BOOK ONE - The God Game Cayce’s Mission
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Can the Source be found in the religious and metaphysical portions of Cayce’s material. Perhaps. But I did not search this material looking for "the source", I was looking for the hard scores. As I read the World Affairs Group readings, which contained many of Cayce’s greatest predictions, I found that the readings were occasionally steeped in the archaic style of King James English attended with assorted quotes and allusions to various bible stories. I did not enjoy the prospect of wading through Cayce's personal religion and I preferred to avoid the heavy "bible-speak" sermonizing. But, as in the World Affairs readings, it typically surrounded the most interesting of Cayce’s political and millennial predictions and I really could not avoid it. Metaphors related to the mysticism of the Christ appeared over and over again, usually accompanied with strong moral exhortations. This bible-sounding sermonizing was often long-winded and poetical in a style which would have made any of the old testament prophets proud. As I read Cayce’s bible-sounding verbiage, often wincingly, I slowly came to appreciate that it was not as it seemed. It was easy to project into Cayce's sometimes florid language and see a naive, militant fundamentalism of the old fashioned evangelical-type of preachment offering something along the lines of "THE ONLY salvation of THE ONLY WAY on the apron strings of Jesus Christ, Our Lord, THE ONLY Begotten Son of God, AMEN. Hallelujah". But detailed examination of Cayce's sermonizing shows that the messages lead to a radically different place than this one. It leads to ... well ... since the readings gave it no name, I have given it the name of the "God Game". The God Game is as old as the temples of Egypt, in fact, it is described on their walls as Ma’at. Within a closer European context, it can be described as Deism, and within a North American context it can be thought of as a sort of Jeffersonian Quakerism. Buddhists will think of it as simplified Buddhism with Y’shua standing in for Buddha. Hindu Yogins will recognize it as an application of principles expounded in the Vedas for achieving perfection of God realization. It has been around for so long and has been expressed in so many ways in so many cultures, it must express aspects of the truly universal nature of confronting the Infinite. Here, then, in this chapter is how Cayce describes it. The God Game is short on specific dogmas, long on the balance of mutuality and respect for all of life. Like Egypt’s Ma’at, the essence of the God Game is living a life which achieves perfect balance, perfect justness, by applying principles of truth which respect and sustain the rightful place of all life. The measure of the God Game is the "Golden Rule", doing in all affairs as one wants done to one’s own self. Those who undertake the God Game are consciousness of the spiritual realities and the morality of choices. They employ their consciousness and choices for the preservation, expression, and expansion of free will. For such people, how to seek personal and collective fulfillment within a framework of mutual respect are the fundamental aspects of all issues, predictions, and prognostications. Such seeking IS history. In the world view of the God Game, the workings of the political-economic world are primarily fueled by how humanity, rightly or wrongly, perceives it relationship to the cosmos and God. The central tenet of the God Game is the absolute necessity to allow and assist humanity in coming to its own free will concept of humanness, unity, and God without the imposition of force, dogma, creed, manipulation, repression, denial, or force. The main dynamic of human history is, on the one hand, the sincere effort to work constructively towards this state of the ideal, and on the other hand, the destructive despoiling of this work by those who attempt to narrowly delimit human aspirations and manipulate the minds and behaviors of other human beings to create or maintain disparity of power, wealth, knowledge, and prestige. The objective criterion for the God Game might best be described by an ancient Egyptian word, "Ma'at", which is often translated as truth, justice, and order. A fuller meaning, within Egyptian metaphysics, includes the achievement of balance among the polarities of the world in accordance with the design or intent of the gods of heaven. English has no equivalent term, but the essence of the idea has been long conveyed through the hermetic notion "as above, so below". Islamics think of it as "God’s will". In Cayce’s God Game, the Golden Rule is the sure road to Ma'at. The readings maintained that the conflict (turmoil was the pet phrase Cayce used) of the world is largely the result of power grabs by people whose practices of discrimination, repression, and denial resulted in inequality and denial of free choice and human expression. The root of all disorder and dysfunction could be found in the karmic responses to these power relationships. The solutions are always to found in applying the Golden Rule to create accommodations to rebalance relationships which respect diversity and restore equity, not repress it. In the God Game, as one becomes conscious of working toward the ideal of perfection with the Golden Rule, one is lead inevitably towards a spiritualized consciousness of the Creative Forces and God. The incorporation of this consciousness into one's activity makes one a part of the God Consciousness, which is consciousness of unity with all things. The power, the juice, the motive energy behind this is love. This is not an idea, not an allegory, it is a statement of simple reality. Love powers the God Game, giving God Consciousness literal force in the world of humans, as fundamental as gravity and electrons. As one becomes conscious of becoming more and more conscious of God and the motive power of love in building God Consciousness, one enters directly onto a spiritual path of development which leads to a more fuller realization of being a manifestation of God. When this manifestation has reached sufficient strength for consistent application through all of one’s affairs, one becomes Christ, which means, simply, a child of God. At the threshold of finding out the nature of the God Consciousness or the Christ within, one makes contact with the spiritual plane. Guides, guidance, meditation, prayer, and even the so-called Spirits of the dead become operational in one’s life, whether one is fully aware of it or not. All of this becomes part of the basis for evolving the strength and consistency for being fully realized as a child of God. When one becomes a fully realized and formed as a child of God, as Christ, one graduates into immortality, even physical immortality. All progress in the world was really all about expanding the critical mass of free will God Consciousness and manifest love to encompass all of humanity. With this critical mass, humans could achieve anything constructive which they found in alignment or attunement with these spiritual principles. Nothing else of human ego mattered, really. For Christians, Cayce claimed, Y'shua is the role model for emulating the God Consciousness. He was the first among humans to fully realize it and achieve physical immortality. Each individual must have hisher own direct free will relationship with Y’shua within hisher own framework of understanding, ideas, words, etc. The rest of it, the churches, the clap traps of religious ideology, the isms and schisms as Cayce called them, were sometimes worse than irrelevant, sometimes they WERE the dark side of dominance, manipulation, conquest, and reactive destruction which has plagued and hindered the world. Cayce added one other fundamental factor into the equation: the inevitable cosmic cycles. His observations in the readings pointed to how the annual planetary cycles influence the orientations and expressions of human activity. Most of the time, he claimed, they hinder human affairs very little, but planetary cosmic cycles form nearly 100% of the inclinations of people who decide things primarily with their emotions, typically those with little education and awareness of the world, and as much as 20% of the inclinations of educated, aware people who are capable of making intellectual decisions. Accordingly, even the patterns of entire human cultures are influenced through time by the flow of the planetary cycles and human cultures need to account for this influence. Though stressing the importance of the cosmic cycles, Cayce made a major point of distancing himself from any sort of occult astrological determinism in human affairs. He stressed the ability of free will to easily overcome any deterministic material factors. In fact, he personally may have over-stressed the point so strongly, to avoid being painted as an astrologer or purveyor of black arts, that he may have created an on-going source of confusion for his students. Many of Cayce’s students have over-generalized certain of the ideas of the God Game to assert that human will, in alignment with God Consciousness, can effect any change at all, even over-ride the cosmic material cycles and create direct physical change in the mechanics of the Earth. In other words, some would have us believe that human will can make earthquakes and catastrophes go away, including Cayce's dire pole shift prediction. Don’t like mass destruction? No problem. Act nicely and think it away. There, it’s all better now. Even some leaders of A.R.E. have chosen to over-generalize the power of human will and proclaim that the coming pole shift is something we can avoid somehow. But thank God they are wrong about the power of human will to directly cancel out the results of the forces of gravity. If true, if humans could simply will into existence what they think is a nice idea, well meaning humans would quickly dissolve this planet into the incoherence of cosmic dust as conflicting visions of its future tugged it from a million directions from a billion competing wills. In fact, Cayce never said that that human will was an absolute which could over-ride the cosmic cycles. In fact, Cayce was absolutely deterministic about the material consequences of the grinding of the cosmic cycles. In several points of fact, his entire story of the World Epic is about the inevitability of the change in the earth cycle which shifts the location of the axis of the Earth, by the "overflowing of the land" as he quaintly but accurately put it. Cayce never named this cycle, but the Egyptians, who had some of the memories of Atlantis, did. They named it the Benu Cycle, and the Hellenics called it the Phoenix Cycle. Cayce was emphatic several times that "when the earth must change again" it will definitely do so. The only issue is, "how hast thou prepared". In essence, it would seem that HOW the God Game is conducted by humans to shape human affairs is relativistic through and through. But where the vast, never-ending grinding of the cycles of the cosmic mill is encountered, the Phoenix absolutely forms the beginning and the end of the Game. It is ... the essence of the game. Other than the inevitable cosmic cycles, the God Game is not delimited by blind historical forces. Were humanity truly subject to blind forces day by day, the job of power brokers and clairvoyants would be much easier. They could determine and predict everything very neatly by simply tuning into the blind powers and manipulating them. Cayce claimed that the opposite was true. Free will made prediction about humans imprecise and in some ways impossible. Prophecy mainly amounted to reading the current intent of human consciousness, individually or collectively. But since humans could change their minds, and often did, the best laid plans and psychic predictions could and sometimes did come to naught. For the broad stream of history, Cayce seemed to imply that mass consciousness, though highly reactive to certain things, was generally slow and ponderous with vast inertia. Thus, some outcomes of human intent could be foreseen for long periods of time, but only as tendencies. And since few humans have long range plans, these tendencies get pretty vague the further into the future one looks. Cayce always preached that all human events (not speaking here of Earth events), no matter how much inertia behind them, could be altered to have favorable outcomes rather than destructive ones. Thus it behooved everyone, including himself, to keep the ideal outcome in mind and work towards it. This Cayce did in the type of predictions he choose to make and the way in which he gave them. Many of his predictions are discretely circumscribed, oriented towards reinforcing positive tendencies even in the midst of dire circumstances. Many of his most penetrating predictions of dire outcomes are stated obliquely in the midst of great sermonizing about loving one's neighbor. It is obvious Cayce strove mightily, sometimes very awkwardly, to avoid feeding the flames of reactive, negative behavior. Cayce's sermon and the underlying metaphysics of the God Game can be drawn from passages from any number of readings as he repeated it endlessly in bit and pieces. His sermonizing often took the form of spontaneously inserted exhortations to consider the implications of actions on others, whether it served to ennoble others as well as self, whether it was constructive and offered betterment, or whether it was merely driven by greed or judgement. Sometimes it took the form of bible-sounding aphorisms, such as "love thy neighbor as thyself", sometimes it was more matter of factly stated, to have as much regard for others as for oneself. Quite often he would speak of God, but not in the majority of cases. Doubtless, some of the variation in Cayce’s style reflected his tailoring of the principles of the God Game to suit the consciousness and interests of the person to whom he was speaking. Cayce's sermons were quite limited in scope and thus generally universal in their validity and application. He consistently restated the same themes in every way possible: equality, mutual care, respect, love, to see and treat all races and classes the same as you would your own family. He militantly insisted that most distinctions and discriminations which people visit on each other were stupid, bound to produce problems, and, if carried too far, as in the division between capital and labor, would eventually destroy the entire society. Probably the best overall summary of the God Game and the sermons it gave rise to is provided in the 29 readings of the 3976 series. This series was expressly created to apply a metaphysical level of analysis to "Present World Conditions" and to suggest solutions to the world’s problems based on the principles of the God Game. These readings tend to provide the most complete and compact forms of Cayce's God Game. Consequently, most of the selections I have taken to summarize the God Game are from this series. In the 3976 series, we can clearly see that Cayce's moral preachments were based on a model in which prophecy and the idea of karma merge. Some statements which seem like predictions are not clairvoyant as such, they are statements of the consequences of the principles of mass reactions working themselves out, i.e. playing out the God Game. Spiritual principles, such as love, hate, and consciousness, are the causal agents in humanity's collective universe. The expression of these principles, and especially, HOW these principles are expressed, create the mechanisms of action, reaction, and thus the shape and flow of history. The purpose of the counseling and predictions of his readings was to provide a sense about the tendencies of the principles at work. To balance them out, Cayce's advice often took the form of warnings, fulminations and exhortations to peacefully create an entirely different attitude and hence behavior, i.e. to achieve a better Ma’at (personal and collective balance of justness) to directly alter the reactions and historical outcomes. The prophecy was a warning, a declaration not of what will come to pass, but of what IS, along with suggestions about how to deal with its implications as they appear the next day and there after. Cayce found the root of the human dilemma in humanity’s quest for dominance, power, and control over others. In these passages, Cayce is nearly at his poetical best:
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06/23/40 3976-025 /7-9 This next passage is easy to misunderstand:
06/20/38 3976-18 /16 Such talk easily puts off people such as myself. Cayce is simply stating that the ideal is equality under the concept of God, by what ever name and practice, and the rigorous application of providing as much respect and love for others and their needs as one does for one's own desires and interests. By this means, the "Ma’at", the balance in the world, works for all. The "wrath of the Lord" in this passage is Cayce’s florid shorthand for the turmoil and destruction created by those "with nothing left to loose". A Lesson On The Individual Solution These passages define very well the essence of Cayce's militant Christianity. The answer in its starkest simplicity is, don't play the power game, play the God Game.
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6/13/39 3976-23 /15 Absolute Respect For Diversity:
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6/13/39 3976-23 /3 One of the finest metaphysical lessons in the Cayce/Davis Collection was given not to a group but as part of a very long life reading for a woman in her fifties. Though her background was Presbyterian, one of xianity’s driest forms, she expressed a desire for orientation to new religious thought. Cayce delivered a very lucid, very clear expression of the hermetic fundamentals of deism and the path of development which leads to the "Ma’at" of God.
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08/15/33 390-2 /32 If one pays attention, one will find these three, spirit, mind, and body, used over and over again to define the architecture of Cayce’s God Game and his form of Gnostic Christianity. They will also be found to define the architecture of the hermetic cosmology, even to today as will be found in the Mystery Schools. To supplement this fine introduction to "Ma’at", the following passages were drawn from a variety of readings:
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10/02/32 262-29 /8 The Christianity In The Readings Wading through the luxuriant rhetorical flourishes of Cayce's preachments, which sometimes seem to repeat endlessly, is well worthwhile. Occasionally one finds the one-liner which puts it all into perspective and truly connects the rhetoric into the larger perspective. With this one, made at very nearly the end of Cayce’s career, we get to the essence of the metaphysical base for the Christianity in the readings:
05/14/41 5749-014 /23 The Gnostic movements, of which the Essenes were a Jewish version, preceded Y’shua’s ministry by at least a hundred years. Some of these groups became the earliest proponents of Y’shua’s ministry and flourished in Hellenic and Egyptian communities. They built the first churches, become increasingly widespread, and generated the first documents of the Christian movement. They taught doctrines of reincarnation, practiced various occult arts for spiritual development, and encouraged communication with the spirit plane. When Constantine, in one of the ten worst moments of human history, was talked into taking over, consolidating, and controlling Christianity from Rome, a faction of Roman bigots set in motion the creation of what I call the "Holy Roman Fascist Xian Imperium". Within 80 years they had succeeded in systematically destroying, butchering, and burning all manifestations of the Gnostic movements which were not under the direct control of the Emperor or the bureaucracy they set up under "bishops". Since most of the Gnostics would not adhere to the narrowly defined set of official beliefs imposed by the Roman faction, most of them were driven underground or murdered. In Egypt alone, several hundred thousand Gnostic Christians were murdered, amply fulfilling one of Thothermes’ prophecies. Throughout the Empire, as much of the literature of the past as could be found was burned. After this consolidation by the Holy Roman Fascist Xian Imperium, the "Dark Ages" in Europe are said to have begun, a period in which there is very little record of anything... Perhaps this sheds a little light on the authorship of the Dark Ages. The chief product of the Holy Roman Fascist Xian Imperium was the Imperial "Book", which today is quaintly called the Holy Bible. Upon the authority of this document, the Holy Roman Fascist Xian Imperium pretended to control of an idealized World State and succeeded in maintaining a reign of intellectual terror for nearly 1500 years. This reign of terror was so successful, the xian world lives still within its long, dark shadows. We have inherited what little survived of the ancient wisdom and overt hermetic practices and teachings from the Gnostic groups who were forced underground. Their teachings have come down to us as the "occult" and as the literature of the secret societies (secret to keep them out of the hands of the Holy Roman Imperium). Here is how the readings define Christianity:
05/26/38 1567 /13-14 Notice the threefold definition of the classic hermetic formula which underpins the initiatory rites of the secret societies:
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09/18/32 262-028 /12 ...take a deep breath...
09/18/32 262-028 /12 ...take another deep breath...
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09/08/35 0262-088 /4 Christ means a certain kind of consciousness, which includes a consciousness of God, whom Cayce describes in these and other passages as the Creative Forces, Mother-God, Father, He. This consciousness, Cayce says in an unusual statement, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, i.e., it takes nothing from God to be conscious of being one with God.
06/23/40 3976-025 /26 This is about 180 degrees from the doctrines of the xian cults who conceive of themselves ruled literally by THE ONLY Son the God. With this one phrase, Y'shua is a seeker who attained, preaching the concept of unity within the concept of God, which attainment he called Christ, and what Cayce and many others have called Christ Consciousness. But is this the rub?
06/23/40 3976-025 /27 Which is precisely the point of the issue between each and every religion, is it not? Such a statement is a Rorschach Test. Let’s see if you passed or flunked. The question is, who is HE? God? Y'shua?, Christ? Buddha? Krishna? The Great Spirit? Brahmin? Amen? YHVH? The closest referent to He in the text is God... Sounds pretty evangelical in the holy-roller mode, does it not? Given the type of rhetoric Cayce used in his sermons, xians would want to answer, Jesus. But can they within the structure of their own dogma? Jesus is worthy of xian worship and exclusivity ONLY because he is the only begotten SON OF GOD. Within Cayce’s God Game, Y’shua is the same as you or I. And only you can save yourself. So think again. Within the context of this reading, especially the preceding paragraph quoted above, "He" = the realization and assertion of being one with God. Y’shua Christ = a man + realization of being one with God. That is it! There is the light! There is the truth: the realization of being one with God. There is no other way, which the Vedas have been teaching for several millennia now. The readings focus on Y’shua as a role model which can be emulated and realized by whomever would follow, which can be followed even to the attainment of physical immortality. The path is meditation and attunement to the spiritual realities, which are real energies which create real results. The Y'shua of Cayce comes down more like a Rishi of the Vedas:
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09/08/35 0262-088 /5 In other words, use material practices (technology) to become one with God by becoming conscious of that which connects on the spiritual plane directly to God. So far, other than the use of the word Christ and God, this formulation is indistinguishable from the Vedic traditions of the Hindus and Buddhists. Or, every shamanistic practice the planet has ever known as well as the Egyptian Book of Immortality, which was originally designed to be a manual of the path.
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9/8/35 262-88 /12 Without doubt, Cayce's readings substantially redefine xianity by giving it a context of personal development and evolution which is strongly paralleled in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and conveyed in various symbolic and ritual manners in the secret societies. Here is one last clue to an even deeper connection to the old Gnostic past which probably goes back even further to the inner circles of the Egyptian mysteries:
09/18/32 262-028 /18 It is perfectly obvious, at least to any student of the Vedas by the name of Michael who happens to know a little bit about the Book of Immortality, that the origin of "Michael" is even older than the Hebrews. Let me share a speculation, which shows just how far back I think all of this really goes. Michael is an old Hebrew name which is said to mean "the word of god". We know the Hebrew traditions, by virtue of spending a few hundred years in Egypt and being solidified by an Egyptian Amen-Ra High Priest by the name of Moses, are saturated with connections to an ancient Egyptian context. Here is a key which connects the three Hebrew phrases in Michael with two of the most important concepts in the Egyptian Book of Immortality: Mi = Maati – perfection of balance (will ruled by love) in the heart (chakra) cha = Kha – spirit released rising to the heavens el = El – to the face of God According to the ancient Egyptians, the aspiring soul, whom the Egyptians ritualized as Horus, must pass judgment in the Hall of Ma’at before its spirit Kha can be uplifted by the divine concurrence of Ma’at to become conscious of its Father El, whom the Egyptians called Wasir (Hellenic: Osiris). Hence, Michael, Lord of the Way. Given the various comments and pointers in the readings, and the encouragement which the readings gave to explore mystical symbolism and hermetic or occult topics, there was obviously interest, like Lammers’, in finding a key determinant which could unify a vast system of thought.
01/15/32 3976-008 /19 It would seem that Cayce’s answer was absolute in its rejection of a religious system of unified ideas. No reading ever suggested any architecture. These passages are some of the key planks which have shaped the Association of Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) to carry out the work of sustaining Cayce’s readings for scientific and spiritual purposes:
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10/25/37 3976-017 /11 (Q) Are there special groups with which I should become affiliated, in doing the work that God is urging His people to do now, impersonally? (C) Rather as indicated, ...Magnify those things that are the virtues in all, minimizing the faults that are there. Not as a member of a group. ...rather than as a member of a group be a helpmeet to ALL groups!...clubs of every nature. Arouse them to THEIR abilities; by writing as well as speaking. For the entity has the abilities in these directions, as has been indicated. 08/13/41 1152-011 /31-36
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