Hugh Lynn Cayce and Psychic Phenomena

Hugh Lynn Cayce (left) was photographed with his father and mother, Edgar and Gertrude Cayce, and his brother Edgar Evans Cayce circa 1940.

Hugh Lynn Cayce (1907-1982) was instrumental in expanding public awareness of his father's life and 'The Work,' as father and son referred to the psychic readings that came through Edgar Cayce while in a hypnotic trance.  Hugh Lynn Cayce's own psychic experiences are described in the biography Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father's Business (1988) by A. Robert Smith.

During one interview with Smith, Hugh Lynn commented: "The breadth of view of the Christ consciousness, I have said many times, is the most exciting material in the Edgar Cayce readings for me." 

In a July 1983 tribute article honoring Hugh Lynn Cayce in The A.R.E. Journal, Harmon Hartzell Bro observed: "I became convinced, years ago, that for Hugh Lynn the total structure of his father's work and thought became a paradigm or pattern for viewing the work of the Christ . . . He fell back on study of 'psychic phenomena' as the doorway through which he might enter into discussion of spiritual ultimates; did not his father and other psychics speak freely of such spiritual matters?  I think he used 'psychic' to mean what is now tentatively called 'transpersonal' among psychologists."

Smith wrote that another dimension of Hugh Lynn's commitment was his trying to comprehend the nature of his father's gift.  Hugh Lynn was quoted:

 

"I went to all kinds of psychics to try to understand Dad, sometimes to ask about him, but just to understand psychic ability.  I wanted to be sure he wasn't really a freak, that it was a universal quality with many facets to it.  I began by reading the literature.  I went back to the early British Society for Psychical Research and read everything that had been published, and then came on into the American Society and read all that.  Then I began to read the people mentioned in the readings.  D. B. Holmes was a famous one, an American who went to England and spent a lot of time there studying William James's work.  I spent a great deal of time checking out his psychical work with Mrs. Piper.  I didn't go to England or meet anyone until much later.  But I talked to people who had investigated the Margery case in Boston, a famous mediumist case.  I also got involved in the Andrew Jackson Davis material, and the man who had influenced Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science."

In the chapter "A Boundless Unconscious" of his nonfiction book Venture Inward (1964), Hugh Lynn Cayce described a psychic experience that illustrated to him how inadequate is our concept of time.  To introduce the passage, he recalled one of the channeled readings  (341-1 of December 10, 1923) that was left for them to interpret after being communicated through his father while in a hypnotic trance.

 

My life reading from Edgar Cayce, given when I was fifteen years old, contained a description of a previous life during which I was described as taking part in one of the Crusades.  The reading suggested that boredom with medieval village life was more the motive for the pilgrimage than the professed desire to free the "Holy City."  Apparently I had left a family.

During the Second World War I was drafted. My abilities in the field of psychic studies were not in great demand.  I was finally placed in a Special Service outfit attached to combat troops.  The day the war with Germany ended our company was stationed in a little Austrian village in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden.  We had liberated some very fine Austrian beer.  I was consuming a canteen cup of this beer while seated in the yard of one of the neat little cottages of the village when my mind began to play tricks on me. The road through the village was crowded.  Remnants of the Austrian army, bedraggled, dirty, thin, and exhausted, plodded by.  American trucks raced back and forth, picking up airplane engines which were cached at intervals along the edge of the road.  The prisoners from a nearby work camp had been released—Poles, Russians, Czechs, and other nationals moved along the edge of the road, looking as if they were about to ask, "Which way is home?"  Trucks passed loaded with English airmen who had been shot down in some of the first Rumanian oil raids.  Imprisoned for years, now free, these men were singing, laughing hysterically, shouting and drinking.  They were headed for airfields from which they would be flown directly to England.  Excitement, relief, joy, confusion, and fear blended into an emotional wave which seemed almost tangible.

As I sat there looking suddenly something clicked in my head, and I saw before me a marching horde of Crusaders.  Men in armor on horses, men dressed in leather and walking with spears, servants riding and walking, some with leather coverings on their arms on which perched hooded falcons.  Little dwarfs acted as entertainers and were doing handsprings and tumbling feats ahead and to the side of the column.  It seemed that I was literally back in the time of the Crusades.

As quickly as the scene had appeared, a curtain was drawn across the mental images.  Now came a strange sensation of awareness of the village.  I knew where there was the ruin of an old building long ago, torn down as the stones were used for buildings in the village.  I knew where there was a stone bridge over a small stream, now filled in.  Perception was a mixed, confused pattern combining the so-called past and present.  My consciousness was torn between two periods of time.

Then came a peculiar sense of "it's over."  A cycle had been completed.  I had walked away to fight a war; I had come back to the very spot from which the departure had been made. I thought of my wife and child back home, of my father and mother who had died a few months previously.  I wondered if this were the completion of a karmic pattern.

All my attempts to relegate this to imagination and recall of studies of the Crusades, or to blame the beer, have not dimmed the peculiar sensation of getting caught in a timeless world of deep memory.

Yes, the next day without the assistance of the beer, I found what I thought might have been a bridge and the ruins of an old building.  This didn't help much; the sensation that something had ended was still with me.

Perhaps all that I can say now about the concepts of rebirth is that for me these ideas have raised many questions about the meaning of life.  As the basis for searching inward they become a point of departure.  Let us continue the search, withholding final judgment until the light is clearer.

 
Hugh Lynn Cayce commented that Venture Inward is "a compilation of my studies and observations of people who through psychic experiences have found themselves in touch with this seemingly boundless unconscious" with consideration given to "the value and importance of dreams as a doorway into the unconscious."

He mentioned that psychical research may encompass "a variety of automatisms such as the Ouija board or planchette, automatic writing, the pendulum, the dowsing rod, and even radionics machines"; while dreams were identified by Hugh Lynn as "excellent source material for the study of all kinds of psychic experiences, including what appears to be telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, communication with the dead, memory of past lives, astral projection, etc." 

 
At the age of 73, Hugh Lynn was hospitalized and A. Robert Smith visited him at Bayside Hospital.  Hugh Lynn related an experience similar to many of those that have come to be known as 'Near-Death Experiences' or 'Out-of-Body Experiences.' 

When he mentioned his kidney-removal operation, he focused on the metaphysical aspects, especially an accompanying out-of-body experience:

"I was knocked out. The drugs were heavy. It was a four-hour operation.  I had bled rather heavily, and they had sedated me rather heavily.  I had a lot of pain with that kidney incision.  It was a big mass.

"I've had a lot of out-of-body experiences, or so I think, and so I know a lot about them, or at least I think I do.  But this one was very interesting.  They came and got me at the hospital, came to the window and yelled for me to come out.  I was in the operating room.  So I got up and went out.

"Some of them I knew and some of them I didn't.  Then we joined a group of Japanese, somewhere, and we walked along and talked with them, and I understood them.  They were talking in Japanese and I was speaking in English, but we all understood one another beautifully.  It was very nice.

"Some of the people I knew were alive, and some were dead—or so-called dead.  You know what Dad always said about that.  Someone asked him, 'How did you know when you are dealing with a dead one or a live one?'  And he replied, 'It's easy.  The live ones are over here and the dead ones are over where you are.'"

Hugh Lynn roared in the telling of this anecdote, and we laughed with him.  It was his way, one may conclude now, of whistling as he approached the grave.  But he had a much more important objective in recalling his out-of-body experience.  He had met the Christ and he was eager to tell us about it.

"I wanted to find Jesus.  So this boy thought he could help me find him, and he said to me 'I think He is over there on the other side of the water.  But I can't go over there with you right now.'  So I told him, 'I'll go.'

"I went and He was there.  I wanted Him to explain the loaves and fishes—how He did it.  And he explained it.  And when I came back to bed I was convinced that if anyone had given me a loaf and a fish, I could have multiplied the damn thing easily.  I knew exactly what it was all about."

"How did he divide the loaves and fishes?" we asked.

"I can't tell you, but I knew then.  What He did was explain that every grain and every piece of fish contained a replica of every other grain and every other fish in the universe.  And all you had to do was divide them and they would keep multiplying.

"It has always fascinated me that He didn't make just enough for everybody but that he produced an abundance.  It reminds me of something I did once.  I had heard that morning-glory seeds, which are so tiny, produced prodigiously. So I planted one morning-glory seed in front of our porch trellis.  After it came up and blossomed, I tied little bags on it and collected the seeds—three quart jars of morning glory seeds from that one seed.

"There is an abundance of everything.  It multiplies.  There is a quality of creativity in it, and what He did was awaken that quality of creativity.  And it just spread.

"Now He did the same thing with the fig tree, I think, only He reversed it.  He told them that it was dangerous for man to work against the laws of supply.  Remember the cursing of the fig tree when it didn't produce fruit?  They pointed to it and asked him, 'Why is it?'  And he spoke to it.  Now I don't think they got all that He said there, but I think he was illustrating that if you put the same kind of energy in reverse that it destroys.  Man is doing that right now with this world.  We're destroying it."

We nodded in agreement, and he paused to take a drink of water.  Surgery had not removed Hugh Lynn's pedantic bent.  He quickly returned to his metaphysical theme:

"Things are not at all what we think they are.  It's ridiculous what we consider the world to be. It brings home to me so vividly the little tiny statements scattered through the [Edgar Cayce] readings that I think are there just to pique your curiosity and to make you realize that maybe there is something else that you ought to take a look at."


This Jesus experience was not Hugh Lynn's first.  He had had three such encounters earlier in this lifetime, the first time as a teenager, the next time when he was about forty after the death of his father, and another time during a visit to the Holy Land.  "I think I dreamed about Him several times, but these were conscious experiences—or at least I think I was conscious.  You can call it an altered state if you want.  But I was more conscious than I am now."

His first encounter with the Master as an adolescent was one of the most important experiences of his life because "it turned me around."  Hugh Lynn declined to discuss it further.  He talked freely about his second encounter as "a turning point in my life."  He was in Texas not long after returning home from World War II in the late 1940s.  It was not long after his father's death in 1945, and Hugh Lynn was on a speaking tour to drum up interest in an organization based on Edgar Cayce's psychic readings.  "I was in Rudolph Johnson's beautiful home in Dallas—he was our attorney.  He had had readings from my father.  He was an old friend, had been on the board, and had invited about forty people into their home.  But I became ill before the meeting.  I was burning up with fever."

Johnson considered calling off the meeting but Hugh Lynn wouldn't hear of it.  A doctor was called.  He gave Cayce a shot of penicillin.  And after the people had gathered, Hugh Lynn got up to speak.  "The penicillin was beginning to work as I was speaking to these folks.  I don't know what I said, but in the midst of this talk suddenly on my left Jesus appeared.  I thought at first it was my father.  But Jesus was there.  He grinned at me, laughed at me really, and said, 'It is I.  You needn't be afraid.'  He reached out and touched me on the shoulder, and the fever broke.  I was drenched in perspiration.  When I say He touched me, I felt it—I felt the energy from it.  I was instantaneously drenched in sweat.  I wasn't saying a thing, just standing there, and the people in the room didn't know what had happened to me.  I think some of them thought I had seen my father because some of them said they had felt something there.  I didn't tell anyone that night, or for years afterward, what I had experienced.

"Then he smiled at me and said, 'Get to work.'  From that point on, I couldn't do anything that wouldn't work.  I'd call people up and ask them to do something and they'd do it.  Anything.  I couldn't say anything, write anything that didn't work.  Even my mistakes worked."

If Hugh Lynn had any doubt about what to do with his life, especially after the death of his father, it was resolved that night.  He had thought as a youth that he might be a missionary.  In college he majored in psychology.  After college he worked as a librarian, real estate agent, master of ceremonies on a radio show, scoutmaster, director of lifeguards and director of recreation for the city of Virginia Beach, and general manager of the fledgling A.R.E. [Association of Research and Enlightenment]  Until he was called into the Army during the war, he helped his father—but when he returned his parents were gone, and there was no plan for what to do or how to carry on with an organization whose purpose had been to encourage folks to request psychic readings.


In his own mind, however, he had a different concept of it: "I never thought that I worked for the A.R.E. I worked for Jesus."

 

Hugh Lynn also commented about his personal psychic experiences involving visions and dreams in the article "Communication with Edgar Cayce — Fact or Fiction?" in the January 1974 edition of The A.R.E. Journal.

I have had dreams of both my mother and father since their death, dreams which have been so vivid and so helpful that they do constitute, for me, proof of the survival of bodily death.  I have also had some conscious breakthroughs — small visions one might call them — which have sometimes involved more than one person.  They have brought me and those with whom I am closely associated physical, mental and emotional help that has been most compelling.  For the present, these experiences are too personal to relate in detail.

There is one peculiar story I would like to share with you in closing.  It involves my mother, Gertrude Cayce, who had many readings from Edgar Cayce during her lifetime.  In one of these she was given a life-seal.  It consisted of symbols which Edgar Cayce suggested be painted or embroidered and kept where she could see them.  This combination of symbols, he said, would speak to her unconscious and would be of help to her.  A friend painted the life-seal for her, combining the suggested symbols which included two red roses with crossed stems.  The reading indicated that the roses would stand for my brother and me.  When my mother died, this life-seal was on her dressing table.

Shortly after her death and while I was still overseas during World War II, Florence Edmonds, a close friend of my mother, had a dream in which my mother appeared to her and said, "When I communicate with Hugh Lynn, tell him that I will give him two red roses."

Upon my return from overseas, Florence told me of the dream.  She said she had not told the dream to anyone else.  I asked her to keep it to herself.  A few years afterward she died.  As time went on I looked in the numerous purported communications from Gertrude Cayce, for the symbol of two red roses as identification.  They were not given.

About three years ago I had a call from a man in a large eastern city who told me a strange story about his wife who had gotten into difficulties from playing with a Ouija board.  She had been directed to automatic writing, after which she began to hear voices.  She talked to her doctor about this, and he put her in a mental institution for a time where she was treated to help rid her of the voices.  Her husband told me she was back home again and that she was still hearing the voices but was no longer telling her doctor about them.  Apparently she had got hold of my book Venture Inward, and had asked her husband to call me to ask if I would talk with her on the telephone, allowing her to describe what the voices were saying to her.  She felt I might be able to help.  That same day I accepted a long distance telephone call from the man and his wife.  He was on one extension and she was on another.  For some ten minutes I listened to her repeat the strange, confusing pattern of words she seemed to be hearing — idle gossip, dirty stories, dire predictions, teasing kinds of comments about the lady personally.  It was a bewildering variety of nonsense, typical of the strange patterns of voices familiar to many disturbed people.  Suddenly the woman stopped.  Then she said, "Mr. Cayce, your mother says to give you two red roses."  She then hung up.

There is a rather beautiful conclusion to this story, for at that point, the voices which had been disturbing the woman ceased.