Transcription
[Applause] Well, let me ask you a question first. I've been thinking about what to say tonight. How many people here know who Edgar Cayce is? Oh, lots. Okay, then I don't have to do the whole biography thing. I, I want to talk about Edgar Cayce, or they asked me to talk about Edgar Cayce, and I accepted because, although his life is quite extraordinary, and I will cover a little of that, what I really want to talk about in terms of Edgar Cayce is what it is he's trying to say, and what he was trying to say about consciousness and space-time.
Now, just to give a little background material. Edgar Cayce was a—oh, and I also, the other thing I want to do, because you do know who Edgar Cayce is, I want to talk about why he did things the way he did them, because almost nobody ever talks about that, which surprises me. But in any case, Edgar Cayce, he was born on the 3rd of March, 1877, 12 years after the Civil War. This also doesn't get mentioned in any of the biographies. He was born into a Confederate state that was in a state of turmoil as a result of the Civil War, in Kentucky, rural Kentucky. I mean, think about this. These people had been living there for a couple hundred years with a black population who were their slaves, but who were now free. And I'll think about what that would be like living in a culture like that. So that, that's a big part of it.
Cayce was also a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. He was, until he was well into his 30s, almost his entire social life was built around his involvement with his church. He was extremely popular as a Sunday school teacher, and because he had the capacity, one of the aspects of his his abilities, he had the ability to, if he held a book up to his head, he could then recite it almost word-for-word. And don't you wish you could do that? He was born into a family that was prominent in the county that he was in, Christian County. I mean, that tells you something right there. And to a mother and father. His mother was, today psychiatrically, would probably be considered codependent, and his father was an alcoholic, racist who was never very successful at anything.
And that matters because when you know anything about Edgar Cayce, you know that he went into trances and he spoke in these trances. He would lie down on a couch or a bed or something and and loosen his tie, and and they would give him a suggestion, and you will have before you the inquiring mind and body of John Jones, Emily Stewart, and he would then begin to talk. Now, one of the things that also never gets mentioned in any of the biographies is why did he do that? Why did he go into trances? And the answer, I think, is that Cayce, because he was a fundamentalist evangelical, most of what he was saying was in direct conflict with what the evangelical Christian faith of the 19th century in rural Kentucky.
The other reason is, is that he started out by being hypnotized, and he developed problems with his voice. They were psychosomatic, and they discovered that when he was hypnotized and given a suggestion that his voice would come back. Otherwise, it was just—he was quite gifted. He would, he became the best photographer in Kentucky and one of the best photographers in the United States, and very few people seem to know that either.
What matters about Cayce in these readings that he gave, that called readings, I actually think of them as remote viewing sessions, because this is a form of non-local perception that he's engaged in. When we look at large populations of people, I've tested about twenty-three, twenty-four thousand people over the years. I've been at this since 1968, so that's a long time. Now, what you see is that the ability to open to non-local consciousness is spread through the population like anything else. It's a bell curve. There are a few people at the this end that are really, really good at it. Edgar Cayce is not the first. In fact, one of the other things that doesn't get mentioned very often is that Edgar Cayce's grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Cayce, reputedly—there's not much documentation, but reputedly by the family stories—was able to do similar things and could make a broom dance and that sort of thing. And so that suggests that, and there are, there's some current research that there may be a genetic component to this. Not that it is that that you can become, that you can open to non-local consciousness necessarily, but that it probably is something genetic, possibly in the prefrontal cortex.
And I say that because there is some very interesting research going on. I'll just give you one example to make the point. A researcher named Jean Cocteau Berg, who was a very good researcher, has died recently. Jean worked with a Kahuna priest in Hawaii, and she put healing recipients in an fMRI magnetic resonance imager. And in another part, not in the same building, even in another place, she had Kahuna priests who were healers, and she had a random number generator so that it was not, she couldn't queue it or to control it. And the random number generator would periodically light a light bulb. And when the light bulb lit, then the Kahuna priests sent healing to the people that were in the fMRI. And what they discovered was that when they did this, and only when this was happening, that the prefrontal cortex of the the anterior superior temporal gyrus lit up in the recipients.
Because the two big questions, and why Edgar Cayce matters, I mean, he was born on the 3rd of March in 1877, and he died on the 3rd of January, 1945. 13th of March, you know, why are we talking about a man who's been dead for almost, you know, since 1945, almost a century? And the reason is, is that he is such an extreme example of this ability to open to non-local consciousness that by studying what he said and what he was able to do, we begin to get a sense of what is going on. Because when you see somebody that has really extraordinary abilities, and you can study them in and carefully.
And the other thing about the Cayce material, which again doesn't often get mentioned, is that the Edgar Cayce material is the largest body of non-local consciousness research that is fully documented that exists. Cayce gave over the course of his life, he began at the very turn of the century, the last century. He gave a total of, let me see, 14,000, 145 readings for 5,744 people. You know, I remembered that they actually gave a bunch more readings, but until Gladys Davis Turner got involved, or Gladys Davis later Turner, and she kept meticulous records. She was the stenographer and the archivist, and she worked her entire life documenting this material. And so if you go to the ARE, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, the organization that was created around his work, and you go into these their library, and there are all these little, these loose-leaf notebooks that are filled with these readings, these thousands of readings, and all of the documentation that supports the validity of what he said. So that there is not, this is not anecdotal conversation. Gladys, I learned a great deal from Gladys. I ran my, I ran my own laboratory in the same way. Gladys kept track of everything: restaurant receipts, little notes people wrote on things, telephone records, just everything. There is no other body of remote perception research in the world that approaches the quality of the archival support of the material itself.
So what is it that Edgar Cayce is doing? You know, what happens? The answer is, is that can begin. The answer, I want to tell you a little story about Max Planck. Max Planck, father of quantum mechanics, was a man who didn't give a lot of interviews. In January of 1931, he gave an interview to The Observer newspaper, and the reporter who did the interview, one of the few that he did, said, "You and Einstein are the most famous scientists in the world. What have you learned?" Now, I don't know what he thought Planck was going to say, something about atoms and molecules, maybe. I don't know. But instead, what Planck said was, "What I've learned is that consciousness is causal and fundamental. You cannot get behind consciousness. Space-time, this is, this is the one you can hear the sphincters tightening, space-time arises from consciousness, not consciousness from space-time." And in 1944, at a physics conference in Pisa, Italy, he stood up and he said, "I have spent my entire life studying atoms and molecules, but I'm sorry to tell you, they don't exist. They are expressions of consciousness."
So the reason that Edgar Cayce is important, other than, I mean, there's wonderful stories, and I will share a couple of these things, but is that because of he is so extreme in his abilities that you can see clearly what Planck was trying to say. Or as Edgar Cayce put it, "Mind is the Builder." And he says it over and over again. And in fact, he talks a great deal about what it is he's doing, and that makes a difference because this is something that you can access. When you read a lot of stuff about consciousness, you read stuff about sending and receiving and signals. I mean, I read these books and these things, it, I'm sorry, there is no sending, there is no receiving, there is no signal. What's happening is you open to non-local consciousness.
Now, most of the time, we are overwhelmed by the sensorial impressions that flood into our neuroanatomy. It's hot, it's cold, it's dark, it's light, there's a smell, there's no smell, it's noisy, it's quiet. All that stuff is constantly flooding in, and it overwhelms this non-local aspect. And the way you get at the non-local aspect is that you have to be able to attain and sustain intentioned, focused awareness. That's why they teach meditation in martial art dojos, in Catholic monasteries, in Buddhist monasteries, in Japanese monasteries. That's why every religion has a part as part of its program teaching people how to attain and sustain intentioned, focused awareness.
Now, when we look at the research data, what we see, for instance, with remote viewing, I'm one of the people that created remote viewing, is that meditators routinely do better than non-meditators. If you look at the healing literature, the scientific literature, you see that meditators do better than non-meditators. Why? Because meditation is a technique for attaining and sustaining intentioned, focused awareness. And when you do that, then the sensorial flood retreats into the background, and what in religion is called the still small voice comes out. And the reason that Edgar Cayce went into a trance is that's how he attained intentioned, focused awareness. And it is also how he disassociated.
You know, in the pre-technological cultures, down to the present-day cultures, as a proposition, made an effort to identify highly gifted people and to train them and recruit them and put them to work in temples or spiritual centers to provide information that would give guidance to the policy makers of that culture. The seven oracles of the ancient Greek world are an example. In fact, the oldest remote viewing that we know about that's on record, and it was done exactly the way we would do it today, is in the 46th chapter of Herodotus' Histories of the World. Herodotus is the first historian, and he wrote a book called The Histories of Histories of the World. And he describes a circumstance in the fifth century BCE involving Croesus, the king of the Lydians. Lydia is a part of Turkey now, but at that time was an independent kingdom. And Croesus got wind that the Persians under Cyrus were about to attack him. And so, what to do? And Herodotus reports this story that I'm about to tell you.
And so Croesus, no dummy, he created seven embassies, seven little teams of people, and he told them to go to the seven oracles of the ancient world and to, and the along to wait for the hundredth day. And on the hundredth day, they were to ask, "What is Croesus, son of Alyattes, king of the Lydians, doing at this time?" Outbound remote viewing. And so they, the seven teams went out. The only one whose answer we know, because it was the correct one, was the Oracle at Delphi. Now, Delphi is an example of what I'm talking about. This was an oracle that was built, the temple was built over a cleft in the earth in which some, not all, but many researchers believe hydrocarbons bubbled up and had a psychoactive, it was like a drug, it was like taking, I don't know, LSD. And young women, the Pythianesses, they were called, would sit in this kind of tripod, cat's cradle thing, and these gases would bubble up, and these girls would go into a kind of altered state of consciousness, and you could ask them questions, and they would speak, just like Edgar Cayce.
So on the hundredth day, the team that went to the Oracle at Delphi went in, and they, before they could even speak, the Pythianess said, "I can count the sands of time, the hundred days. I see the great ocean that they had traveled from Lydia to Delphi, to where the Delphic Oracle is. I see a great bronze urn boiling water, and a hare and a tortoise being cut up and thrown into the pot, and a great bronze lid." Now, that didn't make any sense to the people that were listening to it, but they wrote it all down, and they took it back. And when they got back to Lydia, and they told Croesus what the Oracle at Delphi had said, he bowed down and gave obeisance, because he had said to himself, "You know, if they say Croesus is sitting on his throne issuing orders or edicts, well, of course, he's the king." So instead, he had a tripod brought in, and a great bronze urn, and and a hare and a tortoise, and he cut him up and threw him into the water of the boiling water. That technique actually is an outbound experiment. So people have been doing this for a long time, millennia. Remote viewing is not new in the sense that what is new is that we design protocols that meet scientific standards. But the idea of opening to non-local consciousness, it's not new. The, the talking idol of Siwa, an Egyptian oracle, also talking idol. Note here that all of these, that the person that is speaking disassociates. It's not them speaking, it's the God speaking, or in Edgar Cayce's, it's the source, as they called it in the beginning, the higher self. It's a form of disassociating.
So you are a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, intensely involved with this. You read the Bible through from beginning to end every year of your life for years. You teach Sunday school. All of your social life is tied up in evangelical fundamentalist Christianity. And you're talking about what? Reincarnation? Give me a break. You disassociate, and that's why he went into a trance. That, plus they started with the hypnosis, and that was the way he got into it in the beginning. But the continuation. I was lucky enough when I went to the ARE in 1965 to get to know many of the people who had known that he was dead, of course, he died in 1945. But I got to know many of the people who knew him, and and they told me that the last 14 years of his life, he was able to do the readings without going into a trance, but he kept doing it anyway because that's what people expected. But that he could actually just look at you. And there was a, there was one example, he got arrested, and he and Hulan were put in jail, and he went around to each of the prisoners and basically gave them a little reading just standing there looking at them.
So he is important because what he's trying to show us in all of this, and he says this explicitly, is that if you can attain and sustain intentioned, focused awareness, you can get in touch with this part of yourself. As a scientist, the two big questions for which I do not have answers, I'm sorry. What is consciousness? What is information? Because what we're looking at is not a signal. The way Edgar Cayce describes it, because that the metaphor worked for him was that he went to the Hall of Records. Today, you could think of it as Google. And he went to this hall, and he visualized it as a place with books, and just like you would do. But what he's really saying is he went, that all consciousness is interlinked and interdependent, and that acts of intentioned observation, informationally enrich things. The act of looking at something and paying attention to it. Mind is the Builder. You think about psychosomatic medicine. Mind is the Builder.
And research, for instance, in remote viewing, I did a whole series of studies looking at these issues and discovered that it's easier for remote viewers to see Chartres Cathedral than it is a warehouse of the same size. Now, why would that be? Great big buildings made out of stone and concrete. What's the difference? Why is it always easier for remote viewers to describe Chartres Cathedral than it is the warehouse? And the answer is because from the moment of its inception, Chartres Cathedral was seen as a special place, and that every time anybody looked at it, they looked at it with this intentioned awareness in a heightened emotional state, and that is an informational enricher. Because what we're talking about when we talk about non-local consciousness, we don't know what consciousness is. I mean, I ask this question of every scientist I know, and nobody can give me an answer. So I'm sorry. But what we do know is that acts of intentioned awareness create informational change. The act of intentioned observation is an informational enricher. That's why it's easier to see the instructor cathedral than the warehouse.
The three things that we know about that we can regulate in opening to non-local consciousness, and Cayce made this point quite clearly, are what today we would call numinosity. A term coined in the 19th century, but really made relevant to this conversation by Carl Jung, who said numina are psychic entities. They are beyond space-time. That's what he means by information. The most interesting part of physics today for me is information theory physics, because physics is beginning to grapple with this idea of information as the fundamental. And so when you pray for someone, what you are doing is holding them in intentioned awareness, and when lots of people do it, change can occur. Numinosity, Jung's term, numina, numinosity is that informational enrichment. What it does is it makes it like a neon sign on the thing. And the third part, intention, luminosity, and entropic process. Now, entropy, we all learned in school, means movement toward disorder or decoherence. And if you, if you think about that, it's not just physical, it's also at the informational state. Death is an entropic process. That's why ghosts, we see ghosts, because the house is an information, the physical house, the informational structure of which, that it's like an architecture, an informational architecture of which the house is a physical manifestation. And if someone commits suicide or dies or, you know, all the ghost stories, what you're doing when you are perceiving that is that you are opening and linking with the informational structure of the house and the event, the most luminous event which occurred in the house.
This matters in a lot of ways, but one of them, and one of the most important, is that the key to social transformation is beingness. You know, Gandhi, but just before he was assassinated, a reporter asking, he went, the reporter went up to the ashram where he was, and you can see him is sitting there in his little dhoti and with his little spinning wheel. And the reporter said to him, "My editor wants to know, how did you force the British to leave India?" You know, people don't really talk about it, but India got its independence without a war. I mean, we had to have a revolution. India didn't do that. There wasn't a war. How did you force the British to leave India? How did you get one of the most powerful nations on earth to surrender its most prized colonial possession? The queen or the king was Emperor or Empress of India. And Gandhi's answer speaks to this issue of beingness and consciousness. He said, "It's not what we did that mattered, although that mattered. It's not what we said that mattered, although that did matter. It was the nature of our character that led the British to choose to leave India, not force." Choose. Note the verb difference.
When you listen and look at the Cayce material, those 14,000, 145 readings that are down there in Virginia Beach, what you see over and over and over and over again in his material is this idea that the consciousness that you hold affects not only your well-being, but when you join with others, it creates social transformation. The beingness. Why would a group of people, he had no army, he had no money, he had no official position, he had none of the things that you would think would be necessary to get the British Empire to surrender its most prized possession? How did that happen? It was because he got the coherent intention of the population. The most powerful force on earth is the collective intention of a large group of people. And you can see this play out. I look around this room, and I would be willing to bet you that a large percentage of this audience remembers, as I do, that when they were young, and you went to somebody's house, there was a coffee table, and on the coffee table was an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes and one of those lighters your mother told you not to fool with, right? You never see that anymore. Why? Because the beingness of a large number of people changed.
Look, if you look, for instance, if you do a Google word search, Google has lots of things that are quite interesting, but one of them is that they keep track of all the words that people search. And so you can actually find out how often people search words. If you go back about three years ago, maybe four now, you see that there is a shift between gay to LGBTQ. Who actually starts at LGBT and then becomes LGBTQ. No president got on the television and said, "We're now going to say LGBT Q and not gay or lesbian or whatever." Nobody passed a law. No one in the Senate stood up and gave a speech. What happened? And the answer is because a large number of people changed in consciousness. They held an intention for a new way of looking at things. And so I think, but the Cayce material, all these stories that you hear, I mean, they're amazing stories. I mean, Cayce would give a reading in a language that he, not only a language he didn't speak, he had an eighth-grade education, left school when he was 16, and we're talking about a one-room school in rural post-Civil War Kentucky, so it's probably not Harvard University.
That shift in consciousness that occurs when you hold intentioned, focused awareness, and other people join you with that and make different choices as a result of that, is the power to change anything. Whatever the official position, whatever the army's, whatever the money. You know, we have the worst wealth inequity in this country. We have neo-feudalism. We have such a vast wealth and equity now. And you hear people struggling, and "Nobody pays attention to me," and "Who can I do? I'm just an ordinary person," and "You know, how can I make any difference?" And "You know, I don't have any money, and I don't have a position." Remember Gandhi. What the Cayce readings were trying to get people to realize is that you are more than animated meat, and that in fact, there is a continuity of consciousness. You existed. And I don't say this as a speculation, this is what the research tells us. I, you know, I am an experimentalist. What I care about is data. I'm not interested in philosophies. I'm not interested in politics in the partisan sense. I don't care about theories very much. I'm not interested in philosophies. What I want to know is, if you test this, what happens? The data is telling us at this point in science that consciousness exists prior to birth, and that it continues after corporeal death. Right now, about 4% of the American public have had near-death experiences. That's about 13, 14 million people. We know from scientific research that when 10% of any cohort, whether it's a church group or a nation, when it, when 10% of the cohort changes in consciousness, the whole cohort, whatever it is, whatever size it is, has to change to accommodate that shift in consciousness. That the 10% add.
So if you think about it in that way, in the way that Cayce was trying to tell people, most of his readings are medical. Because I think one of the things was, he felt safe about that. It didn't cause him problems from his religious perspective to be helpful. Although for his family, his giving readings for his wife, Gertrude, and for himself was very painfully difficult, and for years he tried to avoid it because it made him stand out and people thought he was weird. But he kept at it because he could see that it was helping people. And so most of the bulk of the readings are are really about medical issues. He is the father of holistic medicine. But much more than that, what he's really trying to tell us is that consciousness is causal and fundamental, and that when you change in consciousness, you can change everything. And that those things which foster well-being are always the best choice.
Cayce was an avid gardener. Although his father was a racist, he was not. His life was saved when he was a little boy by a black man. His first Bible, he got from a black woman. He had very strong feelings about racial equality and gender equality, very much in conflict with his culture. Another reason why he went to sleep, I think, because it disassociated. But what the consistent threads that come through these readings over decades, I mean, he starts at the really about 1900, and he goes up to the end. In fact, he commits suicide in a way, because he was told he could give two readings without any effect on his health, and because of the Second World War, he was giving up to 16, and he literally just burnt out. But he kept at it because he felt that it would help. He is not the most, he is the most documented person, but there are other people like this. He's not unique. Stefan Ossowiecki, who was a Polish chemical engineer, who did something similar in Poland during the Second World War. There are, as I say, these, the talking idols of Delphi, of Siwa. Today, as we are standing here in Colombia, in the mountains on the east side of Colombia, the Kogi tribal group take young boys, put them in a cave, attended only by their parents and the priests. They use a cocoa substance, do shamanic psychoactive augmentation, and they teach these boys. And when they're about 13, they bring them out of the cave, and they're called the Mamas, and they provide the same kind of guidance for the leaders of the Kogi that the talking idols of antiquity did. As well, the Maya had the talking idol of Ixchel, which was on Cozumel Island. This is not new.
And modern, the part that's new and modern is that we're finally beginning to study this stuff scientifically, and and we can begin to tease out how it works because we can design experiments which allow us to test hypotheses. That's how I got to intention, numinosity, an entropic process. That's, that's a result of experimentation, that's not a theory. I think what we need to do when we think about the Cayce material is recognize that this was an extraordinary man who, in the bell curve, is over way over at this end, who was committed to what he was doing. You know, the also not widely recognized is Cayce never made any money out of this. He was never wealthy. He never tried to become wealthy. I invented a protocol called The Associated Remote Viewing Protocol, where because we learned that that is very hard to get analytical information from remote viewing, a name or a number, that kind of thing is not easy to do. Most people can't do it. But it's very easy to tag along with your neuroanatomy and ask you to describe the sense impressions that you have. So it's easy to describe an apple. And I was writing a speech for Elmo Zumwalt, the Chief of Naval Operations, for whom I was the special assistant. And he'd asked me to write a speech about law of the sea and that sort of thing. And I was looking for a historical example. And I came across a picture of a code book that had been created by Lord Nelson, who was the commander of the British Navy in 1798 when he fought Admiral Brue, Napoleon's Admiral, in the Battle of the Nile, or the Battle of Abu Qir Bay. And he realized that the ships of the line, as they lined up these ships that had more than 65 cannon, that all the firing of the cannon caused a huge amount of black smoke because they had black powder. So they just got lost, and he couldn't, he couldn't get commands to them to get them to act as he wanted him to do. So he created an association. He had flags that meant certain commands. And so he would take his frigates, smaller ships, to sail behind the ships of the line, and they would fly a set of flags. And that way, the commanders of the ships of the line would look at the flags and say, "Oh, if it's a red flag with a white stripe, I'm supposed to attack left," or whatever. And out of that idea, because we can't get analytical information in remote viewing, that's hard to do, I thought, well, but people are really good at describing sense impressions. So suppose I said the apple meant that the stock market was going to go up, and the scissors meant the stock market was going to go down, and the sponge meant that the stock market was going to stay the same, or in my case, the Standard & Poor 500 index. And I, so I did this experiment, and we invested in the Standard & Poor Index, and we turned five thousand dollars into one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And I quit doing it because it ate my laboratory alive. People who were otherwise normal, rational people, when they started seeing this money come in, went crazy. I couldn't get anything else done in the lab. We did it Thursday for Friday, and all week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all they talked about was, "Do you think we'll get it again? Do you think, I mean, how much can we invest this time?"
One of the things that stands out about Cayce is that he never succumbed to that temptation. He didn't get wealthy. He got to know all kinds of people. I mean, it's not widely known, he gave readings for Nikola Tesla, for Edison. He gave readings, we don't know what was said, but for Woodrow Wilson when the League of Nations was being created. So he met all kinds of people and gave readings to them, but he didn't try to translate it into money. What he was involved with was fostering well-being. That's the key. When you foster well-being, I cannot find an exception. You produce results which are always more productive, more effective, more efficient, easier to implement, nicer to live under, and much, much cheaper. And what Cayce was trying to do in his readings was foster well-being and to awaken a middle class of America, largely, who were in completely submerged in the mechanization and technolog—I don't know what the word would be—technological sophistication. You know, when I was a boy, I remember in one of those encyclopedias that you, that they show little boys and girls, there was a picture of a mechanical person, and he was, the front was taken off, and there were people working in each of the things, and they represented the various organs. And it had reduced people to a machine. And Cayce feared that, I think. And what he was trying to do was to awaken to people the idea that the fostering of well-being is the right course, and that course is no less relevant today than it was at his time, because we stand at a precipice. The current projections are about 13 million of us are going to become climate refugees by 2050. I mean, I could do a whole thing on climate change, but I just make this one point. The message that Edgar Cayce was trying to get across, "Mind is the Builder," collective intention shared amongst groups of people can create social transformation that fosters well-being. It doesn't require money. It doesn't require military might. It doesn't require official positions. It is a function that ordinary people can mobilize and use to create whatever they want. And so the question I think that we have to leave ourselves with is, what do we want? What kind of world would we like to see? The world that Edgar Cayce is describing is a world in which people help one another, in which the fostering of well-being is a major social priority, in which people recognize that they are more than animated meat, and that there is this aspect of them that is outside of space-time, and that all consciousness is interdependent and interconnected. And the question I leave you with is, if not now, then when? And if not us, then who? Thank you.
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I'm sorry, I didn't hear.
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Andrea Esther Hicks? Oh, I've heard of it. I don't really know. I don't really know anything about it, so I can't comment. Although I would say this to you, if you notice, I notice in science, in fact, let me speak, let me, I can't speak to Esther Hicks, but let me speak to what she represents that I can do. You know, I went out to speak at another conference, big conference, in Yale, and afterwards, a group of Millennials came up to me and said, "Can we take you to lunch? We, we have a bunch of questions." The next day, I spoke at night, and the next day they came up to me and said, "We want to take you to lunch. We have some questions." So there were nine of them. Then I said, "Sure." So we went out to lunch. And in answering a question that a young woman asked me, I made a reference, because it was a woman asking the question, to Barbara Tuchman. Not one person in the room, no, not one person at the table knew who she was. Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin are the two leading women historians of the 20th century in America. So then we went on a little bit longer, and then I got asked by a man, a young man, and in answering his question, I, to test my idea that had begun to think about, I mentioned David McCullough. They didn't know who he was either. And I thought, my goodness, he's on PBS about every other week. So, so I said to them, "How do you all learn? How do you take information in?" And they said to me, "We read adult comic books. We read novels. We do social media. We play video games. And we watch series on Netflix and Hulu and Showtime and that sort of thing." And so I listened to that, and I was, I was flying home. I began to think about that. You know, I've been writing nonfiction books and hundreds of research science papers to get published in science journals. And I began to think about, you know, maybe I'm, I need to change how I do this, because they don't read any of the stuff that I'm writing. And so I thought, well, I don't know anything about adult comic books, and I'm not interested in. I don't do social media. I published Swartz Report on Facebook and LinkedIn, but I don't really do media in the way that they meant it. I don't play video games. I don't have time. But I could watch television, and I could write novels. I read a lot of novels. Maybe I could write one. I'd never written one. And so I started writing novels and put all the same science stuff that I put in science papers, I just put it in my novels. They're all, everything in the novels is all based on science. And I started watching television, which I didn't do. I mean, I watched news, but I didn't watch it. And and I was so glad that they had asked me that question and told me that, because I realized there were two things going on. And Esther Hicks, who I don't know, but I know, sort of, what she is or what she's doing. As I began to watch these television shows, I realized that there was a change in consciousness that is going on in America. There are 15 television shows, series, that deal with time travel. There are another 15 that deal with issues of consciousness. I mean, some of it I don't agree with, you know, like the magic stuff, but but there are other things which are just explicitly about non-local consciousness. And then as I thought about that, I realized over the last several years, I've been asked to be on the board of five new scientific societies, all of which are fundamentally focused on consciousness. Hundreds of scientists, old ones, young ones. There are three big discussion groups on the internet that involve hundreds of scientists, all of whom are involved with consciousness research. There is a shift in the paradigm that is happening. Part of it is tied into the ecology movement. Part of it is being driven by climate change, I think. But there is a shift in how we look at the world. And that the four-thousand-year-old Abrahamic, Middle Bronze Age thinking, in which we have dominion over the earth, and men are superior and dominant to women, is changing. And it has begun quite recently. And that each of us, by the choices that we make, the shows we watch, the books we buy, the things we support, all the things we participate or volunteer at, all of those things are changing. So that this idea, this ancient Abrahamic idea, is diffusing. Gender equality, racial equality, that we are part of the matrix of consciousness, the Gaia hypothesis. There is a change of foot. And this lady that you mentioned, she is an expression responding to that. When consciousness changes, it's like the culture becomes pregnant, and it gives birth because of the high mortality rate, it gives birth to litters. I'm one of the litters, and my litter mates are shifting in consciousness. And I can see in these younger people, the Millennials and the Gen Xers and the Gen Zs, that they are also shifting, because they're beginning to recognize, "We're the ones who are going to live in this world in the future, and it's not acceptable to keep doing things the way we're doing them." And so each of us has that opportunity, wherever we are, in whatever we do, by the things we say, by the choices we make, the things we buy, the dog food, the toilet paper, the toothpaste, every time you buy something, you are voting for a worldview, and you have enormous power. It's very interesting to look at how things shift. I don't know how many people have noticed, but fast food restaurants are embracing veggie burgers like a long-lost child. I mean, I don't know who invented the Impossible Burger, but if you go into, I don't eat fast food restaurants, but if you go into a fast food restaurant now, I did this, I started doing this just to see how prevalent this was, you can see that these companies that serve up fast foods are responding to the customers because the customers are demanding a different way of doing things. And in every choice you make, you either support well-being or you just make profit the first priority. And it's up to us. Yeah.
Anybody else? Yes, in the back. I'm sorry, at that part, I didn't get this. A channel? This a person who's a channeler? Oh, okay. Okay. Cayce was not, well, Edgar Cayce was not a channel in the sense that he was channeling either Zorkon or the Council of Nine or—no. What he's talking about is that he is in contact with what he calls his higher self. This is the aspect of consciousness that is outside of space-time. Channeling, which is a very interesting phenomenon, it occurs at the end of every century. It was very big in the 19th century. That's where spirit, in fact, there were churches, Spiritualist churches. There are communities that still exist of people who are channelers. Whole community of channelers. Lilydale up in New York, or Cassadaga down in Florida, are examples. Those are communities of mediums where you can go and pay a small fee, and you can, they'll channel something. It started at the end of the 19th century. Spiritism actually became a church. And it also began at the end of the 20th century when there were all, I was thinking of the, the woman that channels Ramtha. Yeah. Yeah. I can't think of her name right now. I know her. Actually, I've known her for years. No, no, Ramtha. JZ Knight. Thank you. I knew there were initial. So JZ Knight is an example of that. Channeling, what channeling is doing is trying to contact discarnates, or sometimes they're expressed as higher beings. Glastonbury Cathedral was reconstructed by Frederick Bligh Bond because he used automatic writing to channel the monks who had had had been the people who maintained Glastonbury Abbey. It was the largest Abbey in England, and Henry the Eighth, because they wouldn't give up their allegiance to the Pope, destroyed the Abbey. It's still, the ruins still exist. But Frederick Bligh Bond, in 1917, 18, 19, used channeling to reconstruct this, this Cathedral, and defined where the walls were, because they were all, there was just a few walls up, and everything else was underground. I wrote a book in which the secret vaults of time, which tells this whole story. The problem with channeling is, you actually don't know who you're contacting. It, it is a form of opening to non-local consciousness, but it's not always clear who you're contacting. No, I don't use words. You'll notice I don't use words like ESP, psychic. All that sort of thing. Those are all archaic words. I don't use them at all. What we're looking at with all of this, channeling included, all of this, is non-local consciousness. That is the aspect of consciousness which is not limited by space-time. And it has many manifestations. Channeling is one. Edgar Cayce was another. Remote viewers are another. Healing is another. I mean, just all of it is about opening to this non-local aspect of consciousness. And it's kind of like doing a Google. You sort of put in your search terms, and you get, you know, whatever that produces. The difficulty with channeling, if you look at the literature across the centuries, is that it isn't always clear who you're contacting and what their intentions are. And so you have to be very careful. You, anytime you are dealing with the non-local, because everything is in there. I mean, everything that ever is, was, or it's all in the matrix of the non-local domain. You have to measure the quality of the information. Just the fact that it comes from a non-local source does not inherently mean that it's positive. And so you, whenever you become involved with non-local information, you have to measure, is this producing well-being, or is it producing some kind of crisis or some kind of difficulty? And there is a lot of that because it depends on your intentions. That is, that's why I mentioned this thing about Cayce not using that to get money, because that wasn't his intention. But there are people who set themselves up as channels, and they like the attention. I'm not saying I don't know this particular one, but I'm just saying channeling in general, who liked the attention and who liked the money that they can get. And so you always have to calibrate the integrity of the information as tested to see what I mean. And so whenever you deal with a channel, but all of it is about opening to non-local consciousness. Non-local consciousness is the fundamental. This Buddha is right. This is an illusion created by intentioned consciousness. That's the hard part. It's very hard to get. People have a hard time with this. Now, the, now, let me also say, the reason that science until recently did not deal with consciousness is because of the Council of Trent. Between 1545 and 1563, the Roman Catholic Curia held a series of 25 meetings in Trento and Bologna. And they did this because they were responding to the fact that science was beginning to come into existence, Galileo and and others, and because of the corruption of the church, the Protestant Reformation was beginning. And so between 1545 and 1563, they had these 25 meetings, and at the end of the day, issued an edict. And they said, "Anything that has to do with spirit, read consciousness, that's our world. Anything that has to do with the physical, the material, you scientists can have that. But if you cross over into our world, and we can get at—"
You, we're going to kill you. In fact, we're going to torture you, and then we're going to burn you alive. And they did, including burning a lot of women who were herbalists. That's the Inquisition. I mean, at one point, the church had official torture chambers, and the Dominicans were the principal people that did this.
As a result of that, scientists, because at that time the church was the most influential of all the churches, controlled most of the country's scientists, recognized it as a taboo and stopped doing it. They stopped looking at consciousness. They stopped studying it. The last person killed by the Inquisition was in 1826 in Spain, and he was killed because he was a teacher who was teaching his students in a philosophy class about deism. And they caught him, and they publicly garroted him.
So this was what began as a kind of taboo developed into materialism. I know that everybody you hear scientists all the materialism. Well, that's the real science. Materialism is a cultural effect. If you go to China, for instance, and you talk to Chinese scientists, as I have done, they don't have any trouble with consciousness being part of science because they never had the Council of Trent and this, this taboo, which became generation after generation, became built into science.
It didn't change until the end of the 19th century when anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and parapsychology all began in a period of about 30 years, beginning particularly with a man named Adolf Bastian, who wrote a book called "The Psychic Unity of Mankind" and "The Fundamental Thoughts of Humanity," which influenced Jung to create the collective unconscious idea and influenced Joe Campbell to create the monomyth idea. These are cultural effects. They're not science. Science is a process for discovering things, learning things by very rigorous examination.
We are going through a change now, and it's interesting that you're asking me questions about people who are popping up in the culture who are opening to this non-local aspect of consciousness. Okay, where are you? Yes. Oh, well, again, you know, I mean, I'm a child of the '60s. Dear, of course, we made a dreadful error. It started with the creation, the whole Reefer Madness thing. I don't know you, but you and I both live in states where marijuana, for instance, is legal, and you have probably noticed what I have noticed, and that is there's nothing to notice, right? I live on this island off the coast of Washington. People that smoke grass smoke grass. Nobody cares. There's nothing any different.
However, to your question, the use of psychoactive substances dates back at least 5,000 years, and probably much older. There is some evidence in archeology of the use of mushrooms, for instance, psychedelic mushrooms. There is now a real awakening of that research, which was castrated with Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs, which was terrible because the research we now see tells us that, I mean, every time I read these papers, and I read all those papers, good lord, I'm a Vietnam vet, right? I think about all those guys that came back who had PTSD because of what they experienced in that incredibly stupid war, and there was nothing to treat them with. We now know that psychoactive substances can be very useful in things like PTSD.
The use of psychoactive substances in these cadres that I was telling you about, the pre-technological cultures would identify people who were gifted and would get them all together, and then at a temple or a shrine, and would train them. They often used psychoactive substances. The Kogi use some kind of cocaine derivative that they work with. There's another group down in the Amazon who work with ayahuasca. As in any case, you can abuse these things, or you can use them in a positive way. We made this, we went off the rails because there was a lot of power issues that were involved with that, and I'm glad to see that that part of the pharmacopoeia has been reintroduced, and people like Jim Fadiman or David Luke or others who are doing this kind of research are discovering some wonderful things, and it's proving very fruitful, particularly. I'm always very mindful about these guys that come back, men and women who have PTSD because of the horrible things that they've experienced, and so I see it as a plus to reintroduce psychoactive substances into the treatment of disorders. Yes. Oh, wait. Okay. Look, get to you. Yes. I didn't hear the last part. Dreams or readings? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're, you know, as I said, I wanted to cover enough biography to get a sense of it, but not too much. Yeah. I mean, Casey was, because he was such an extreme example, for instance, as I said earlier, he spoke languages that he didn't speak. He was giving a reading for a woman in Italy, and he spoke not only Italian, but he spoke Genoese, which is a dialect of Italian which nobody in Kentucky even knew existed. And in order to understand what he was saying, Gladys wrote it all down phonetically. They had to go out and they finally found a guy with a pushcart who came from Genoa, and I think this was in Louisville, I'm not sure, but I'm not remembering exactly, who tried to help them understand it.
One of my favorites is Casey gave a reading for a man who had leg problems, and he said, "What you need to do is to get this smoked oil and rub it on your legs, and it will solve your problem." And so they sent this out. You know, the people are not physically present, usually. This was all, and this is all pre-computer, so it was all done by mail and telephone, and which is lovely because there's all this documentation. But anyway, so they, what the man went to his doctor, and the doctor went to the pharmacy, and the pharmacy said, "Well, who the hell knows what smoked oil is?" So they went back to Casey, and he gave another reading, and he said, "Well, it's on the second shelf in the back in the storeroom, and if you go there, you'll find there's a bottle that's back in them in the thing." And so the pharmacist went back into the storeroom, and in the back, way in the back, was a bottle of smoked oil, and he called up Casey and he said, "How could you possibly know that?" "It's that there. My father, my, I inherited that drugstore from my father, so it must have, he must have bought it. I'm not, I have any idea what it is." But the man got the smoked oil, and he used it, and he got better.
Casey gave, I learned, let me think how to get into this exactly. As I said, I'm one of the people that created remote viewing. Really. I mean, to give credit to everybody, myself in '68, then beginning in the early '70s, Russ Targ, Hal Puthoff, Pat Price, at the SRI lab. I wouldn't do classified research because I thought everything we know about consciousness should be made available to everybody. But not everybody agreed with me, so that was the government classified lab. I ran a lab called Mobius. The third big lab was Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Group. Anyway, I just learned so much from Casey's readings about how to do remote viewing. And one of the things that I got was that you can get anything. You know, there is nothing that you can't find out about. In fact, that's what freaked remote viewing out. Freaked the government out because they realized there were no secrets. And trust me, I was in the government. They like secrets. And when you realize that, at one of the, an example, they asked a remote viewer to describe Brezhnev's office, his inner office, and they did it, and they later found out it was exactly right. And when they realized that, they thought, "My God, then somebody could describe what was going on in the Oval Office in the White House." It freaked people out. You can't have a secret.
So Casey's readings, he's often described as a healer. He was not a healer. He was a provider of information. And he could get almost anything. He would, one of the things that I learned, as I say, in creating remote viewing, he gives a reading and he says, "Oh, the readings all start the same way. You will have before you the inquiring mind and body of whatever the name was of such-and-such an address." Casey's first words are, "He's not here yet. He's stuck on the bus." And it turns out he was stuck on the bus. Or another one, he gives a reading for a very fat lady, and he says, "Yes, we have the body, and my goodness, there's quite a lot of it." Or another one, he says, he gets the direction to do the reading, and he says, "Oh, I can smell the jasmines. The jasmine. It's so, the window is open, and the jasmine is coming in, and it smells so pleasant." Or another one, he gives a reading for somebody, and he says, "Yes, we have the body. My goodness, those were very garish striped pajamas." So the readings are filled with these little observations that there was just simply no way he could possibly have known any of that, and yet he routinely did.
As I said, he is the father of holistic medicine. I've been eating the Cayce diet since 1965. It's a kind of modified Mediterranean diet, and at the time it was considered very weird. And when I first started doing it, the only place you could get organic ingredients was from Walnut Acres. I don't even think it exists anymore, but you used to have to order it, and then they would send you a box with organic. That's how weird it was. He talks about organic food. He talks today, this is all commonplace. Don't eat a lot of red meat, don't eat fried foods, large, you know, a large squat of vegetables and salads. He said specific things. Lettuce is clarifying for the blood. It turns out it is. All of those food recommendations that he made are now quite commonplace, but at the time were so weird that people just hardly could process it.
He, his exercising. Casey began giving readings just as Osteopathy and Chiropractic were beginning, and as Homeopathy. There were then about 15,000 homeopathic physicians in the United States. Homeopathy is the transference of an information pattern into water by dilution and succussion. So you take something like Arnica, for instance, and you would dilute it with water, and every time you make a dilution, then you shake it up, succuss it. There is a whole form now of organic agriculture that was begun by Rudolf Steiner, who is Casey's contemporary. They were born at the same time. Steiner, who you probably all know about, but he died in '23, but he began what's called biodynamic gardening. My wife is a biodynamic gardener. She grows all her food. I mean, the only thing we buy are oils and proteins. And I mean, Brahman grows everything. I'm married to a large redheaded fairy. No, you think I'm kidding.
What you get out of the Cayce material is again, and if you can get anything, it's about intention. And you can ask for an answer, take it into meditation. You can use dreams, for instance. Henry Reed and Dale Graff have both come up with techniques for using dreams to get information. You can do a Google on their names. Henry Reed, R-E-E-D, or Dale Graff, G-R-A-F-F. There are a lot of ways to get this access. There is no, there's only one mountain in town, and it's an illusion. So how you get up and is purely a matter of personal taste. That's another thing that you get from the Cayce readings. He kept saying, "I'm not unique. You can do this. Other people can do this." It's about opening to this aspect of ourselves, and when you do that, then all kinds of things open up.
You can use lucid dreaming. A researcher named Steven LaBerge, L-A-B-E-R-G-E, developed lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is you wake up in your dream, you know you're dreaming, you can take control of the dream and go and get it to answer questions or whatever. He's written a book about it, and there's a lot of research about it. No problem with lucid dreaming is that some of the people that do it get confused about what is real and what is the dream. A friend of mine, Joe McMoneagle, who was one of the viewers of remote viewers for the SRI program, the Stargate program in the Army, did this lucid dreaming experiment with Ed, one of the founders of SRI, in which they would, in lucid dreaming, they have a little gadget that you put on the end of your nose, and it tickles the end of your nose just enough to wake you up in your when you're dreaming, when you're in REM sleep, but not to wake you up totally, right? And so he was trying to remote view targets. In my book, "Opening to the Infinite," I tell this story and show the pictures of what they actually did. But anyway, Joe did this, and in the dreams, there were these creatures, and then he went one day into his base and he looked at some of the people in the base, and they looked like the creatures, and he said he quit doing it because he said, "I'm losing contact with which is reality." But in any case, there are a lot of ways to do this.
That's the, that's the other thing I think that's very important to know. The key to all of this is to find the rituals that work for you, and then to do them, and to do them regularly. That's the key. It's not that there's one way that it has to be done. I dislike these remote viewing teachers or healing teachers who tell you, "This is the only way. This is the true way. This is the superior way," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. As I told you about the story of Herodotus, there are a lot of ways to do this. People have been opening up to non-local consciousness for thousands of years because it is the fundamental part of us. And how you do it is much less important than that what you do it, why you do it, and to what end you do it. That's the heart and the key part.