Edgar Cayce on the Spiritual Forces Within You: Unlock Your Soul with: Dreams, Intuition, Kundalini, and Meditation

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Outer Life, Visible Life

Throughout the Edgar Cayce volumes, the term spirit is equated with the life forces or the motivating forces of life. With this in mind, let’s begin with a look at what we know about life and how we identify something as being alive. Surprisingly, the question as to what constitutes life does not have an easy answer. Here are some of the complexities to consider:

In general, from a biological perspective, something is considered to be alive if it demonstrates: 1. animation, 2. self-sustaining processes for existence, 3. metabolism and growth, 4. responses to stimuli, 5. reproduction of itself, and 6. adaptation to a changing environment. As you can see, plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi demonstrate these properties, as do we humans.

On Earth there is also a cellular component to life in that a cell is the basic structural, functional, and biological unit of all known living organisms. Simply put, physical life requires a cell with genetic material (DNA) and the ability to reproduce—it must also be able to turn food into energy and to evolve through natural selection. All living organisms have to have a mechanism to utilize or somehow convert something into energy; for example, plants use sunlight directly for energy.

Human bodies are a complex organism of carbon and water in a cellular structure with inheritable genetic information. There are other things that appear to be life forms but are actually on the fringe of biological life; viruses, for example. Viruses possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and replicate themselves by rapidly creating copies of themselves—but they do not metabolize, and they must have a host cell in order to replicate, because they do not have a cellular structure of their own.

We might think that all life forms come from the forces of nature, but humans are now creating life forms. Some scientists are using chemical compounds to create single-cell organisms, and some are creating new life forms by hollowing out existing cells and inserting genes. It’s alive, it’s alive! shouted Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, but now we are approaching that very possibility.

Despite these clearly physical aspects, there still remains a mysterious magic to life. For example, researchers have wondered how cells containing the same genes build different parts of a complex organism. How do the cells know to change what they are making and begin building a different part? Eye cells contain the same genes as liver cells—so if they contain the same identical message, how do they develop so differently? Some propose that a field of unseen energy—possibly an electro-magnetic (EM) field—contains a blueprint or pattern, and dividing cells follow the blueprint as they divide and specialize. The blueprint causes the gene message to change when making a liver rather than an eye. This is a morphogenetic process with the added power of an EM field—an EM field that contains the person’s essential composition. However, there is mounting evidence that this specialization process is more about chemistry and proteins that cause some genes to turn on while others turn off, and in this way eye and liver cells are made. But there still seems to be an invisible pattern or blueprint that guides these on-and-off changes. Some believe that nature contains the blueprints for every creature in the form of some kind of mental pattern. Most scientists cannot deal with this idea, because it is not measurable. Curiously, a mental pattern would be an electromagnetic field of thought. Thus nature contains the pattern for a daisy as well as a human. The mystery continues.

What about alien life? Life beyond Earth may not be structured using carbon, water, and cells. We might need to be prepared to broaden our parameters for classifying other life forms. Would non-biological life be classified as alive if that life possessed consciousness and the indications of having feelings?

And what if machines, such as robots, advance to a level at which they can reproduce themselves and improve themselves through a learning process using artificial intelligence? Are they then considered silicone-based life forms? Like carbon, silicon can create molecules that are sufficiently large enough to carry biological information.

And consider the significance of human near-death experiences (NDEs) in which the patient’s biological organism, his or her body, is dead on the operating room table and yet the consciousness belonging to that body is somewhere in the room observing and is later able to recount the events that led to the body’s resuscitation? Is that discarnate consciousness a life form?

There are no simple answers to our questions as to what qualifies as life.

The Universe

Let’s review what we know about the forces of life in the universe. When I look up into the starry night sky, I am in awe of its beauty—but I am also moved within myself, as if there is some personal connection that I have with that heavenly vista. Ancient cultures taught that we were once part of that wondrous unending realm, and we will eventually return to it. Scientists tell us that a part of the vast starry scene is in our bodies for we are composed of stardust! Physicist Lawrence Krauss explains it this way, Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the atoms in your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about the universe: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars had not exploded, because the elements—the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the things that matter for evolution—weren’t created at the beginning of time, they were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died so you could live.¹ Of course, Krauss is speaking of our physical bodies whereas Jesus’ death and resurrection was about our souls. But the point is that when we are looking at the stars, we are looking at a kindred creation, a portion of which is in the very composition of our bodies—or as Cayce put it in this reading from 1935, … there are the energies in each atom even of the physical body that are the shadows of the whole universe. (633-2)

In looking at the universe, there is at least one observation upon which theologians and scientists can easily agree, and that is its extraordinary large-scale uniformity. Whatever the first impulse for creation, it clearly intended to be expressed orderly. Despite the complexity of the cosmos, it clearly reveals uniformity, order, and fundamental laws, such as gravity and electromagnetic dynamics. And, despite evidence of a Big Bang creation, there is an even distribution of energy throughout the universe, indicating that the Bang had to have erupted with such a force as to have spontaneously leapt in size, distributing energy equally in that first split second.

Einstein’s famous formula, E (energy) equals m (mass) times c (speed of light) squared, reveals how the physical world of mass (matter) is simply a condition of energy. Inside material matter, there is a tremendous amount of energy, and that energy can be released, as it is in our Sun. But energy can also produce matter! If two beams of pure light were to come together, solid particles would come into existence! In the beginning, the universe was filled with light, which carried enormous amounts of energy from which matter could and did come into existence. This brought forth atoms, stars, planets, and eventually human bodies!

Using satellites, scientists have studied the cosmic heat radiation and gained detailed facts about the universe. At present, the universe is believed to have begun roughly 14 billion years ago. A percentage of the static on our TVs is caused by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation that still remains from the Big Bang! CMB falls on Earth from every direction with uniform intensity. It is a faint glow of the light that fills the entire universe—the afterglow of the Big Bang. It is the oldest light we can see, beginning long before the Earth or even our Milky Way Galaxy existed. It is a remnant of the universe’s birth—a time when it was not the cold dark place it is now, but was instead a firestorm of radiation and elementary particles. The objects that we see today—stars, planets, and galaxies—were formed from these primordial particles as the universe expanded and cooled.

What existed prior to the Bang? That is a challenging question to answer. We find some answers in the most ancient of philosophies and religions, and other answers in the latest findings by modern Quantum Theory. Obviously some form of law and order pre-existed so that the Bang exploded according to those existing regulations. Energy of some sort likely pre-existed, because all of the created matter is composed of energy.

Curiously, it is unlikely that the Big Bang could have been an isolated event given the realities of energy and relativity, so there have been other Big Bangs, each producing other universes. This is called the Multiverse theory, and scientists now believe there could be an infinite number of universes. These universes may be going through an evolutionary cycle much like our own—bang, expansion, contraction, and ultimately, a return to pure energy. We see this pattern in the birth, evolution, and death of individual stars.

Fascinatingly, there is the same amount of energy in the universe today as there was when it all first began! How is that possible? Energy just keeps shifting its condition, transferring itself from one impulse to another. For example, if you throw a baseball, energy leaves your muscles and is transferred to the ball as it moves, and when it arrives at the catchers’ glove, that energy is transferred to the catcher. If you push against the ground to get some thrust behind that throw, then you’ve just shifted the Earth in its orbit; but it will rebound upward by exactly the amount needed to counter your push, giving you the thrust you sought. However, scientists have recently found that there are places in the universe where new energy appears to come from out of nowhere! These places are the breeding grounds for stars. And a counterbalancing amount of mass disappears as the new energy comes forth. Here on Earth we simply move the existing energy around; there is no new energy.

There are also varying degrees of energy. For example, wood has energy to fire up a boiler and give us heat and locomotion; charcoal has even more stored energy than wood; coal has even more energy than charcoal; and oil, well, the current world runs on oil. Natural gas has more than oil and is cleaner to burn. The key is how much hydrogen is in the fuel in relation to how much carbon—the more hydrogen, the more energy is available to be used. The evolution of civilizations has corresponded with the evolution of fuels used by their societies. We may have begun with the sugar and sweat of human muscle to build villages. Wood fires were then used to heat water, to produce heat for more and bigger homes, and even to run mighty steam engines for transportation and construction. Then coal did it even better. Of course, oil is even better than coal—producing electricity, heat, lights, and moving personal vehicles as well as powerful mass-transportation and construction vehicles. Fuels foster larger civilizations, because the energy output is increasingly more powerful, giving the society more energy with which they can do what they desire. These fuels have been stored on and in the earth over millions of years, but they have not been in use for that length of time. We know there are even better fuels coming—some have likely not even been discovered yet.

The magnitude of the universe is amazing. Daily Mail science editor Michael Hanlon wrote, In July 2003, scientists at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Australia announced their latest estimate of the number of stars in the Universe—70 sextillion. That is 7 followed by a mind-boggling 22 zeros … The new estimate means that the number of stars in the visible Universe is larger—quite a bit larger, actually—than the total number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth …² Add to this information that there are 275 million new stars being born every single day!

It is a truly unimaginably enormous universe, with light and energy throughout! And we should be prepared for new discoveries revealing that it is more than what we presently know.

The Human Body

As amazing as the universe is, the human body may be more amazing. For example, each of our eyes is composed of 130 million photoreceptors, and our bodies contain about 100 trillion cells—that’s more than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy! And our cells are constantly regenerating, so that about 50 million cells in your body will have died while you read this sentence—but don’t be alarmed, your body made more than 300 billion new ones today! An adult body is composed of 7 octillion atoms (that’s a 7 with 27 zeroes behind it)! The biggest molecule in our bodies, chromosome 1, contains 10 billion atoms! And yet, there is so much empty space in a single atom that if we were condensed to remove that space, we’d be the size of a cube 1/500th of a centimeter square. That’s a lot of empty space. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of an atom is so much smaller than the whole atom that it may be compared to a fly in a cathedral!

Our bodies have approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels! The distance around the Earth is about 25,000 miles, meaning that our blood travels through our body a little over twice the distance around this planet.

Our feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce over a pint of sweat a day! And the human feet contain 25 percent of all the bones in the body, that’s fifty-two bones!

The egg my mother produced to make my body actually formed when she was an embryo! The largest cell in the human body is the female egg, and the smallest is the male sperm!

I could go on and on listing amazing features of the human body. It is truly a remarkable creation. But now let’s focus on how this body is arranged, and how that arrangement affects our existence.

The human body is a complex organism composed of seventy-eight organs, thirteen of which are major (such as the brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, and so on). The various organs are composed of millions to trillions of cells that have the same or related functions. Each cell has components that allow it to function almost independently. Except for red blood cells, each cell has its own command-center containing its twenty-three pairs of chromosomes containing DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is a self-replicating material present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes. It is the carrier of genetic information. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The bases in the DNA molecule carry the different codes. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. Each strand of DNA is in the shape of a double helix and serves as a pattern (like a dress-making pattern) for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.

Each cell has its own power generators (mitochondria) and each is like a tiny battery with a charge of 40-90 millivolts. That may sound small, but imagine how much electricity and electromagnetic energy 70 trillion cells can produce! All the cells in the body together produce an electric current and an electromagnetic field that can be detected and measured by an Electrocardiography, Electrocardiogram, and Electromyography (ECG, EKG, and EMG). An Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a test to measure the electrical activity of the brain. Major breakthroughs in discovering cellular electricity have come from using voltage-sensitive nano-particles, and these breakthroughs have discovered electric fields inside cells stronger than those produced by lightning bolts! Yes, I said lightning bolts. It amazed me too. University of Michigan researchers, led by chemistry professor Raoul Kopelman, found electric fields inside cells as strong as 15 million volts per meter, roughly five times stronger than a lightning bolt.³

The cells produce bio-electricity to store metabolic energy so they can deliver energy in order to do work, to trigger internal changes, and to send signals to other cells. It is not only found in humans but also in animals and plants—even certain minerals generate electricity. For example, all types of crystals produce electricity when heated (pyroelectricity) or when under pressure (piezoelectricity). Granite produces electricity when under pressure. The granite stones inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt emit an electrical field, because they are under enormous pressure.

The electrical power of the body has been known since ancient times. It has been called the ka (in ancient Egypt), élan vital (in France), and qi (pronounced chee, sometimes spelled chi) or qigong (pronounced chee gung, and literally meaning life-energy or life-flow in the East).

Interestingly, the body’s bioelectric field extends beyond the body, generating an auric field around it. Edgar Cayce could see this energy field in the form of colors. He observed that the colors changed as the energy of the person changed. The electromagnetic field around the body can be experienced using a simple little maneuver: press the tips of your fingers on both hands together tightly, with a little space between your palms, and hold this for one full minute. When you gently let go, you will feel a magnetic attraction between the fingers, as if they do not want to separate from the other hand. Another little test is to put your hand, palm-open up (like high five), close to another person’s open hand, and then feel the energy between the two. This is the usually unseen field surrounding each body. On one occasion, Edgar Cayce was about to enter an elevator in New York City when he noticed that no one on the elevator had an auric field. He stopped cold and did not get on. He had never seen people without energy fields. To his dismay the elevator malfunctioned and everyone on it died in the crash. Cayce felt that their life-force or spirit had already left their bodies by some precognitive knowing of what was about to happen.

Human bodies are generators. Each person generates about 60 watts of power while walking. According to a January, 2011, report by the BBC News, the Stockholm Central Station, through which about 250,000 commuters pass every day, uses a special ventilation system that draws in the accumulated human body heat in the station and passes it through a heat exchanger and heats water for central heating. The developers estimate that it lowers the energy cost by about 25 percent.

The Human Brain

A single human brain cell can hold five times more information than an entire encyclopedia set with volumes of information! An article in Scientific American states that the storage capacity of the human brain in electronic terms is thought to be as much as 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes)! That’s enough capacity to hold 3 million hours of TV shows!⁴

This is the marvelous outer, visible life. In the next chapter, we’re going to take a look at the surprising inner, invisible life.

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Inner Life, Invisible Life

For all of the amazing wonders of the universe and the human body, as presented in Chapter One, an enormous amount of the grand vision of life is invisible!

For example, the stars, planets, and galaxies that can be detected make up only four percent of the universe! Four percent! The other ninety-six percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily explained. These invisible substances are called dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that they exert on normal matter (the parts of the universe that can be seen).

Let’s just consider this a bit more; our universe may contain as many as 100 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, massive clouds of gas and dust, countless planets and moons, and enormous amounts of cosmic debris—yet everything that we see is only four percent of the total mass and energy in the universe!

Genes Do Not Direct as Much as They Respond

What about the human body? In Chapter 1, we discussed how physical life required a cell with genetic material (DNA), and we assumed from this that our life is determined by our genes. It only makes sense, right? Well, it turns out that this is not necessarily so, for research has determined that it is not the insides of a cell that determine outcomes but the receptors around the membrane of the cell that respond to the stimuli of our perceptions, vibrations, and environment! Identical twins have the same genes yet one may develop cancer while the other does not. Why? How? Siblings who come from the same gene pool, but live in different settings and environments, may develop different ailments. Why? How?

Dr. Bruce Lipton, a biologist, explains it this way when speaking on the topic of his book The Biology of Belief: Cells, like computers, are programmable and the program lies outside the cell/computer. The genes do not program the cell! The nucleus is simply a memory disk, a hard drive that contains the DNA programs that encode the production of proteins. We can edit the data that goes into our bio-computer just as we choose the words we type into a computer! Our cells are like programmable personal computers!⁵

Lipton adds, "The energy in your body is reflecting the energy around you because the atoms in your body are not only giving off energy, they are absorbing energy. Every living organism communicates with these vibrations. Animals communicate with plants; they communicate with other animals. Shamans talk to plants with vibrations … Quantum physicists reveal that underneath apparent physical structure there is nothing more than energy, that we are energy beings … Quantum physics says the invisible energy is one hundred times more efficient in conveying information than are material signals (e.g., drugs). What we are beginning to recognize is that there is an invisible world that we have not dealt with in regard to understanding the nature of our health … In other words, rather than focusing on matter, in a quantum world we focus on energy … When you interact in your environment you are both absorbing and sending energy at the same time. You are probably more familiar with terms such as ‘good vibes’ and ‘bad vibes.’ Those are the waves at which we are all vibrating … When we understand that genes are just respondents to the environment from the perceptions handled by the cell membrane, then we can realize that if life isn’t going well, what we have to do is not change our genes but change our perceptions. That is much easier to do than physically altering the body."⁶

Our Brain Is More Active When We Sleep!

The human brain, perhaps the most fascinating part of the human body, is more active during sleep than while awake! With all of the brainpower used during a day, one would logically think that this should be the other way around. As it turns out, when we turn off activity, our brain turns on! Something is occurring during sleep. Of course, we know that during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) the human brain is dreaming. Perhaps Elihu revealed what’s going on during human sleep when he told Job that, God speaks once, yes twice, though man pays no attention—in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, in slumbering on the bed; then He opens the ears of men and seals their instruction. (Job 33:14-16, World English Bible [WEB])

The original meaning of the word conscious was very different than most of us understand it today. Originally the word came from the Latin conscius, which is itself from con- (a form of com-, meaning together) and scire (meaning to know). Thus it meant, Knowing together, having knowledge with another. Does consciousness exist without stimuli? A sentient being is considered to be one who responds to stimuli—perceives it, processes it, and reacts to it. Also, we generally believe that consciousness is personal, subjectively unique to a being’s perception and perspective. In Latin, we also find the term conscius sibi, meaning knowing with oneself, indicating that we share knowledge of something with oneself and by implication, one knows that one knows something. (For more on this, see C.S. Lewis’ Studies in Words, Chapter 8: Conscience and Conscious, Cambridge Press, 1960.)

Consider the following from Bernard J. Baars and Katharine McGovern:

No alien space visitor could fail to observe that vertebrates, including humans, engage in purposeful motion only two-thirds of the earthly day. In the remaining third, we hibernate. When consciousness returns in the morning, a massive change in electrical activity takes place all over the cortex, as the fast, small, and irregular waves of waking EEG replace the large, slow, regular hills and valleys of deep sleep … When we try to understand conscious experience we aim to explain the differences between these two conditions: between the events in your nervous system that you can report, act upon, distinguish, and acknowledge as your own, and a great multitude of sophisticated and intelligent processes which are unconscious, and do not allow these operations.⁷

Our Unconscious Life

The fact that there is so much going on while we are supposedly unconscious—sleeping—says something about the dynamics of human consciousness.

So much of bodily life occurs subliminally, below the threshold of sensation or conscious awareness. Skin conductance, also known as Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which can vary depending on the skin’s moisture level. This is of interest because the sweat glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system not the central nervous system, so skin conductance is used as an indication of subliminal psychological or physiological stimuli. There has been a long history of electro dermal activity research, most of it dealing with spontaneous fluctuations or reactions to stimuli. The scientific study of GSR began in the early 1900s. One of the first references to the use of GSR instruments in psychoanalysis is the book by Dr. Carl (C.G.) Jung entitled Studies in Word Analysis, published in 1906. GSR was used for a variety of types of research in the 1960s through the late 1970s, with a decline in use as more sophisticated techniques (such as EEG and MRI) replaced it