s to train people in their intuitive and psychic abilities at the Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies, a branch of Atlantic University. Known as the international leader of modern dreamwork, Reed’s holistic approach suits the organization and Edgar Cayce’s original philosophy perfectly.

In contrast to the antiseptic Rhine type of ESP and remote viewing research, Reed’s concept is that the psychic world is a subset of the spiritual, and that it is best understood through the context of Oneness. As a result, he has focused on developing psychic rituals and experiments that focus on and demonstrate interconnectedness.

In the early years, he asked groups to focus on dreaming at night for a particular individual with health or other problems. Reed found that, like a statistical meta-analysis, when the group’s dreams were looked at as a whole, they reflected a coherent healing message for the person dreamed about. Expanding the group approach into daytime exercises, Reed asked individuals desiring a reading to participate by counting backwards from 99 while the healing group listened and became entrained with the speaker’s voice. The reports of group members to the person afterwards showed a marked congruence.