Free The Essential Edgar Cayce by Mark Thurston

already had tried to formulate his own best thinking on the matter, offering Cayce a possible solution and requesting comment. This sound strategy is consistent with the approach often encouraged by the readings for consulting psychic sources.

    Although there are many subtleties and interesting nuances found in the reading, at least five major themes are addressed:
• Creation and the purpose of life.
• The importance of free will.
• A cosmic view of the soul’s journey.
• The process of incarnation and influences that shape a lifetime.
• The mysteries of Jesus, the Christ.

    There are, of course, other readings on creation, and Thomas Sugrue was able to draw upon them as well. But in this reading, we find an especially straightforward description of the fall of humanity. Edgar Cayce takes evil seriously. But to answer the ancient problem of its origins, he focuses on the misuse of free will by souls. To decipher essential points in this portion of the reading, it may be helpful to notice that the term soul is used for the spiritual component of our nature, whereas man refers to the physical creation that happened much later.

    Were souls meant to come to earth? Here, the answer is a little more cryptic (“The earth [was] . . . not necessarily as a place of tenancy for the souls of men” [emphasis added]). Apparently, it became a place for meaningful experience after souls had fallen through their own misuse of free will.

    The issue of free will is so prominent throughout this discourse, in fact, that reading 5749-14 might well be considered Cayce’s most important statement on the subject. Free will, one of the three attributes of the soul along with mind and spirit, is described in a variety of ways:
• The cause of the Fall.
• The greatest factor (surpassing both heredity and environment) in helping or hurting the soul’s growth.
• The agent by which the soul makes use of opportunities due to the circumstances of birth.
• The awakener of the Christ Consciousness resident in the unconscious mind of every soul.

    Another particularly significant portion of this reading concerns the distinction between Jesus and the Christ —a topic explored in more depth in chapter 7, “Esoteric Christianity.” In other readings, we find not only the idea that “Jesus is the pattern” but that the “power is in the Christ.” That is to say, Jesus was a man who was one incarnation of a soul that had many lifetimes, whereas Christ is a consciousness to which a soul can attain. In this reading, the mission of the soul we know as Jesus is clarified.

    However, Edgar Cayce’s answer regarding Jesus’s past lives leaves us bewildered. Thomas Sugrue complicates matters by putting the question of Jesus’s past lives and the Christ’s past lives in a single question. Cayce responds that the Christ had incarnations as Enoch and Melchizedek, but then he describes another sequence of lifetimes belonging to a soul that became Jesus, including Joseph, Joshua, and Jeshua. Does this latter sequence denote a new phase of the same soul’s development? We can’t be sure—it’s open to interpretation.

    The final question-and-answer exchange may seem like a request for personal advice on Sugrue’s part. Up to this point, Cayce has presented a thoughtful dissertation on metaphysics, a clairvoyant view of the structure of the universe and human history. Now comes the twist: Cayce adds a moral dimension. Don’t try to “go around the Cross,” he states. There is no real understanding of all these matters—creation, the past lives of Jesus, or anything else—unless one also embraces the meaning of self-sacrifice.

    The passage reminds us of Gandhi’s famous warning: “Be on guard against science without humanity, politics without principle, knowledge without character, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without consciousness, and work without sacrifice.” Edgar Cayce seems to be speaking in the