Hopkinsville, Kentucky 1901: While under a hypnotic trance, Edgar Cayce prescribed a cure for his own ailment despite having no medical background. It was the first of over 14,000 predictions by the 20th Century's most prolific psychic.
From a trance state, he could give details about complete strangers, including their pasts and their futures. Among his worldly predictions were the advent of WWII, political assassinations, and medical breakthroughs.
Edgar Cayce was born to a tobacco farming family in rural Kentucky in 1877. Young Edgar was a strange boy. After his grandfather's death, he repeatedly saw the old man in a cornfield. He often had visions and couldn't fathom why other kids didn't have them.
At age 21, Cayce became a photographer. Then he acquired acute laryngitis that wouldn't go away. He sought a doctor for relief, and self-hypnosis was suggested.
In front of his family, Cayce went into a trance, which came to him easily. Then, to everyone's surprise, he talked in his sleep. Cayce described what was wrong with his throat and how to restore it. He claimed to be able to look inside his own body as well as the bodies of others as if he had x-ray vision.
In his trance state, Cayce gave physicians medical advice on how to perform surgeries. He later saved his own wife Gertrude from what doctors considered a terminal case of tuberculosis, and she survived.
Cayce's unusual mental powers received mention in the New York Times. They praised his understanding of complex medical terminology. Yet when not in a trance, Cayce knew nothing about medicine.
His process was simple. He merely laid down on a sofa, folded his hands across his stomach, and went to sleep. Just before Cayce went under, he was told the name and address of the person seeking the reading. That person need not be in the room or even in the same city. But in a trance, Cayce answered any questions posed to him about that individual.
He always awoke with no memory of what occurred. He hired a stenographer to take notes of everything he said in his trance state.
Profiteers put Cayce's predictions to the test. They asked him who would win the Kentucky Derby or what stocks to pick on Wall Street or where to drill for oil. His answers were often correct. But as people made money from his predictions, Cayce began suffering migraines. If the questions involved greed, he fell ill. So he quit giving readings and went back to photography.
His retirement didn't last long, however. He realized the benefits of his psychic power, and he put it to positive use to help heal people. Cayce gave readings free of charge and subsisted on donations. As a result, his family was often on the verge of bankruptcy.
Cayce gave readings to the rich and to the poor alike. Among the celebrities were George Gershwin, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson.
Cayce foresaw the 1929 stock market crash four years ahead of time. He predicted WWII five years in advance. He accurately predicted that the war would end in 1945.
By age 67, he had conducted tens of thousands of psychic readings, and they took a toll on his health. He died of a stroke on January 3, 1945.
Cayce explained that he could tap into a kind of spiritual database that holds all of the universe's knowledge. And he believed anyone could do the same if we just released ourselves from the constructs of time and space.
Thousands of his psychic readings have been catalogued at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, VA.
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