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Aug. 20, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:38
Edition 308 - Edgar Cayce

This time Mark Thurston who has researched and updated the works of visionary EdgarCayce...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, summertime and the living is kind of easy.
How's your life going right now?
Always good to hear from you, by the way.
If you want to get in touch with me, tell me anything about yourself, about the show, whatever.
When you do get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Always interesting to know from my point of view.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can follow the link and leave me an email there and maybe make a guest suggestion, whatever.
I see all of your emails and act upon them.
So if you give me bits of guidance and pointers, then I take them on board.
And you really can't say that of many outlets and armatures of the mainstream media.
Sometimes they just completely ignore what you tell them, but I know I've said that before.
So that's that.
Going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
Then a very good guest, Mark Thurston, will be here and will be talking about a topic and a person who's been suggested many, many times for this show, Edgar Casey.
A remarkable person, medical clairvoyant, lived from 1877 to 1945 and was a very influential person in a whole variety of ways, not only psychically.
Mark Thurston has brought up to date his teachings and works.
He's studied him intensively.
And we'll be hearing from Mark in just a moment here.
But before that, a few shout-outs to do on this edition.
Patrick in Belfast, thank you very much for an email that meant a lot to me.
You know what I'm talking about.
Much appreciated.
Very interesting.
Valerie, thank you very much for your stories.
Dot in Vancouver, good to hear from you again, Dot.
Joe and Natalie, good to hear from you.
Kevin from Essex and visiting Liverpool.
Hope you enjoyed my home city, Kevin.
Peter, I'm looking for you into Agenda 21 and trying to see if I can shed some light on that somewhere along the way.
But thank you very much for your communications about it.
Brett says, I live in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
I've been listening for about three years now.
I used to unload trucks in a frozen food warehouse and I binge listen to your podcast to get me through my shifts.
I'm glad they helped.
I think you do a great job of interviewing your guests.
My favourite episode must be your talk with Al Bierlick about the Philadelphia experiment.
Of course, that was an archive piece from 2005.
Thank you.
Nice to hear from you, Brett, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Abby in Derby, UK says, Ayo, Poward.
I'm a new listener to the podcast.
I wanted to let you know I'm loving catching up on the shows.
I listen to them while I'm sculpting in the studio or at work.
Me and my buddies really loved the Steve Parsons interview.
We want to know more about time slips now.
Yeah, I'm very, this is something that fascinates me.
But it's so hard to find good people who know about this subject, Abby.
But I want to get somebody else on to talk about this.
I could talk all day and all night about anything to do with time travel and time slips.
Keith says, please don't be put off and don't think that you mention your mum and dad.
Mention them whenever you want to on your show.
Thank you for that, Keith.
Very much appreciate it.
I got some criticism from one emailer about the number of times I mentioned my late parents.
Grace says, I listened to your latest show where a listener said in a shout-out that you talk too much about your family and yourself.
For what it's worth, I love hearing all about you and your family because you are a part of the whole show.
Thank you, Grace.
And you say thank you for putting out the shows.
They make my day.
I'm really pleased to know that.
And, you know, look, all of these things are a fine balance.
And I think the only thing you can give a show like this is yourself.
We had a great broadcaster in the UK called Terry Wogan.
If you're in the US, look him up.
He was a wonderful Irish broadcaster with the most fabulous voice and the greatest turn of phrase that I think I have heard from anyone on radio in this country, certainly, and possibly in the entire world.
We lost him far too early recently.
He had cancer.
And Terry Wogan was once interviewed about the art of doing radio and he said, if you can't give it yourself, then what are you doing the thing for?
And that's what I think is the truth.
You know, you can only be you.
And I spent years trying to be Mr. Announcer, and it didn't work for me.
So I can only give this myself.
And I'm thrilled that, you know, so many of you like what we do here and write such kind comments.
If you want to get in touch, you know I love to hear from you.
Right, let's get to the guest in the U.S. now, Mark Thurston.
And we're going to discuss the life, the works, and the bringing up to date of Edgar Casey.
Mark, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Thank you.
I'm pleased to be part of the program.
Now, look, you have done impressive research and written a whole sheaf of books about Edgar Casey.
Before we talk about Edgar Casey and your interest in him, and he is a fascinating man whose name keeps coming up all the time in my programs, tell me about you.
Well, my background's in psychology.
When I was growing up, I was very interested in being a mathematician and a physicist, but I was also really deeply involved in my Protestant church and very interested in religion.
And it seemed to me like these were two different parts of me that didn't go together very well.
But when I was 18 years old and began to study parapsychology and metaphysics and spiritual psychology, I was able to find sort of a bridge between science and religion.
Right.
And that is a true, even, you know, for the most learned people all over the world that I've talked to on this show, that is an enormously difficult thing to do, isn't it?
Because both sides of certain factions on both sides do not see those things as being connected.
Well, maybe it's the challenge of our times.
Well, maybe the only challenge, but it is a challenge of our time of how we can begin to have a deeper dialogue between spirituality and the physical sciences.
And how do you think that might happen?
Do you think that might happen if we discover a great power in ourselves, and that power is something that we would attribute, would have attributed in the past to the power of God?
And then suddenly we discover this enormous, I mean, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are such a power.
You know, they are a power that we would have attributed in the past to God, but science has given us that power now.
Yeah, I think that can be part of it.
I think as biological research deepens, I think we're finding out things about the way we're wired, the way in which neuroscience is beginning to show evidence for some of the things that mystics and profound meditators have talked about for thousands of years.
There's lots of places where science and spirituality are getting into a deeper conversation.
And it's strange you should say that, because I interviewed a couple of weeks ago Professor Michiu Kaku, who, of course, is very well known around the world, and he was saying something very similar, that these fields are beginning in some ways to coalesce.
Yeah, and I think physics has led the way.
In many ways, a lot of contemporary cutting-edge physics begins to sound almost like mysticism.
I was talking only last night on my radio show with a man here called Professor Jim Al-Khalili, who is the head of physics at Surrey University and a very well-known media figure in the UK.
And he was talking about the exciting possibilities thrown up by quantum biology.
Yes, yeah.
And the fact that we will be able to zero in on, you know, below the, well, beyond levels we've been able to see before and perhaps detect things about ourselves like the nature of consciousness that we couldn't before.
There's some interesting theories about quantum consciousness, and could it be that that's an explanation for how consciousness emerges, that it's at the quantum level?
So all this is a little beyond anything that Edgar Casey ever spoke of.
He was much more down-to-earth kind of fellow.
And so it was really a changing factor in my life to come across his spiritual philosophy and the psychic discourses that he gave well before I was born.
What is it about this man?
His name crops up time and time again in interviews that I do.
People who say that they were fundamentally influenced by Edgar Casey.
What was it about him?
Well, I think there were a handful of figures working in the first half of the 20th century that were really seminal individuals.
I mean, people like Carl Jung certainly need to be in that same category, that they were opening up new vistas for understanding the mind-body connection, the way in which Eastern religion and Western religion might be able to be synthesized in a way that would deepen human experience.
Casey's really a piece of Americana.
He grew up in Kentucky in a rural area.
He only went to school formally through the eighth grade.
He was self-educated.
He was deeply religious.
He read the Bible once for every year of his life.
But he discovered somewhat spontaneously that he had this intuitive gift to be able to diagnose ailments.
And then later in his life, he discovered that he could give advice, spiritual advice, about a wide range of practical daily life concerns that we all face, such as finding meaning in life.
Okay.
And how did he come to manifest these things first?
How did he discover that he could do these things?
He got ill when he was a young man, about 23 years old.
He lost his voice.
It went on for nearly a year.
And then a traveling hypnotist came to his little town in Kentucky and claimed that under hypnosis, he was sure Edgar Casey would be able to heal himself.
And when he was hypnotized, he could talk, and he proceeded to give a diagnosis of what was wrong with his throat.
And when they followed the recommendations, he got well.
And soon thereafter, they discovered that he could put himself into this prayer-induced hypnosis, and he could answer questions about other people's ailments.
And these came to be called the physical readings that Evase gave for thousands of individuals over a 43-year period.
That's a hell of a thing to carry around with you, isn't it?
How did he bear that term, if it is a gift, that gift?
Well, I think it was so non-traditional, it created a lot of stress for him.
He took a pledge himself that he wouldn't continue to do this if it ever led to harm for anyone.
I think it was more of a challenge for him after he'd been doing it about 20 years when he began to give these readings on topics other than just health, giving people advice about their career, interpreting dreams and so forth.
And subjects began to arise such as reincarnation, which did not really match with his conscious waking beliefs.
And so that was deeply disturbing to him.
But he always tried to measure it by the fruits of what happened in the person's life who received these readings.
So how did he do the readings then?
Did people make appointments with him like they would make appointments with a medium or a psychic?
People made appointments.
He was supporting himself for many, many years as a portrait photographer, so he was not dependent upon the finances that might come from the readings.
And people were usually at a distance.
Sometimes they were done with people sitting right in the room.
He would have his wife present and a stenographer who would write down everything that was being said.
He'd have a period of prayer.
He'd lie down on a couch.
It would look much like he was falling asleep.
His wife would read to him a suggestion, much like a hypnotic suggestion with the name and the location of the individual.
And then questions would be dictated to him or read to him.
And he would speak.
And everything that he said was written down and then later typed up.
And so we have the archival records of all these readings.
There's more than 14,000 of them.
The era in which he worked was an era of great questing.
An awful lot of people investigated phenomena.
An awful lot of people discovered fakery.
There was a lot of fakery around.
In this country, we had people like Harry Price, who was doing a lot of paranormal research and was very famous.
Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, of course, was famous for these things and didn't stop to his dying day researching.
Was Edgar Casey put under scrutiny?
I assume he was.
Well, there was a physician who came from Duke to investigate him.
There was another scholar from Harvard that came down to investigate him.
In the way that investigation would be done today with neuroscience and double-blind experimentation, there was none of that.
I mean, that just wasn't the way research was done in those days.
I guess if we're going to try to retroactively do some science around this, we could take case studies, we could do it more kind of in a case-by-case method with the follow-up data we have, the letters from individuals.
It might not be as convincing as modern science requires.
I think maybe what's even more convincing are the way in which many of his recommendations could be applied in today's world.
And in many of these instances, there seem to be a beneficial effect, even a healing effect from some of his holistic health recommendations.
And that's been a large portion of your work, and I want to get into that.
But I wanted to try and get under the skin of this man a little more first.
Sure.
In the parlance of today, and even in the parlance of his day, he would have been regarded, I guess, as a mystic, almost as a mystic, almost somebody like, I don't know, I mean, the Beatles went to see the Maharishi, and in the TV generation, we have Uri Geller.
And none of us has been quite sure what powers Uri Geller exhibits, what there is about him.
But in terms of being different, it sounds to me like he was that kind of character for his generation.
Well, I think he was a spiritual teacher in that regard.
I think in contrast to Uri Geller, who, at least from my perspective, has been much more interested in notoriety and demonstrating the sensational, we never would have caught Edgar Casey doing something like that.
He was much more humble and quiet and out of the mainstream.
He really wanted to just help people one at a time.
And yet he gathered this reputation, this reputation that holds people like you and many people that I've interviewed here awestruck.
The reputation really emerged in the last three years of his life.
There was a book published by a major New York City publisher.
It was a biography.
And there was also a magazine article that came out in a mainstream magazine about the success that people had had over the years getting readings from him.
And that led to a huge outcry, requests for reading.
There were just thousands of requests coming in every month.
And in many ways, he kind of worked himself to death.
His own readings had counseled him to only give two per day.
And he ended up giving 8, 9, 10, 11 readings a day.
And his health began to deteriorate very quickly.
And he died of a pulmonary disorder only at the age of 67 years old.
Right.
So if the man was a fake, he would enjoy his leisure time a bit more, wouldn't he?
It would seem to me.
Yeah, I think he probably would have been more financially successful as well, very modestly.
From your researchers, can you think of any stories of people who were helped and how they were helped?
Any remarkable stories that stick in your mind?
Oh, I guess one of the most famous examples from his own era was parents who brought to him a young girl.
She was five years old at the time, who had stopped her intellectual and cognitive development at about the age of two years old.
So at the age of five, she was still like a two-year-old.
And they had no idea what was wrong.
And they asked Edgar Casey for a reading.
No physician had been able to help.
And he went into his trance-like state.
He seemingly was contacting something about her physical body or the condition of who she was.
And he described how he could see clairvoyantly that she had had a fall and struck her spine when she was two years old.
And it had created an imbalance in the vertebrae and in the cerebrospinal system.
And he described how this had arrested her cognitive development.
And then he proceeded to talk about certain physical remedies that needed to be done, including osteopathic adjustments and certain poultices and certain other treatments.
And if they were followed, he held out hope that she could regain normalcy.
And so the parents, you know, have no other thing to hang their hope on.
And so they proceeded to follow these instructions.
And within six months, the girl had not only improved, she was actually beginning to behave as a normal five-and-a-half-year-old girl would.
Is this only documented in his own notes, or did other people keep records of what he did and how he did it?
I mean, it's the only record of this we have here.
It's documented in the notes of the treating physician who was willing to work with Casey's recommendations.
We don't have x-rays before and after.
We don't have neurological workups and so forth.
It really isn't, in a sense, a case history.
But there's hundreds of these kinds of cases.
And after a while, I think it begins to make a pretty convincing body of evidence, at least in terms of his physical, his capacity for giving physical health readings.
Now, there are people who claim today to be able to do some of these things.
And some of these people are quite famous, and some of these people are pretty well known and are never short of patients or clients or whatever you want to call them.
But in Edgar Casey's day, it was, I assume, a little easier to do these things.
Today we are regulated.
There are laws that stop people setting themselves up as healers and, you know, people who claim cures for cancer and that sort of thing.
This is all regulated by law.
In his day, perhaps a little easier to practice.
Yeah, although he was arrested once for practicing medicine without a license.
He was in Detroit, Michigan, giving readings, and he got arrested.
He was eventually released and sent back to Virginia Beach.
I think it shook him up a little bit.
He tried whenever possible to work in collaboration with physicians.
There were a small number of doctors who had some faith in his ability and would send their patients to him.
And for a short period of time, there was even the Casey Hospital for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach.
It had an MD medical director and a nursing staff.
And people could come there and get readings.
And there were health professionals that would follow the readings.
But I imagine the fact that he was arrested, I mean, it wouldn't just have been on a whim.
Somebody must have complained about him.
So the man had enemies, it seems.
Doing something that goes against the mainstream were vulnerable.
And he was certainly doing something out of the ordinary.
And as you hinted at the beginning of our conversation, all of this, he sounds like a very sensitive man, was taking a toll on him.
Yeah, I think there was a physical toll in terms of the process he had to go through in giving a reading.
As best I understand it, it was much like the higher energy body separating from the physical body, and that apparently that can be done for a certain period of time a day, and to do more than that disrupts the electromagnetism of the physical body.
It's really stark to see pictures of him in the last 18 months of his life and how much his health deteriorated.
Up until his 50s, he looked like he was 10 years younger than he was biologically.
And then by the time he's 67, he looks like an 85-year-old.
Why didn't he stop?
Well, he said he just felt an obligation.
You know, while World War II was going on, there were literally hundreds, if not sometimes thousands, of requests coming in a week, letters.
He would sit and read these letters, and there seemed to be such profound need.
I think he just felt like he needed to try to do his best every day.
And as a sensitive human being, I would imagine that he would ask himself the questions that you would ask yourself and I would ask myself if I was in this position.
I'd ask myself, number one, why am I doing this?
Number two, how am I able to do this?
Well, there were actually readings that he gave where questions were asked about the nature of his power and whether this was something that other people could do as well.
And he was always encouraging that we all have the capacity to be intuitive and psychic.
We might manifest it in different ways.
That's not to say that all of us are going to learn how to lie down on a couch and sort of talk in our sleep.
But I think all of us have innate capacities for creativity, for sensitivity, for gut instinct, for being able to make decisions that are informed by our intuitive abilities.
And I think all of us ought to try to cultivate these capacities.
Now, this crisis, this brings us back to the crisis he had when he was young that left him with these abilities, we think.
This almost speaks to a lot of the cases that we hear even today in American news.
There's one of these things almost seemingly every year where somebody maybe has an accident or goes into a coma and wakes up out of it and suddenly they can speak French.
It kind of sounds like that to me.
Yeah.
He had had an accident as a teenager where he was sort of a head in and it almost foreshadowed what he was able to do later as an adult where he was sort of delirious and was talking and seemed to be in connection to other realities, but he kind of came back to normal.
The loss of his voice, I think, was not so much an accident.
It was just an illness that befell him that baffled his doctors.
And I really feel like his abilities grew out of his deep devotional life and his prayer life more than it did any injury to the head or any kind of accident.
I think he looked at his own gift as a byproduct of his deep desire to be of service to God and to be of help to other people.
And that doesn't mean that psychic abilities are the only way we can do that.
We all have a calling.
We all have a mission.
I mean, my book, Discovering Your Soul's Purpose, is really about his advice to people about how they find their own mission.
Did he ever question or did other people question his sanity?
Yeah, I suspect so.
I don't know a lot about that.
He continued to be part of his local church and to teach Sunday school.
I think he was enough of an ordinary fellow with his portrait photography business and a wife and two kids that he was seen as a responsible member of the community.
Probably a lot of people just didn't want to know much about this other thing that he did on the side.
Do you think he was a faith healer?
Well, he was very explicit about him not being a healer himself.
He was more of a diagnostician and sort of somebody who could recommend holistic natural treatments rather than being the one who was the instigator of the healing.
So he wasn't somebody that gave a reading and then at a distance somebody got well.
Or he wasn't somebody that laid hands on people and suddenly they changed.
It was more he was a source of information and wisdom that then had to be applied by the recipient.
You know, as you say, there were people who would have opposed him, but he was a remarkable man who had a whole catalog of case studies and a whole set of documentation showing that he was able to do these things.
Do you know of cases where he failed?
Yeah, his two sons, both of whom are now deceased, even wrote a book called The Outer Limits of Edgar Casey's Power.
And they felt like it was really important for there to be a balanced view of their father's work and for people to recognize that he was not 100% accurate.
And so their book documents examples of where there's strong evidence that he was wrong.
One study that was done post-fact was looking back at readings where there seemed to be a chance to say about whether he was right or wrong on health material.
And the investigator there arrived at the 85% accuracy with diagnoses figure.
Now, you know, 85% is impressive.
I doubt if I could get 10% trying to do something like this.
But it still leaves room for people to ask themselves about any reading Edgar Casey gave.
Well, what's the corroborative evidence?
We're not going to believe this just alone because he said it.
Did he have any beliefs about the afterlife?
I asked this for a reason.
There are at least one person, I think, in this world who claim that they've either been influenced by or are the reincarnation of Edgar Casey.
Oh, there's hundreds of people who claim to be the reincarnation of Edgar Casey.
I worked at the Edgar Casey Center for 36 years.
I bet I met at least 50 people in my years there who were absolutely sure that they were the reincarnated Edgar Casey.
So he had a strong belief in the afterlife.
He reluctantly, as a conscious person, came around to accept this idea that was coming through his readings, that we are reborn in human form.
His notion of reincarnation was always coming back as a human being.
It's hard to find in the Bible.
There are some passages that maybe are suggestive of the possibility.
But that was a stretch for him to come around to accepting that in his waking life.
But he was a strong believer that we survive physical death, a strong believer in the continuity of life.
Right.
Well, a very special man who influenced an awful lot of people.
But it is...
I still am impacted by this ability that this man has to influence people today.
I mean, you're an example of that, but so many people.
But Edgar Casey seems to have transcended all or most of them.
Well, some of it, I think, is because there were a relatively small number of people doing this kind of work in the first half of the 20th century, say, compared to how many are doing it now in the early decades of the 21st century.
I think there's also something about the integrity of the guy.
I mean, he's just beyond reproach in terms of his sincerity, his willingness to be doing this for the greater good.
I think there's also the breadth of topics that he addressed, that he's a pioneer, literally, in the holistic health movement.
He's also somebody who was among the few in the early part of the 20th century talking about the spiritual significance of dreams and dreaming and giving advice on how people can learn to interpret their dreams.
He gave a lot of information about how we can develop a meditative lifestyle and actually practice meditation.
I mean, there's just hundreds and hundreds of different topics.
It's almost encyclopedic.
And I think for that reason, people with a wide range of interests have been able to find something in his material that really interests and intrigues them.
Of the many streams of Casey's work that you've picked up and explored, I know you've looked into the dreaming aspect of it.
Talk to me about that.
Well, I think one thing I learned from the Casey readings is that a dream can have more than one level of meaning, that a dream is in a sense of very real experience and consciousness, not physical reality, but we're being changed and influenced by our dreams.
We awaken in the morning, whether we remember a dream or not, having been changed in our attitude, in our mood, our emotion by these very real experiences we're having at night.
Our dreams can potentially be a portal, a window into higher spiritual realities.
I think some of our dreams allow us to tap into our telepathy, our precognition abilities, our clairvoyance.
But more often than not, we're having dreams that just give us an honest picture of what's going on inside of us in terms of our attitudes and emotions.
They're really kind of a truth teller about our feelings, about our aspirations, about our hopes.
And they can be a way that we connect to some of our gifts and our talents and things that we need to cultivate in order to really live our personal calling.
Did Edgar Casey believe that you could seed your dreams with your desires and ambitions and wishes and somehow work them out and realize them?
Well, he was an advocate for focusing on our ideals and our core values before we go to sleep at night, especially to have a prayer meditation time and then fall asleep with an intention.
And in that way, we could sort of steer the unconscious mind in a direction.
I don't think he wanted us so much to try to manipulate our dreams.
We need to kind of trust that the unconscious has a certain wisdom of its own.
But I like your word seeding in the sense of especially seeding it with intention or direction or a topic around which we'd like to have a dream.
You say that he was influenced enormously.
It's clear that he was, by his own religious faith and perceptions.
Was he only able to help people who were religious?
Did you have to be religious to be helped by him?
Well, of the 14,300 and something readings that we have transcripts of, two-thirds of them are health readings.
So that's roughly 9,000.
And for those, I don't think religion or spirituality really came into play.
And he gave readings to people of all faith traditions.
Now, in his own time, in his own circles, the majority coming out of a Judeo-Christian perspective.
But there were also plenty of people who were agnostic or atheistic who were getting physical readings.
When it came to spiritual advice or the readings about life purpose or dream interpretation, I think in those cases one's faith tradition or one's beliefs are probably going to be much more of a factor.
And I think that Casey was, for people who were agnostic or atheistic, he was inviting them to see how their dreams were maybe giving them inklings of a higher reality, trying to give them a sense of foreshadowing of how there might be a life beyond the physical life.
So he was proselytizing kind of indirectly sometimes with his interpretation of dreams.
But I don't think he was ever trying to do anything other than just take people deeper into their faith as opposed to trying to change their faith in the way he interpreted dreams or the way he gave advice in general.
How was he regarded in other countries?
I don't know a whole lot about that.
Again, in his own era, I don't think he was known very widely outside of the United States.
There were newspapers then, and stories would travel far and wide.
It wasn't like today.
I just wonder if his notoriety spread beyond his own immediate area, his country.
Yeah, I don't know.
There was a famous article about him in the New York Times in 1910, focused on his clairvoyant abilities around health diagnoses.
I think it's highly likely that got picked up in a lot of places around the world.
It may very well have led to requests for physical readings, but I don't have statistics to be able to answer that question very well.
I mean, his impact is enormous.
Just having a scan on the internet today before we did this, there is an Edgar Casey organization in the U.S., and there is one here in the U.K. from what I can see.
So this man's name lives on enormously.
Right.
There's an Edgar Casey Center in Shanghai.
There's one in Tokyo.
It really, in the years after his death, has really caught on.
Quite a few of my own books have been translated into Spanish, into Japanese, into Russian.
I mean, there's really been a widespread interest in his works in recent decades.
Well, let's get on to you.
First of all, what was it about you that made you want to open the book again, open the files again, and reinterpret this man's work and legacy?
Well, I chose psychology as a career track.
To me, that was something that might have the opportunity of sort of bridging these two sides of myself.
One that was interested in religion and spirituality, the other interested in science.
And I particularly focused my studies on humanistic psychology and what's called transpersonal psychology.
And I became interested very early on in how people find meaning and purpose in their life.
And so I studied figures like Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl and others that have written about meaning-making and the process of individuation and becoming a whole person.
And I found in Edgar Casey's advice to about 2,000 different individual people about how to find a life mission, a really rich system of thought.
And so in 1984, I published a book called Discovering Your Soul's Purpose that had sort of the distillation of Casey's advice about how people can do this.
And then just this summer, a second edition of the book got published that has new exercises and I think more evidence about the efficacy of these methods.
And when you talk about your soul's purpose, I've heard a lot of people talk about this.
I remember sitting in a Swami's home in Bath in the west of England.
A guy who'd come over here from India a long time ago by then, this was the 1980s when I met him.
He was one of the first people I ever interviewed as a student.
And this was probably 1984 or so.
He talked about this kind of thing.
There are many people who talk about discovering the purpose of the soul.
What am I here to do?
What is my destiny?
Yeah.
It's a fascinating topic, but a lot of people have different takes on it.
Well, you know, the phrase to have a calling in life, I think, is one that has widespread usage.
In a lot of ways, a calling for many, many centuries seemed to be isolated on people who felt a religious calling, maybe to join a monastic order, to become a nun or a priest.
And then, particularly with the Protestant Reformation, there was an expansion to this idea that you could have a calling within any type of work or occupation that served the greater good.
So somebody might say they had a calling to be a farmer, or somebody has a calling to be a teacher.
And what happened in the 20th century, I think, with sort of the mushering of metaphysics and the whole idea of reincarnation, maybe we come back to this earth for another lifetime with a plan or intention or a set of talents and gifts that we've developed in a previous lifetime, is that this notion of a soul purpose and the way Edgar Casey speaks of it is something that can be found and discovered and is deeply embedded within us.
It's part of our very makeup unconsciously.
Well, look, you told me there's a whole book that you'd written in 1984 about this, and it's just been updated.
I know you can't go through the whole content of the book to tell me how you might do this, but give me a flavor.
Well, I read, I think, virtually all these 2,000 readings that Casey gave to 2,000 different individuals.
I mean, luckily, it was my job, and I was there for many decades.
And what I saw in reading these different discourses given for different people is there seemed to be a pattern or a template that Casey was following, much like a psychotherapist or a career counselor might follow a certain schema in giving help and support to somebody.
And there were five steps in this schema.
First, Edgar Casey would counsel a person to clarify his or her core beliefs or core values.
What's going to be a foundation for your life in terms of what you believe in and two or three qualities that are right at the heart of your deepest sense of values.
He called that setting a spiritual ideal.
Second step in a life reading, as they called them, was for Casey to use his clairvoyance and help people see what four or five of their most important talents and gifts and strengths would be.
And I think in some cases he was using the language of reincarnation to talk about how in a past lifetime they might have cultivated and nurtured certain gifts and talents.
If a person doesn't believe in reincarnation, they could just as easily say, well, maybe I have certain God-given talents and strengths that I came into this lifetime with.
And so in the book, I have half a dozen different exercises that can help a person kind of hone in on what their core talents And strengths and abilities would be.
An example of an exercise would be looking back at your key achievements and accomplishments in life so far and the talents that you already have a track record working with.
The third step is to try to write the first draft of a mission statement.
It's probably going to be long, it may be a little cumbersome, but how could you take those most important talents and gifts and strengths and have them work sort of in a synergistic way where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, where the talents and gifts play off each other?
What's that configuration equipped to be doing in life that's for the greater good, that would help others, that would contribute in some way?
The fourth step is to write some kind of an application plan.
What am I going to do in the next 90 days that would be some baby steps in this direction, trying to put this into application?
Maybe in my job, maybe in my community, maybe in my family.
How could I take some initiatives in the direction of what I've written as a draft mission statement?
And the last thing Casey gave in a life reading were some signposts that people could look for, things that would happen more often in your life when you're on track.
And when these things aren't happening, he basically would say, "You've got to go back and redo the steps," like a researcher.
So you're saying...
This is fascinating.
You're saying that if you have your life plan and you stick to it using the Edgar Casey method, then you will get almost like having your essays ticked and approved and marked highly by your teacher.
The universe will show you that you're on the right course.
Exactly.
He said there would be reinforcing signs.
And I'll give you some examples.
I think we need to be honest here and realistic and know that just because somebody knows and is trying to live their sole purpose, it's not like a bed of roses.
It's not like everything just becomes easy street.
Casey himself, I think, was living his calling, but he sure had obstacles and he sure had difficulties.
But, for example, he said there's more joy in your life when you really get on track with your mission.
That that's the emotion more than anything else that begins to happen more often in your life.
He said that there would be more of a sense of flow in your life.
That's actually a term that comes out of positive psychology in modern terms.
Where there's just a sense of sort of losing track of time and being so fully engaged in what you're doing that I think this word flow is a lovely word to describe the feeling that comes with it.
He suggests that there's also a frequency of synchronistic occurrences that take place, that there are signposts, the person that we need to meet comes into our lives, the resources that we need come, that there are these signs along the way to give us synchronistic reinforcement.
Well, this is wonderful.
So the universe is there to help you.
The universe is there to guide you along the way.
Your task is to find the set of railroad tracks that you have to be on.
And then once you get on those railroad tracks, along the way, you'll find help.
Yeah, I like that analogy if we remember that the locomotive on this train is going to need some energy, and there's going to be work involved in taking care of the passengers along the way.
So even when we get on track, it's not just easy street.
There's still lots of work to do, but it's going to take us someplace that's meaningful.
Many of us think that we have a purpose in our lives.
In some ways, I think that maybe I'm fulfilling mine by doing the work that I've done in radio over the years because I felt that was what I was meant to do.
But let me tell you, along the way, I have been knocked and kicked and thrown off track.
People have been jealous.
They've wanted to stop me.
And this is everybody's experience in life.
You know, as you say, it's not easy, and it's easy to get deterred.
Did Casey have any words, any guidance, any thoughts on how you could stop yourself being thrown off your track?
Well, I think he was a big advocate, a big advocate of everybody who's trying to live their life's purpose having a regular contemplative practice of some sort.
We need some type of meditative or mindfulness practice done on a regular basis to maintain our resilience and our connection to that sense of calling.
He also says that we need social support.
We need to find our people.
We need to find sort of allies in this kind of work.
If we don't have one or two or three or a group of people who support us in our mission, then we're going to get discouraged.
We're going to run astray.
And he also invites us to remember that our calling is more than just a particular job title or something you have on your business card.
So I don't know you well, but I would guess that maybe your own mission statement is probably broader than just the radio show.
It might be something including being a spokesperson for the truth or being a proponent of ideas that challenge and lift people's spirits or you see some way that's thematic that the radio show is one expression of it, but it also has applicability in the way you are in your neighborhood or with your family or even the way you treat yourself.
The calling needs to engage us in a lot of different places in our life.
And when we're experiencing pushback and resistance in one area, we may be able to experience success at the same time in other areas.
Right.
So he has some guidance for us to find the kind of fortitude that you will need if you're trying to succeed.
Let's leave me and my radio career out of it.
If you want to be an artist or a musician, or you want to help bring food to the people who are without food, whatever it is, you have to find that fortitude, and there are ways to do that.
We have to cultivate resilience, and I think we need to find our group and realize that our own purpose is connected with the purpose in other people's lives as well.
What about people who commit terrible crimes?
Mass murderers and people of that kind.
they clearly haven't found their calling, have they?
I would agree.
I would agree.
I think those people have gone way astray.
And it's sad.
It's tragic.
Did Casey have any thoughts on how things go wrong in the middle?
Well, I think for him, the nature of evil is a will to private fulfillment, when our intentionality is around our own well-being and not the well-being of the greater good.
And I think we all have temptations around that.
We don't have to become a mass murderer or a Hitler-like figure to have experiences of falling prey to selfishness.
Every day we have to make a choice to be working for a greater good rather than our own private fulfillment.
So the people who commit bad deeds or who behave in bad ways are giving in to something that is within themselves, that is beyond their sole purpose.
They are, in other words, they're turning down the transistor radio of guidance in their life.
They're refusing to hear it.
And that's how they come off the straight and narrow path.
Yeah.
Or they're tuning to a different channel and the channel that would connect to their highest purpose.
Was Casey concerned at all with the whole question of good and evil?
He was.
He had a little bit different notion than just a demonic sort of heaven and hell sort of thing.
He felt like in general, we need to be able to find that what we label as bad about ourselves is redeemable.
That oftentimes what we call bad in ourselves or in somebody else is some principle that could be good that has gone wrong and that can still be lifted and transformed through a kind of alchemy.
That the whole notion of turning lead into gold wasn't so much to be an external as it was an internal process.
So he believed that anybody more or less could be turned around, could be saved?
Well, I think he had ultimately a very positive, hopeful notion about the human soul.
I think his view that includes reincarnation makes that a little easier to understand how it would even be possible.
I mean, clearly there are those who are so lost in darkness and in selfishness, it's hard to imagine how they're going to get turned around this lifetime.
But he had this longer timeframe view of the human soul and the journey that each of us is on.
And what thought did he give to his legacy?
Well, I think it was not so important to him that his own name be remembered.
I think he wanted the principles to inspire people.
I think he was glad to know that the archive of his readings was going to be made available for generations after.
But he really thought there would be people that would come after him, maybe giving further readings or perhaps just taking the principles in his readings and finding ways they could be applied to childhood education, to health care, to politics, to religious studies, and that it wasn't going to be important to him whether the name Edgar Cayce would be known or not.
And if anybody was to ask you, Mark, what has Edgar Cayce done for you in your life?
How would you sum it up in a very personal way for you?
Well, I think his teachings have shown me how I can have a direct relationship myself with spiritual reality.
He's taught me ways in which I can use my dreams to be a connection to a higher source.
I've learned a method for meditation that's within my own Judeo-Christian background.
He's given me some safe ways to begin to trust and cultivate my own intuition.
He's helped me to be more of a heart-centered person and not just an intellectual analytical person.
It's really been transformational for me over the decades of working with his material.
I think the thing I take away from what you said is the notion that I've heard before, and deep in my soul, I kind of believe, but sometimes life pushes you off course or causes you to question these things, that the universe is actually basically there if you have good intent, is there to assist you.
So the bad guys don't have to win.
In fact, it's not meant that the bad guys should win.
I agree.
He had a fundamentally clear sense that the universe is on our side and that if we will align ourselves even internally with the forces of health and healing, positivity and service, we are sure to be able to find a response that puts wind in our sails.
Is there anything we haven't talked about in this conversation that I've been looking forward to and I'm glad we've had that we haven't talked about?
Anything that we should be bringing out?
Well, I just encourage people to look more into this material.
I mean, Edgar Casey's last name is spelled in an unusual way, C-A-Y-C-E.
And there's a great website about his work, edgarcasey.org, edgarcasey.org.
There's lots of free information there.
Anybody that's interested can visit and learn about his work.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm teaching college students at a big public university about mindfulness and about consciousness studies and about how they go about finding meaning in life.
And it's very fulfilling work.
And the generation that's coming up now, you know, there are lots of people who say that this generation is lost.
This generation is sunk in technology, doesn't think enough, is hung up on reality TV and all the rest of it.
Do you have a message for people who think that way, who say that that's the case?
Oh, my goodness.
I have a lot of hope in the current generation.
I think it's oftentimes us baby boomers that are more caught up in reality TV and some of these technological distractions.
I mean, they have grown up as digital natives, as they're called.
I mean, they're used to a digital interconnected world.
I think, though, that they are much more nimble and adaptable about putting together a spirituality that works for them and that draws upon the best of lots of different faith traditions.
I think there's a willingness to see that their own career and their own way of living their life's purpose is probably going to morph many times over the course of a lifetime.
And I'm really hopeful about what they've come to offer the world and the leadership that they're going to give us.
Any more books in the pipeline?
Oh, I guess I've got another one on dreams yet in me.
I've published two about dreams, but I think I'd like to tackle that as a next challenge, sort of the spiritual dimension of dreaming.
Okay.
One last thing to ask you.
I've done two interviews about mindfulness, one on the radio, one on my podcast.
The government here even was very keen on young people to learn mindfulness.
And it's a buzzword now that you read in papers all the time.
I think some journalists write about it, and they don't really know what it is.
How do you define mindfulness?
Well, to me, mindfulness is a capacity of the human mind to stabilize itself and to be able to be present in this moment in a way that has beneficial physical effects, that helps with stress management.
And then once we can stabilize the mind with mindful practice, such as breath attention, then it allows us to open the mind in a deeper kind of meditative tradition where we can tap into creativity and wisdom and resources of understanding and meaning that really allow us to change and transform the world.
But first we have to use mindfulness to learn to quiet a mind that jumps around and that is so easily distracted and is caught up in sort of self-sabotaging thought and emotion patterns.
And the problem is, isn't it, with a life that is crammed, you know, most of us, even those of us who are older than today's in Inverted Commas young generation, you know, our life is crammed with gadgets and gizmos to distract us from all of that.
It's a big task, isn't it, that we all face.
It is.
We have to set aside, though, 5, 10, 15 minutes a day and make it just as important as our meals.
We wouldn't skip lunch, probably.
And in the same way, we need to have an attitude, I'm not going to skip something that gives me my mental and spiritual hygiene and nourishment.
I guess down the years I've worked with a few people who used to say, I'm going to get some me time.
That's what they used to call it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, Mark, listen, thank you very much.
I've really enjoyed this conversation, and thank you for explaining about the life, times, and work of Edgar Casey to me.
I knew a little, but I didn't know clearly, nearly enough, and now I know a lot more.
And thank you very much.
Thank you.
I appreciate being on the show.
And if people want to read about you, do you have your own website?
Yes, it's just my name, markthurston.com.
And it's got a link to the new book.
It's got a place they can leave me a message.
They can put their name on my email list, and I send out free resources occasionally about an article I've published or a video of a lecture I've given.
So it's just M-A-R-Kthurston.com.
Well, good luck in all the work that you do.
And I guess there's a time difference between the two of us.
Have you got a day of teaching ahead of you now?
Oh, it's summer semester.
I'm getting ready for the autumn courses.
Okay.
Well, good luck with your prep.
Thank you very much, Mark.
All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye now.
You've been hearing Mark Thurston, and I will put a link on the website, theunexplained.tv, to his work so that you can see it from there.
We have more great guests in the pipeline through this summer, the back end of it here at The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of the nice things you say.
If you want to get in touch, go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and there you can send me a donation if you'd like to, a guest suggestion, or any thoughts about the show.
Thank you very much for all the communications that you make and for the fact that you enjoy what I do here.
And that's, you know, after 11 years of doing it online, is a marvelous thing.
We've built a worldwide family in a way here.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
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