cayce’s concept of reincarnation

8/13/2019 Cayces Concept of Reincarnation

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Writing Your Past Lives Week Two: Past Lives & Present Karma

Cayces Concept of Reincarnation

On October 11, 1923, Edgar Cayce was in Dayton, Ohio, where

businessman Arthur Lammers had commissioned him to do what he hoped would

be a different type of reading than the 2,000 physical readings Cayce had given up

until this point in time. Lammers believed that Mr. Cayces Source could answer

questions about other topics, including those related to esoteric studies.

In reading 5715-1, Cayces Source shared ten words that would signal the

dawn of a new direction in Cayces work. Referring to Lammers, it said: Third

appearance on this plane. He was once a monk. Years later in 1964, GladysDavis, Cayces secretary, made a notation about this reading in which she wrote:

So far as we know this is the first reference in the Edgar Cayce readings to

reincarnation,or at least a definite former incarnation of an individual. In 1976

she amended that to say she had found another reference to reincarnation in an

earlier reading, but it seems this earlier reference was done in such a subtle way as

to not even draw attention to it.

But back in 1923, telling Lammers this was his third lifetime and in one of

those lifetimes he had been a monk was a stunning revelation. You can imagine

how Mr. Cayce reacted, for such a thought was sacrilegious to him. Here he was a

devout man who had been brought up with traditional Protestant values. He had

read the Bible for each of his 46 years of life. He accepted a literal interpretation of

the Bible and taught it that way in his Sunday school classes. Yet there was no

mistaking ithere was a reading in which his Source emphatically stated that

reincarnation was a fact and not a myth.

At first, Mr. Cayce feared the dark forces had taken over while he was in

trance. He had vowed he would stop using his psychic powers if they were being

misused in any way, or if they were harmful to anyone. Lammers felt otherwise.
http://are-cayce.org/ecreadings/glosnmed.html#REINCARNATIONhttp://are-cayce.org/ecreadings/glosnmed.html#REINCARNATIONhttp://are-cayce.org/ecreadings/glosnmed.html#REINCARNATION


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Copyright 2012 by Joanne DiMaggio. This material may not be duplicated without permission.

Edgar Cayce Readings Used by Permission.2

He was excited about the reading and although Mr. Cayce initially had second

thoughts about continuing to answer broader esoteric questions, he eventually

agreed and permitted Lammers to continue. As a result, a new concept of

reincarnation emerged in what would be identified as the Life Readings.

Over the next 21 years, Edgar Cayce gave a total of 2,500 life readings to

roughly 1,500 people who came to him to learn of their previous life histories. You

may wonder what good did those readings do for those people? What is there to

gain from knowing about your past lives? As with anything, knowledge is power.

A serious study of your past can make a tremendous difference in your present life.

Learning from past lessons and recognizing karmic patterns is essential for your

soul to reach its full potential.

The Life readings focused on psychological problems such as a persons

fears, mental blocks, vocational talents, and relationship issues. Cayce did this in

the context of what he called karmic patterns that arose from previous lifetimes. He

viewed karma as the universal law of cause and effect, a system that holds you

accountable for your every thought, word and deed. It is the truest definition of the

adage:Reap what you sow. Whatever you do, comes back to you in some way,

shape or form until balance is restored. In doing so your soul is given

opportunities for physical, mental and spiritual growth, so while on Earth its

advantageous for your soul to make use of successive rebirths in order to balance

your positive and negative karmic patterns.

The Cayce life readings give us a detailed understanding of how

reincarnation works and explain the law of Karma and how that influences the

experiences we have in life.

You may ask if knowing about our past lives is so essential to our souls

growth, why doesnt everyone remember having lived before? The truth is, we do!

Everyones subconsciousremembers every previous lifetime. Our souls have a


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built-in database containing details about our former selves and with the proper

tools we can access that information. In week one you already experienced that for

yourself when you went to the Akashic Records. We learned, as Cayce said,

anyone can read these records. Cayce sincerely believed that there wasnt a person

anywhere who didnt have the same ability as he did if they learned how to attune

themselves properly.

The reason so many people can easily dismiss reincarnation is because,

unlike our subconscious minds, our conscious minds have no recollection of

previous lifetimes. Thus those who choose to live on the surface and are not

inclined to explore the depths of their souls are not aware of the treasure-trove of

information there is for them to discover.

There are a lot of misconceptions about reincarnation. Karma, for instance,

is often misconstrued as being solely retributionof having to pay for less than

stellar behavior in the past. But karma isnt one way or the other. Edgar Cayce

equated karma to memory and said that the laws of cause and effect were not rigid

and inflexible, but were, in fact, pliable. That means that depending on how you

behaved in the subsequent lifetime, your karmic debt could be reduced. One

lifetime in service to others may equal multiple lives where your soul did nothing.

It should be noted here that often we see individuals who are struggling in

this lifeespecially those dealing with disabilities or extreme poverty. You might

assume that soul is dealing with a lot of negative karma when, in fact, it could be

just the oppositethat they accepted this role in order to gain stature from the

experience, or for the lessons they teach to those who interact with them. Think of

the lessons that a physically or mentally challenged child teaches its parents,

godparents, siblings and other family members. They are the way they are and in

that particular family because thats what they chose to do. Knowing that in this

life you face particular circumstances and are dealing with specific people because


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of your choices in previous lifetimes means you cannot blame others for your

current reality. You are not a victim. Whatever is going on in your life now is the

result of a decision you made in your pre-life planning session to give your soul

and the souls around youan opportunity to advance.

Just as you bring in issues to work on, you also bring in skills and talents.

When Cayce did a life reading, he often spoke about gifts and talents that were

acquired in a previous life and available to the individual in the here and now. For

example, a 23-year-old amateur artist was working in a dead-end mechanical job

because he had no confidence in his craft. Cayce told him that in previous lives in

Egypt, Greece and Rome, he had designed frescoes for the temples, courts and

government buildings. As a result of that reading, this young man went to art

school and traveled the world to study architectural design, which he later put into

his own practice. It was a natural progression of his skills and talents from those

past lives into his present one. You see, you do not lose abilities that you acquire in

past lives. When I conduct regressions, I often find a correlation between talents

that were first developed in a past life that are manifesting again in this life. For

my own part, I have been a writer for multiple lifetimes. The same can be said of

healers, musicians, teachers, and others who resonate to a particular vocation.

I wish I had been around in Cayces time so that I might have had the

privilege of having a life reading. The readings are fascinating in that they

provided such a wealth of information to the recipient. Individuals were told of

usually three to four past lives that were impacting their current one and how their

soul gained or lost ground as a result of the actions they took in those lifetimes.

What an extraordinary learning tool this isa true roadmap to knowing what areas

needed improvement and what talents could be drawn upon again in this life.

A question that is asked often in past life work is whether or not a person has

had a famous past life. Celebrities of history represented only a very small


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minority in the life readings. Cayce suggested that the majority of souls achieved

their greatest spiritual advances while living uneventful, average lives in relative

obscurity. All souls are equal so regardless of who you were, you are judged based

on how you are doing in your current lifenot on a life you led hundreds of years

ago. The life readings gave recipients a microscopic view of their inner being.

They described experiences from previous lives that were relevant to their current

life and they exposed patternsphysical, mental, emotional and spiritualthat

were the direct result of actions taken in those previous lifetimes.

Yes, the Cayce readings are filled with accounts of individuals who led

famous past lives, but these people will tell you that having that knowledge was

not an easy thing to bear in this life, especially if they felt they were not living up

to the potential their previous lives had earned or couldnt live down some of the

rather unsavory things they did before. Reviewing our past lives does not give us

a picture of a steady upward climb. As Cayce points out in the readings, souls

make advances but often lose some ground as well. Cayces own past life history

evidences this. He went from great heights to nondescript plateaus where he was

neither exalted nor especially gifted. From high priest Ra Ta to the gambler John

Bainbridge is quite a roller coaster ride for any soul.

When studying reincarnation, the question always comes upwhy are we

here in the first place? There have been severalbooks written about Cayces

version of the creation story, so if youre interested in really digging into the story

of how and why our souls first came into physical bodies, I encourage you to read

Edgar Cayces Story of the Soul,by W. H. Churchor EdgarCayces Origin and

Destiny of Manby Lytle Robinson.

Cayce called souls the offspring of a Creator. In reading 5753-1 he

provided a comprehensive discourse on reincarnation before the Second Annual


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Congress of the A.R.E. He told the group the why of why we came into being. His

Source stated:

Thefirst cause was, that the created would be the companion for the

Creator; that it, the creature, wouldthrough its manifestations in the

activity of that given unto the creatureshow itself to be not only worthy of,

but companionable to, the Creator.

So according to Edgar Cayce, the reason for our being is to be co-creators

and companions of God. Reincarnation enables us to earn that privilege by giving

us opportunities to grow into our fullness as spiritual beings.

Souls are students in the three-dimensional classroom we call Earth. Some

souls are still in what we could equate to elementary school, while others are

working on their PhDs. Which grade you are in is not determined by how many

lifetimes youve had, but instead by how many courses youve passed. When you

are between lives, you work with your guides who act in much the same way as

school guidance counselors. With you, they review how well you did with the

courses you took in the last lifetime.

For example, if you signed up to work on issues of humility, were you in

fact, humble in that lifetime or did you continue to operate from a place of self-

centeredness and ego? How well or poorly you did determined whether you passed

or failed that class. If you pass the course and thoroughly learn the lesson, you

dont have to repeat itagain. But lessons that you fail must be taken again. We all

want to move up a grade level, but often we have to repeat a class depending on

how seriously we took our studies. Sometimes we have to repeat a course multiple

times until we learn the lesson.

Earth isnt the only school in the planetary system, however. Cayce said that

souls travel to other planets as well. After his life as Ujhltd, he went to the system

of Arcturus before returning to earth. However, Cayce made it clear that any


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karma that is acquired on earth has to be resolved on earth. In reading 5749-14 he

was asked: Must the solar cycle be finished on earth, or can it be completed on

another planet, or does each planet have a cycle of its own which must be

finished?In his answer, Cayces Source gave one of the most important precepts

of reincarnation in the very first sentence:

If it is begun on the earth it must be finished on the earth. The solar system

of which the earth is a part is only a portion of the whole. For, as indicated

in the number of planets about the earth, they are of one and the sameand

they are relative one to another. It is the cycle of the whole system that is

finished, see?

Regardless of where the soul chooses to study, the catalog of classes is huge.

School sessions on earth are designed for those working on issues of love, power,

finances, relationships, honesty, responsibility and patience to name just a few. I

occasionally hear someone brag that this is his or her last lifetime. What they fail

to understand is the mere fact that theyre bragging means theyll have to come

back and sign up for that humility class I mentioned earlier! So one can see, just

by the sheer number of issues we face while in physical bodies, that ascension to

the point of not having to incarnate again takes much longer than a handful of

lifetimes.

But dont worry. Each soul is granted as many lifetimes as it needs to

complete its development. Some souls are quick learners, while others struggle to

master lessons. For that reason, the term old soul is misleading. Most people

believe an old soul is someone who is very wise because theyve led many

lifetimes. In truth, theyve led many lifetimes because they didnt pass the courses

they signed up for. So you might say, an old soul is really just a slow learner!

Old soul or not, there is comfort in knowing that youre never alone.Not

only do we come in as individual souls signing up for a particular class, but also


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there are members of our soul family who come with us, often signing up for the

exact same class, either as a fellow classmate or as a teacher.

Your soul family consists of souls who have been with you before, but their

roles change from lifetime to lifetimeso the sister you have now may have been

your husband before; your current son may have been your mother in another life;

your present father may have once been your child. We come back with each other

to work out the issues that arose from our previous time together. Out of love for

each other, we agree, in our between-life planning session, to come back to provide

the circumstances to enable each other to master the lesson and pass the course.

Sometimeson this side of the veilour relationships are problematic and

painful, but when looked at from the other side, they were designed to be that way

so that we may learn the necessary lessons presented by those relationships.

If, for instance, you have an issue with abandonment or need for approval,

you can be sure that you will choose to come into a family and have a circle of

friends who will exasperate that feeling of abandonment. You wont get much

approval from them if approval is what you are working on. What better way to

teach you that approval comes from within than by souls agreeing not to provide

that to you during your next lifetime? Challenging? Oh yes! But so rewarding in

the end because, remember, once learned, the lesson need not ever be repeated

again!

We make our choices about life fully and freely. Thats why we cannot

blame others for the challenges we faceespecially our parents who often labor

under that burden of blame. Who and what you are is because you chose your

parents, your friends and family members, knowing full well the lessons and

opportunities they would provide. Cayce confirmed this when, in reading 5759-14

he was asked about patterns made by parents at the time of conception: Should it


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readers out thereand Ive worked with several of themthere are also many

who are far les reputable and whose gift seems to be in their ability to deceive you.

Cayce said, all answers lie withinso if that were the case, why would

you seek answers outside of yourself? You have the ability to access that

information on your own, but make no mistake about it; it does require work on

your part. Still, if you do the work yourself, the benefits are enormous. You have a

Source you can trustyour own soulso the information is not being filtered by

someone else whose own perspectives may taint the purity of the message they

convey. Even an outstanding psychic can inadvertently distort the information and

provide an inaccurate account. You cannot assume that a source, other than your

own soul, can provide you with the definitive truth, and even then there may not be

100 percent accuracy. Edgar Cayce himself advocated testing the accuracy of his

readings.

On the flip side, accessing past life information through your subconscious

means the images and sensations we receive have come from your soul, the

repository of past life memory. You communicate with the subconscious by

entering an altered state of consciousness, such as a hypnotic regression, where the

regression therapist acts as your guidenot your informertaking you back in

your memory until you reach an earlier lifetime. We will do just that with the

regressions you will do in the next three weeks that will guide you in exploring

various aspects of specific past lives.

People often ask whether what they saw, felt or sensed in their regression

was their imagination.Did I just make that up?Information that comes through

while in an altered state is a product of your subconscious. It comes from within.

Through meditation, you reach a deeper level of awareness and are able to pull out

information that resides in your soul. Whether you do it verbally in a regression

session or allow your subconscious to write the information out for you through


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about the resonance technique is that it works for everyone, even individuals who

have no memories of a past life and aren't sure past lives even exist. Everyone

knows what he or she likes and doesnt like. Perhaps you gravitate to a particular

type of architectural design, or you detest the taste of certain foods, or youre

drawn to a specific time period. When working with resonance, all that is required

is to make a list of how you feel about certain common place things, such as foods,

cities, physical traits, books, movies, architecture, religion, hobbies, art, music, etc.

and then look for a pattern that connects your likes and your dislikes. Once that is

revealed, you can use soul writing to fill in the blanks. If you put down Denver as

one of your favorite cities, you may ask something likewhat is the significance

of my resonating to the American west? Questions like these can jumpstart the

writing session. It is a fascinating process and can be a powerful, enlightening first

step toward exploring the journey of your soul.

Regardless of which method you choose, using soul writing to acquire or

expand on past life information is a valuable tool to understand why were here,

locate both positive and negative karmic patterns, and receive guidance on how to

master the courses weve enrolled in for this lifetime. And if, after all this, you still

question whether reincarnation is a fact or a myth, I can only quote Cayce when in

reading 956-1 he was asked: What will convince me of reincarnation?His

Source answered: An experience.

In this eGroup, you will have many such experiences, beginning with the

regression and writing session you will experience this week. But for now, return

to the Lesson Plan and continue with the next assignment.

cayce’s concept of reincarnation

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