Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.
There were, however, other things about Cayce’s readings that I was never able to believe (aside from the quackery of the treatments themselves)! These apparent contradictions spurred an interest in discovering just why so much of what Cayce had produced was proven accurate, but some seemed, (to me at least), completely unbelievable.
During the course of his career, Cayce began to deliver numerous “life readings.” Cayce’s spirits talked incessantly about reincarnation, in spite of the fact that Cayce himself was raised a fundamentalist Christian and did not believe in reincarnation. Since he did not remember anything he said in trance, when he was later told about what he had conveyed, he at first refused to believe that these words had come out of his own mouth. Only after much prodding by his spirits was he persuaded to accept reincarnation as a spiritual doctrine. It was not the idea of reincarnation that I found unbelievable, but the fact that so many people seemed to have had past lives on the sunken continent of Atlantis!
Atlantis was first described by Plato in the fifth century B.C (He was born about the year 428 BC and lived to age 80). He described Atlantis in his dialogues as an advanced Utopian society. It can be safely assumed that Plato himself heard about Atlantis in folktales that were widespread in Greece during his lifetime.
Modern archaeologists attribute these folktales to the Minoan civilization, which had been in existence during the Bronze Age. It was a civilization that arose first on the Aegean island of Crete, about 65 miles off the southern tip of the Greek mainland. It flourished between 3000 and 1450 B.C., at least a thousand years before Plato’s birth. It was an incredibly successful and wealthy Bronze Age civilization. Its livelihood was based on its mastery of the sea and its relatively advanced fleet of ships. It controlled all commerce between the numerous Aegean islands and most of the lands bordering the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.
For all its success, the entire Minoan civilization went into decline between 1650 and 1450 BC, finally ending in 1100 BC. This was due to the catastrophic eruption of a huge volcano that lurked under the island of Thera, which today is known as the island of Santorini. Santorini lies only 73 miles off the coast of Crete, and the volcanic eruption was absolutely huge. The eruption, which happened in 1650 BC, is estimated to have been four times the size of the famous eruption of Mt Krakatoa in 1883. After the eruption, a large part of the island of Thera sank beneath the sea, and this probably gave rise to the myth of the sinking of Atlantis.
The resulting ash fall and tsunami would have devastated human settlements on virtually all the Greek islands and mainland coastlines surrounding the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. In addition, because of the atmospheric cooling caused by sulfur emissions spewed out by the volcano, the climate would have become cold, dry and very inhospitable for several years, interrupting farming and causing widespread famine. The loss of life would have been catastrophic, and the event would have been shrouded in myth ten centuries later when Plato wrote his dialogues. This is almost certainly the source of the stories that Plato wrote about.
Plato’s mythical stories of Atlantis became quite a hot topic during the Renaissance because of writers like Roger Bacon and Thomas Moore. Plato was required reading for scholars in those days, and Bacon and Moore were the era’s preeminent philosophers. From there, mythology upon mythology was invented about the mythical land of Atlantis. By Cayce’s time, it had been embellished to the point of absurdity, and Cayce’s spirits were telling people that they led past lives flying prehistoric airplanes and manufacturing electronics on an ancient long-gone continent. No one until very recent times understood that Atlantis was really an island that “sank” as a result of a volcano. Plato himself attributed the sinking of Atlantis and the demise of the Atlantean civilization to the moral bankruptcy and debauched behavior of its inhabitants. Cayce’s spirits believed this fantasy.
In short, it was because of this nonsense that I began my quest to discover just how a psychic who could deliver such accurate information about people living thousands of miles away could also produce such rubbish. The book you are reading is a sort of culmination of that effort. It was because of Atlantis that I eventually learned how otherwise good spirits could be so sincerely mistaken about some things, and yet uncannily correct about others.
Spirits of the dead are really no different from the people they were before they died. They may have been fabulous doctors, teachers and artisans; they may have been good and honest people; but they were burdened with the mythologies of their day as well as their personal obsessions, all of which they took with them into Spirit when they died. Cayce’s spirits were no different. If the spirit doctors had stuck to their diagnosis and prescriptions, they would have been more believable because they could actually demonstrate their expertise in clairvoyance and psychic healing. But when they expanded into opining on spiritual doctrines and supposed past lives, no documentation could either prove or disprove their points, and later satellite observation, archeology and geology has shown that their sunken continent of Atlantis is just a fanciful myth.
Skeptics love to point out discrepancies like these to prove that people who believe in spirit are just naive suckers. They get away with it because most of the people who believe in an afterlife make the assumption that after a person dies, he or she becomes privy to all the secrets of the universe. You can see that this is simply not true. Some of those spirits have evil intentions and will lie for their own benefit. Others, with good intentions, are not omniscient. Even though the average spirit may be more psychically aware than they were when they occupied a living body, they are still the same “people” they were before they died, and just as limited in their overall knowledge and understanding.
The lesson of this chapter is that everything a spirit says cannot really be taken as fact. This goes for virtually all channeled material that purports to tell people how to live their lives, and what spiritual doctrines to believe. Spiritual pronouncements that take sides on any disputed political or moral question are either lower spirits with an agenda pretending to be channeling higher wisdom, or they are simply the subconscious beliefs of a deluded psychic.
There are a lot of books written by psychics channeling famous spirits. Don’t take this channeled wisdom as some sort of ultimate truth. If the information coming through a single spirit seems more like pop culture or politically correct verbiage, or if the “truths” spilling forth from the psychic’s writings seems too good to be true, or too confirmatory of conventional wisdom, then there is something very wrong with that wisdom.
Keep in mind that ancient wisdom looks nothing like modern wisdom. In another 200 years, our conventional wisdom will be as outdated as the conventional wisdom received by Emanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century when he received his revelations from spirits who advised him about life on other planets. The spirits were very earnest. They waxed poetic about Jesus’ interactions with the people who live on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the moon. The spirits really believed it, and Swedenborg had no reason to doubt it. This mythology was conventional wisdom in some circles before and during Swedenborg’s lifetime. (Swedenborg wrote “Earths in the Universe” about this very subject. You can download it as a PDF from the website of the Swedenborg foundation.)
Real spiritual wisdom is imparted in very subtle ways through your own conscience. You can discover it yourself if you listen carefully to that small voice and learn to dig through the conventional wisdom that shrouds it. Just don’t go digging for it with a Ouija board!
Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.