Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet

Profiles in Right Hemispherism

Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet” (1877-1945), was a peculiar figure, a lanky Kentuckian who slipped into some kind of trance-like stupor and spouted answers to life’s mysteries like a backwoods oracle.

Over 14,000 of his mutterings were scribbled down by diligent stenographers, responses to questions from 6,000 souls scattered from across the map, some hundreds, even thousands of miles away. He’d diagnose their ailments, prescribe remedies, and, more often than not, hit the mark with eerie precision, helping people who’d never laid eyes on him.

A fraud? You could argue it, and plenty have, squinting suspiciously at the whole affair. But the grateful throngs who swore by his advice suggest there was something more than hucksterism at play.

Sure, some of his cures leaned toward the snake-oil end of the spectrum. But strip away the oddities, and Cayce’s core prescriptions sound like they could’ve come from today’s “Medicine 2.0” gurus like Peter Attia or Casey Means.

Eat fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables, he said. Stick to organic meats, hydrate properly, stretch daily, meditate, get a good rubdown now and then. Simple, grounded stuff—less about miracle elixirs and more about not poisoning yourself with the processed slop of modern life.

Cayce wasn’t out to fleece anyone. He lived lean, sometimes scraping by, his modest existence a rebuke to the prosperity gospel hucksters of today. His “gift” weighed on him like a sack of bricks; he didn’t flaunt it, didn’t turn it into a traveling circus.

The man seemed to operate from some deeper well of knowing, as if his chattering, rational left hemisphere had been knocked out cold, letting the wild, intuitive right hemisphere roam free into realms of consciousness the rest of us can only squint at through the fog.

In a world obsessed with reason’s cold machinery, Cayce was a glitch, a reminder that there’s more to this mess of existence than what fits neatly on a spreadsheet.

Apparently, I am one of the few who can lay aside their own personalities [set aside the grasping ambition of their left hemispheres] sufficiently to allow their souls to make this attunement to the universal source of knowledge [to free their right hemispheres to connect to transcendence]—but I say this without any desire to brag about it. . . . I am certain all human beings have much greater powers than they are ever conscious of—if they would only be willing to pay the price of detachment from self-interest [the price of subduing their left hemispheres] that it takes to develop those abilities. Would you be willing, even once a year, to put aside, pass out entirely from, your own personality? Edgar Cayce