2006-08-13
Part 1 Of A Review By William Hutton
of
THE REINCARNATION OF EDGAR CAYCE?
Interdimensional Communication & Global Transformation
a new book by
Wynn Free with David Wilcock
(Published in 2006 by Frog, Ltd., Berkeley, CA; 418 pp., $18.95)
Introduction
For reasons unknown, the publisher of this book sent me a review copy, with no strings attached. And because both Mr. Free and Mr. Wilcock believe that David Wilcock is the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, I will confess at the outset that I decided to examine their joint story for possible inconsistencies between what I know of Edgar Cayce’s life and readings, and the accounts of same as rendered by the authors.
According to the authors’ page at the back of the book,
David Wilcock is a professional intuitive consultant who, since 1993, has intensively researched UFOlogy, ancient civilizations, consciousness science, and new paradigms of matter and energy. With the help of “those on the other side,” he has assembled an ongoing series of critically acclaimed, breakthrough scientific research works under the master title Convergence, published on his website, Divine Cosmos.
Wynn Free, Wilcock’s biographer and collaborator, is a songwriter, poet, and freelance writer who lives in the Flagstaff, Arizona area.
Now even though Mr. Wilcock lived in Virginia Beach, where I now live, I never actually laid eyes on him. Nor have I ever met or communicated in any way with Wynn Free.
With the foregoing background in mind, we turn to some of the discrepancies between what Cayce’s readings revealed about how he channeled information and what Mr. Free has written about the process.
Cayce’s “Source”
In chapter 1 of the Free and Wilcock (F&W) book one reads (p. 15) that:
When Edgar Cayce gave his readings, the voice that spoke through him identified itself as the “Source.” I theorize that Cayce’s Source was not an isolated intervention unique to Cayce. In fact, if my informed assumptions are correct, Cayce’s Source was his own Higher Self, which was part of a group soul that identified itself as Ra through both Wilcock and L/L Research.
From the Glossary at the end of the book one learns that the “group soul” is the same as the “social memory complex,” defined as “a large group of completely integrated souls.”
Thus, Free and Wilcock are saying that Cayce’s source for his readings was none other than a group soul that identified itself as Ra.
The level of scholarship displayed by F&W is severely tested here. My own studies of Cayce’s early readings, given at a time when his friends and relatives were asking sleeping Cayce about the source of his information, is quite different from F&W’s conjecture. As explained in the book, Earth’s Catastrophic Past and Future, A Scientific Analysis of Information Channeled By Edgar Cayce,(Hutton, W., and J. C. Eagle, 2004, Universal Publishers, 500 pp.), and on the Hutton Commentaries web site, Cayce was able to access around 12 sources for his readings. And in stark contrast to Free’s claim above, a search of the CD-ROM that contains 14,000-plus Cayce readings yields no instance in which Cayce identified the origin of the material in any of his readings as the “Source.”
Mr. Free's claim that, "the voice that spoke through him {Cayce} identified itself as the “Source,” most likely was taken from Sidney Kirkpatrick's book (2000, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet, Riverhead Books, New York, N.Y.). The index for Kirkpatrick's book indicates that the first occurrence of the word Source appears on page 148, where the author states, "He {Cayce} also volunteered to let the Source itself make the final decision..." Only a few other mentions of the Source are found in Kirkpatrick's book. One of these says, "Ketchum believed that because the Source sounded so 'human' that it was none other that Cayce's subconscious mind tapping into a vast database of information." But at the end of this paragraph (on p. 159) Kirkpatrick writes, "As would be demonstrated on numerous occasions in the future, Cayce's higher self may indeed 'retrieve' information ....." This last statement may have been the basis for Free's words above, "...if my informed assumptions are correct, Cayce’s Source was his own Higher Self." At any rate, both Kirkpatrick and Free invented "the Source" explanation for Cayce's psychically derived information without ever reviewing the early Cayce readings that describe in considerable detail the several kinds of sources that Edgar Cayce actually contacted when channeling his readings. ...