Edgar Cayce

Having just completed (except for some of the appended case studies) THERE IS A RIVER by Thomas Sugrue, I am now aware that the trance diagnosis and treatment of people's physical problems displayed by Edgar Cayce was not a phenomenon unique to him. It came into prominence in the late 18th century. To quote from the book:

In the eighteenth century, before the discoveries of Mesmer and de Puysegur, a pioneer named Maxwell said, “There is no disease which is not curable by a spirit of life without help of a physician . . . The universal remedy is nothing but the spirit of life increased in a suitable subject.” Mesmer found a means of stimulating this natural healing force and called the process “magnetism.” In 1784 de Puysegur, attempting to magnetize Victor, the shepherd boy, discovered hypnotism: Victor, falling into a deep trance, began to speak and diagnosed the ailment of the person next to him. During the next generation persons with similar sensitiveness were found in France, Germany, and England. They were studied carefully; the best men of science gave them their attention and wrote books about them. Somnambulism became fashionable. People went by preference to a somnambulist rather than to a physician, and the results apparently were as efficacious as they were amazing. The somnambulists seemed infallible in diagnosis, and the remedies they suggested were simple and, according to the evidence, helpful.

Predictably the medical mafia, even though enjoying nowhere near the terrifying monopoly on human health that it holds today, managed to debunk, discredit and finally destroy this burgeoning threat. To quote further:

As the books on somnambulism rolled off the presses, orthodox medicine rallied to the opposition. Mesmer was condemned as a fraud, and the diverse phenomena discovered by other investigators were damned along with him. The hope for a new system of diagnosing physical ills—a system already inherent in man and magically sure—began to fade.

I managed to get a hold of a book by Richard Harte called HYPNOTISM AND THE DOCTORS, published in 1902, that deals with Mesmer and Puysegur. I also managed to find MAGIC STAFF: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis To quote from the Wikipedia article about Davis:

He had little education, though probably much more than he and his friends pretended. In 1843 he heard lectures in Poughkeepsie on animal magnetism, as the phenomena of hypnotism was then termed, and found that he had remarkable clairvoyant powers. In the following year he had, he said, spiritual messages telling him of his life work. He eventually became known as "the Poughkeepsie Seer".

Both these books should be interesting reads. All this has rekindled my interest in hypnotism which I dabbled with earlier in the year when I was having trouble remembering my dreams. I used an hypnotic suggestion method outlined in a book and had immediate success. The technique can be used to facilitate lucid dreaming.

I prepared a self-hypnosis walk-through to improve my dream recall and activate lucid dreaming. It's a bit rough but it's a start. I played it through once tonight so we'll see if there are any immediate results. However, it will definitely need refining, possibly using Garage Band.

The High Priestess

For the first time in quite some time, I had a dream last night that I'd call a "big dream". I use this term to describe dreams that are numinous or have psychologically significant content. The setting for the dream was the house where I spent my entire childhood and adolescence, apart from the first two years. It's located at 21 Mayneview Street, Milton, Brisbane and it still stands to this day, although now it's been taken over by a computer company. In my dream world, the house serves as a symbol of my psychological foundations and so any dream containing this symbol is invariably significant.

In last night's dream, I had a close encounter with a very powerful and very old female figure. It began with me at the front of the property on which the house stands. I was on the ground writhing slowly and trying to purge myself of some inner emotional content. It felt a bit like throwing up except that I was trying to rid myself of some psychic content rather than stomach content. This seemed to be a necessary preparation for the encounter with the old woman because in the next scene I am the back of the property where she is seated on a raised throne.

I am still prostrate on the ground and I struggle to get to my feet. Eventually I succeed and I draw closer to her at her behest. As I do, her face comes into focus and I can see that she is very, very old. However, she exudes power and authority. Our faces are almost touching and I know that she is going to say something very important to me and she does. With solemn authority, shes tells me to "lose my anger" and thus delivers a very clear and unequivocal message.

Thanks to my sustained meditation, I've had relatively few outbursts of anger recently and they have been relatively minor but even so they are unsettling, often occurring when I'm driving. At other times, I'll become impatient when I'm queueing, even though I may not express my irritation. Lately in my meditation, I've become aware of the need to maintain equilibrium between inner and outer. At brief times, I've even felt the two merging and becoming continuous. At such times, "I" fade out and the inner flows into the outer and vice versa. The antithesis of this state is the emotional state of anger, however mild, because it severely disturbs the equilibrium between inside and outside.

Anger is always ego-driven as when I'm driving and somebody does something that I think he or she shouldn't do. I have an inner expectation of how I think people should behave on the roads and if they don't meet those expectations I'm likely to feel aggrieved. It's stupid really but hard to let go of. However, the old lady on her throne is telling me that I have to. She is reminiscent of the High Priestess in the Tarot deck.

Lucid Dreaming

Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death
by John William Waterhouse

I've been on holidays for one week now and that's about how long it takes to really start to slow down and relax. I've managed a daily meditation or two and have begun to re-read Osho's "The Book of Wisdom". In doing so, I was reminded of a reference he made to dreaming. He says:

The ego is a by-product, a by-product of the illusion that whatsoever you are seeing is true. If you think that objects are true, then the ego can exist; it is a by-product. If you think that objects are dreams, the ego disappears. And if you think continuously that all is a dream, then one day, in a dream in the night, you will be surprised: suddenly in the dream you will remember that this is a dream too! And immediately, as the remembrance happens, the dream will disappear. And for the first time you will experience yourself deep asleep, yet awake -- a very paradoxical experience, but of great benefit. Once you have seen your dream disappearing because you have become aware of the dream, your quality of consciousness will have a new flavor to it. The next morning you will wake up with a totally different quality you had never known before. You will wake up for the first time. Now you will know that all those other mornings were false; you were not really awake. The dreams continued -- the only difference was that in the night you were dreaming with eyes closed, in the day you were dreaming with eyes open. But if the dream has disappeared because awareness happened, suddenly you became aware in the dream.... And remember, awareness and dreaming cannot exist together. Here, awareness arises, and there, the dream disappears. When you become awake in your sleep, the next morning is going to be something so important that it is incomparable. Nothing like it has ever happened. Your eyes will be so clear, so transparent, and everything will look so psychedelic, so colorful, so alive. Even rocks will be felt to be breathing, pulsating; even rocks will have a heartbeat. When you are awake, the whole existence changes its quality. We are living in a dream. We are asleep, even when we think we are awake.

Osho is referring here to lucid dreaming about which much has been written and I was prompted to review the literature on the subject on the Internet. One technique recommended for the inducement of lucid dreaming is to carefully count the digits of your hand before going to sleep followed by a reminder to look at your hands in the dream and try counting the digits again. Apparently, this proves very difficult in a dream or you miscount the number. In either case, you are then alerted to the fact that you are dreaming. There are other techniques to maintain the state of lucid dreaming. I have an e-book titled "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold that I think I'll make an effort to read. I notice the final chapter of the book is called "Life is a Dream: Intimations of a Wider World".

I'd like to attempt some lucid dreaming during these holidays and Osho's words have given me the stimulus. The dreaming also connects with Jung, whose writings I've recently reconnected with, and so it should be an interesting experiment. I'll need to start with the digit counting on a regular basis during the day so that it becomes so habitual that the practice will spontaneously occur to me in my dreams as well, maybe. Let's give it a try.