The Essential Edgar Cayce by Mark Thurston

quantum leap of transforming the soul, we gain access to a new kind of power in our lives. But with that power comes greater responsibility.

    “More spirituality than materiality.” Spirituality emphasizes oneness, whereas materiality emphasizes distinctions, competition. With authentic transformation, we begin to respond to life in terms of oneness.

    “Karmic influences reach their changing point.” Here, it sounds like Edgar Cayce may be referring simply to grace, the law that complements karma. Karma means we are constantly contending with situations of our own making. Grace does not eradicate karma; it introduces an additional element to it that can turn “stumbling blocks into stepping-stones,” as Cayce often stated. Transformation comes when we are open to grace, that seemingly magical force of love that heals our most vexing problems. Grace lets us know we are undergoing transformation and not just improvement.

EDGAR CAYCE’S WORK FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

    Edgar Cayce cofounded three organizations, two of them still active today.

    In 1925, Cayce joined forces with supporters to create the Association of National Investigators. It provided a legal framework for conducting Cayce’s work in general and a framework for parapsychological investigation in particular, especially with regard to medical clairvoyance. The ANI, as it was known, raised money to build and run the Cayce Hospital of Research and Enlightenment for two years starting in 1928. But when the hospital failed due to lack of funds and discord among its directors, ANI also collapsed.

    Concurrently, Cayce and several colleagues founded a small institution of higher learning, Atlantic University, in Virginia Beach, which opened its doors in the autumn of 1929. While there were great plans to expand the school’s scope, enrollment, and influence, less than two years later it, too, ran into severe financial difficulty and had to close its doors.

    But while ANI folded along with the hospital, Atlantic University was kept alive as a legal entity chartered in the state of Virginia, and some forty years after Edgar Cayce’s death, in the mid-1980s, it was reactivated as a small graduate school entitled by Virginia’s Council of Higher Education to grant master’s degrees. The program, referred to as Transpersonal Studies, is interdisciplinary, including courses in psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, religious studies, health sciences, and the arts. Although it offers an on-site resident program at its Virginia Beach campus, the majority of its students participate off-site by utilizing computer-based learning, which effectively makes its offerings available worldwide.

    Atlantic University offers in-depth study not only of the teachings of Edgar Cayce but also of a wide range of body-mind-spirit practitioners. The university also maintains an extensive Web site at www.atlanticuniv.edu , and is accredited through the Distance Education and Training Council, an organization authorized by the U.S. Department of Education to monitor schools’ delivery of curricula to students off-site.

    The third organization cofounded by Edgar Cayce is also still active today, and it is by far the largest of the three endeavors. Soon after the demise of ANI, several of Cayce’s most ardent supporters helped him start a new nonprofit organization to continue his work, even though the treasured hospital project had been abandoned. The Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), created in 1931, has for more than seventy years served to make Cayce’s work known to a wide array of audiences through publishing, membership, small group study, and conferences. As of the early twenty-first century, more than thirty thousand people are dues-paying members of ARE worldwide, but there are also literally hundreds of thousands of others who are students of Cayce’s work and access the various resources of ARE, especially its online materials at