Synchronicity as Spiritual Guidance

Mark Thurston

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Chapter 3

The twentieth century has seen many individuals famed for their skill at providing guidance. Religious figures, psychologists and counselors, newspaper advice columnists, and clairvoyants. Probably none has done more to advance our understanding of guidance from a spiritual perspective than has Edgar Cayce, Christian mystic, holistic healing guide, and spiritual growth advisor to thousands.

The organization that he founded in 1931—the Association for Research and Enlightenment—has always been a place where people came looking for spiritual guidance. When Edgar Cayce was alive to give his guidance-laden discourses, people wrote and people came to Virginia Beach looking for direction from this man on a remarkable array of problems: health concerns, career crises, problems with relationships, financial disasters, questions about the meaning of life. And since Edgar Cayce’s death in 1945, the A.R.E. has continued to focus on spiritual guidance, now by teaching people the tools by which they can begin to get their own answers from within.

The methodology is based on a wonderful promise found in the Cayce teachings about spiritual guidance. More important than any technique we can learn and practice is a promise about guidance: We can make contact directly with God.

Cayce was asked by one inquirer, "What is the highest possible psychic realization?" His answer emphasized the capacity we have to make an immediate and personal connection with our Creator: That God will speak directly with each one of us. We can make contact with the very highest source, for any kind of problem we may have. Spiritual guidance is available to everyone.

What is meant by "spiritual guidance"? One way is to see it as a special quality of information that comes to help us. It’s information that doesn’t rest upon a materialistic understanding of life. Spiritual guidance never denies that we are part of the material world, but it comes from a source that is beyond just a material perspective of life. Another way of saying this is that spiritual guidance comes from the invisible side of life, from the unseen side of life.

But perhaps the most important definition that the Cayce readings gave of spiritual guidance is "information that comes to help us and which engages our own spirit." That’s what makes it spiritual guidance. It’s not so much a matter of where it comes from, but how it engages us. It touches us at the level of our ideals and our values and our motives. And that’s why it’s spiritual guidance.

Personal ideals will be a center point of all the methods of spiritual guidance to be explored in this book, including synchronicity. That is to say, we obtain, evaluate, and act on guidance best if we’ve identified a core value that we aspire to. The following question-and-answer exchange between a seeker and Cayce illustrates the point of just how important ideals are to the guidance process. In this instance, the purported source of guidance was rather unusual—an invisible "spirit guide"—but the principle Cayce emphasized was universally applicable. No matter what the apparent source of our guidance, the content of the guiding message had better resonate to our own core value, our own ideal.

(Q) Is Abdulla, the guide that I have, a worthy one to work with?

(A) Only when such influences are kept in accord with your own ideal are they worthy; but keep thine own ideal! For each soul must answer to self and the consciousness within! 1387-1

Cayce didn’t deny that some spiritual being might be helping her from the invisible side of life. But he brought her attention back to the role her own ideals and motives play in any effective decision making. That advice is applicable to all of us who are interested in spiritual guidance, not just someone who believes he or she has a spirit guide. Whether we’re working with meditation guidance or dream guidance or professional psychics or synchronistic signs or inspirational writing—any form of spiritual guidance always comes back to the necessary foundation of a personal spiritual ideal, a topic to be explored more deeply in chapter 5.

Personal Reflections on Spiritual Guidance

As I was in the process of developing workshop materials on spiritual guidance a number of years ago, I took a morning walk with my wife, Mary, and as we were walking I told her what I was doing that day. We began to talk about times in our marriage and our lives together when we felt that we had been guided spiritually. I asked her to try to identify with me what some of the characteristics of spiritual guidance had been.

Our short list may not be identical to the list of the characteristics someone else or some other couple might experience. But consider these features that she and I noted. Do they strike a chord of truth for you as well?

We saw that when spiritual guidance had come to us it always seemed to engage some way of understanding a problem that had not occurred to us yet at a conscious level. It’s as if some source of knowledge was awakening, something that we experienced as wiser than our conscious rational intellects.

A second characteristic is related to the first. Spiritual guidance which has been accurate and reliable has always seemed to demand of us a little more than our conscious personality selves might have been willing to do. It was always a little bit of a soul stretch for us to follow that spiritual guidance.

A third and final characteristic we identified was the way in which signs or synchronistic events had often come up to reinforce or remind us of the appropriateness of the guidance we felt that we had received. Not only was it an inner prompting; there were usually outer signs also to confirm that we were on the right track.

I sometimes like to take the phrase "spiritual guidance" and adapt it a little bit, asking people to consider a slightly different phrase: the spirit of guidance. What would it mean to approach a problem in your life in the spirit of guidance? To me this has something to do with openness and a willingness to be shown a better way.

My own professional training is in psychology, and, in counseling people, I find that there are individuals who come with this spirit of guidance fully in place. There are others, however, who come seemingly looking for help but who don’t come in that spirit, who aren’t ready to hear a better answer—from me or from themselves. Think about your own life. If you have a difficulty or problem, you might turn to the I Ching, or dreams, or a professional intuitive, or meditation, or any of the other forms of spiritual guidance. Can you approach the process in the spirit of guidance, with an openness and a willingness to put aside your preconceptions and to be open to a new way of seeing that issue? That’s sometimes easier said than done.

Oftentimes we are attached to the problem, and it’s hard for us to imagine not having that problem in our lives anymore. The spirit of guidance requires of us a willingness to let go of the past and to let go of our difficulties and our problems. And it also means letting go of our prejudices and our biases and our preconceived notions of how that problem is going to be resolved.

The spirit of guidance is really rather paradoxical. It asks us to be humble on the one hand and yet also to have confidence—that there is a source of wisdom within and without. In the same bipolar fashion, it asks us to be receptive but also then to be willing to be active and apply the guidance that comes. So it’s both humility with confidence and also receptivity with a readiness to act.

There are several other key ideas in the Cayce teachings about spiritual guidance—principles that provide a context or a background before we get into the methods of spiritual guidance. Cayce always emphasizes a need for balance between logic and intuition. As we come into the "house of spiritual guidance," figuratively speaking, we’re not going to "check at the door" our logic and analytical abilities. We’re going to need to be able to make use of our analysis skills along with our intuitive capacity to tune in to the invisible side of life. It’s always this balance of working with both sides of the brain, so to speak.

Another key idea from Cayce’s philosophy about guidance is just how accessible inner wisdom really is. In the so-called "work readings"—intuitive discourses that Edgar Cayce gave about the purposes and operation of his organization, the A.R.E.—he describes his own work in a unique way. It’s a matter of teaching other people about the accessibility of this kind of information for all of us: " . . . the simplicity of the ability of individuals to apply that as may be obtained from their own subconscious self . . . " (254-46)

A final point to set a foundation about spiritual guidance is the freedom of will. Even when we’ve noticed a synchronistic sign, gotten an insightful dream, received an informative psychic reading, or tapped into meditative wisdom, we still have free will. We still have to use conscious judgment, and we have to recognize that we have a freedom of choice about how we’ll go about applying that information. The importance of this faculty of the soul called free will cannot be emphasized too much.

On one occasion when he addressed the topic of how spiritual guidance works, Cayce even estimated the degree to which outward factors influence the course of our lives versus the influence coming from our own free will. In this case he was analyzing the effect measured by methods such as palmistry, astrology, and other types of esoteric indications of guidance. But I believe this principle relates to all forms of guidance that we can turn to.

(Q) What value is there in palmistry? To what extent may it be relied upon?

(A) As we have given in regard to any and every omen, it is an indication—yes. As to whether or not it will come to pass depends upon what the body, the mind of such an one does about that it knows in relationship to itself. It may be depended upon, then, about twenty percent as being absolute—and about eighty percent "chance" or what a body does with its opportunities. 416-2

Those last few words in the answer—"what a body does with its opportunities"—was his way of referring to free will. According to this teaching, the signs andindications that we can get from an astrology chart that offers guidance, or from an I Ching hexagram interpretation, or even a dream coming from within ourselves, still allow 80 percent of the influence to come from our free will. The 20 percent that can be measured or indicated by guidance tools is certainly significant, but these influences don’t run our lives, unless we surrender our free will and drift with the flow of events.

A Practical Program for Spiritual Guidance

In the numerous case histories where Cayce offered spiritual counsel, he always emphasized the individual’s capacity to get his or her own guidance in the future. He didn’t want people to become dependent on him. And in many of those discourses, he presented a multiple-step process for making a decision under the influence of spiritual guidance. It’s an eight-step formula that is straightforward and easy to follow.

1. The first step is to clarify your spiritual ideal. Here’s where purposes and motives play a role. It has already been emphasized just how important that is. In chapter 5 you’ll find details about how to set (or reset) for yourself a core value or a spiritual ideal.

2. Next is to formulate carefully your question. Write it down. We may tend to gloss over this one and much too quickly assume we’ve clarified what we’re looking for. It’s important to articulate precisely what it is you want to know. Too easily one’s question becomes something vague, such as, "What do I do with this problem relationship?" or "What can I do about my career?" Instead, it’s important to articulate specifically what it is you want to know. "Should I start expressing the anger I’ve been feeling in my relationship with Tom?" Or, "Is now the time to start going to night school in childhood education so that I can be ready for a career switch in two years?" Carefully word your question. It can be formulated so that the answer must be a yes or no; and, in fact, Cayce often recommended that it be done that way. But many people get very good results by just working with open-ended questions, too.

3. Once you have your question written down, step three is to consider consciously all the facts that you have available. Collect the information that’s available to you with your conscious senses and your rational mind. This is where you do your homework before looking for spiritual guidance.

4. Collecting all the facts might take ten minutes or ten weeks, depending on the question. Then you’re ready to move on. Arrive at a tentative or preliminary conscious decision: a yes or no. Or, if it’s more of an open-ended question, what you now think would be the best answer. Then measure that preliminary decision against your ideal: Could you stay in keeping with your spiritual ideal and act on what you have decided? If you couldn’t, you need to go back and redo these first four steps.

5. Assuming you could potentially act on your preliminary decision and still be in harmony with your core value (your ideal), then you’re ready to move on to step five, seeking guidance—both inner guidance and outer guidance. In this book we’ll explore methods such as synchronicity and other approaches by which spiritual direction can come. Step five is where you’d especially want to be alert for synchronistic signs or where you’d employ the guidance tools to be outlined later.

6. Once you’ve made use of two, three, or even more of these guidance modalities, then you’re ready to assemble the information and insights that you’ve received. This comparative analysis will work best if you’ve been keeping a journal record of your results with the various approaches to guidance.

Evaluate each kind of guidance you’ve received. Rate its feeling of reliability. Look for patterns or repeated themes. What does the guidance seem to indicate?

7. Having made your evaluation of the different elements of guidance, now it’s time to make a decision. That choice will perhaps reaffirm your tentative decision from step four. Maybe it will be only a slight refinement. Sometimes the guidance will have pointed in an entirely new direction. Here’s where you make your guided decision.

Then, before moving on, subject your decision to a comparison with your spiritual ideal. Could you act on this decision and still be in harmony with your core value? If the answer is yes, proceed. But if something doesn’t feel right and would require you to compromise your standards, then go back to step five.

Once again, as you evaluate the guidance and as you move toward a guided decision, you need always to measure what you’ve received against your spiritual ideal.

8. When you feel as though you’ve made a guided decision you could act upon, then it’s necessary to go out and apply it. Too often people work with the first seven steps, and they are amazed at what specific guidance they can get. Then they never get on with acting on it! They’re fascinated with how well the first seven steps work, but they fail to put the decision into motion with actions.

But even those who move on and try to apply the guided decision need to remember another point: It’s very important to continue to stay open to further guidance. Stay on guard against any tendency to act like a bull in a china shop who stubbornly charges ahead—"Come hell or high water I’ve got my guidance, I’m going to make it happen."

Instead, we need to recognize that sometimes the guidance comes to us incrementally. At first it points us in the right direction. And as we begin to apply the first-stage guidance, more can come to us, refining the course of action. It’s a continual recycling through these steps—particularly for some of the deeper problems and issues that we have in our lives.

Consider this analogy. Suppose you were in Denver, interested in driving your car to Virginia Beach, Virginia. If I were asked to be a source of guidance for your trip, I might talk to you on the phone as you got ready to leave, saying, "Get on Interstate 70 headed east and call me again when you reach the Mississippi River in St. Louis." The first experience of guidance hasn’t given you the entire answer, but it has pointed you in the right direction and given you a step to apply.

After driving for a day or two, you call and ask for more help. This time I instruct you to get over onto Interstate 64 headed east and travel until you get to the Virginia state line. After another day or two of following my guidance, you reach the prescribed point where it’s time for more instruction. Once again we talk on the phone, and this time I give you the directions to move across the state and eventually end up in Virginia Beach.

Admittedly, in this analogy one could wonder, why not give the driver all the directions right at the start? They could be carefully written down and followed all the way to the destination. But the experience of many people has shown that more often than not the guiding spirit within us doesn’t work that way. Maybe our capacity to remember all the details is limited. Perhaps we might get discouraged or overwhelmed if all the aspects of a solution were presented at once. Or maybe it’s simply because we’re more likely to act on guidance when it comes to us incrementally.

An Example of the

Eight-Step Guidance Process

Here’s an illustration of working with these steps for guidance, a personal story. It concerns an important decision that I made as a young adult that resulted in my starting a career working directly with the Cayce material and the organization Edgar Cayce founded, the A.R.E.

Through my college years I was involved in Search for God study groups in the two cities where I went to college in Texas. These groups—usually with six to twelve members who meet weekly—were pioneered by Cayce and his supporters in the 1930s. Since then, they have been started in towns and cities all over the world. The purpose of such a group is positive character development and soul growth for each of its members.

As I was nearing graduation from college in the spring of 1972, I realized I faced a decision. I had a clear spiritual ideal for my life—"Christ’s loving service"—but I began to recognize that I had an important decision to make. How was I going to start putting that ideal into practice? What was I going to do next, upon graduation? The members of my study group, all of whom were fellow college students, encouraged me to work with the guidance and decision-making sequence that is found in the Cayce material.

I literally wrote out my question: What am I going to do upon graduation? Then I spent a lot of time collecting facts about possibilities for what I could do. And as I collected facts, it seemed as if it really boiled down to three different options. One was to go on to graduate school. Another was to look for a job—that is, to start working right away. And a third option was to travel around the country and "find myself," as people of my generation called it back then. (I have since discovered, as I travel frequently with my job, that more often than not I "lose myself" in hotels and airplanes and don’t know where I am some mornings when I wake up. But twenty-five years ago that option seemed very glamorous to consider!)

Having collected information and facts about all these options, I finally arrived at a preliminary conscious decision: I was going to look for a job and try to work for a while. The only place I knew of that I would be very enthused about working was at the A.R.E. in Virginia Beach. I had previously visited this center of the Cayce work and had attended some conferences. I’d met many of the leaders of the organization, and I thought I’d risk making a move and hope for a job.

With that as my preliminary decision, I went to the next Search for God study group meeting and told my fellow members about my provisional decision. They encouraged me now to start looking for inner and outer guidance. I prayed, I meditated, and I watched for signs. And before too long I had a very dramatic dream that seemed to speak directly to my question.

In my dream I was sitting at a table, and right across the table from me was Edgar Cayce’s grandson, Charles Thomas Cayce, whom I had met at conferences and gotten to know a little bit. In the dream we were talking about his needs at A.R.E. and how he was on the verge of hiring someone to work with him.

I quickly replied, "Oh, hire me!" I was very enthusiastic and ready to promote myself as his assistant or work with him in some way.

We talked about this in the dream, and the last thing I can remember him saying was that he really had somebody else in mind, and he named another individual I knew. He wasn’t going to hire me; he was going to hire this other person, and I could just forget it.

When I awakened from that dream, I was really discouraged but, at the same time, quite impressed with how specific dream guidance could be. I went back to my study group the next Wednesday night and told them this dream, and they all agreed, the process works. "It wasn’t what you were hoping to hear," they told me, "but look at the guidance and how specific it was."

Based on that dream, I began to set in motion working on one of the other options, and I sincerely began to act on what I thought was authentic guidance. About eight or nine days later I had a second dream. In the second dream I was walking down a sidewalk and I saw up ahead, walking toward me, Charles Thomas Cayce again. Not knowing that I was dreaming, I hollered out to him, "Charles Thomas, hi! I had a dream about you the other night."

He called back to me, "Oh, hi—I remember that dream." And as he approached me, he came right up to me and continued, "But you forgot the second half of the dream."

"What do you mean?" I replied. "Tell me the rest of the dream."

He went on to explain, "Well, when I told you that you couldn’t have the job, you didn’t like my answer. And you went out and got a file that documented everything you’ve been doing for the last five years. I read it and was so impressed that I changed my mind. I said you could have the job!"

And so, in this second dream, I felt wanted and needed. I quickly announced to him, "That’s great! When does the job start?" He replied, "Christmas day, this year."

"Well, what will the job be?" I wondered aloud.

He answered, "Your job title will be ‘in charge of college-age young people who are looking for God.’ " Strange as that may sound now, in the dream it sounded perfectly normal. I then woke up from the dream, obviously very excited. I couldn’t wait for the next Wednesday to roll around so that I could tell my fellow study group members.

At the next meeting we talked about it. We measured the new guidance against my ideal. It seemed like the thing to do was act on it and to move to Virginia, which is exactly what I did in the fall of 1972. It was all I could do to keep from going up and making an appointment with Charles Thomas to tell him this dream saying, "You promised me. Now where is my job?"

But I did not do that, and at first there was no job. He did have some small, miscellaneous tasks that I could do—a project here for three weeks and something else for two weeks. But in early December of 1972 someone decided to leave his staff position to go back to graduate school. I applied for that job and got it. What’s more, the job started New Year’s Day, 1973, and the job title was Youth Activities Coordinator, which is very close to what the dream had predicted. Even more startling, it was within seven days of that Christmas date that the dream had given.

The point of this story is not to convince anyone that there’s a divine purpose behind my having moved to Virginia to work where I am. Rather, the story simply illustrates a process about accurately deciphering guidance when it comes. Probably we all have a certain anxiety about misinterpreting guidance when we receive it. Over and over again I’ve observed a principle in my own life and in the lives of others. In essence that principle says that sincerity of application protects you from misinterpretation if you stay open for more guidance to come. In other words, your first responsibility is to try to apply the best understanding you have of the guidance. But in so doing, you must also keep alert for further direction. Even if you’ve misunderstood the initial guidance, you can get correcting, additional guidance if you’re doing your best to interpret and act on what you’ve already received.

That principle is crucial to keep in mind as you start to work on Cayce’s eight-step guidance procedure for one of your own problems or concerns. It’s a safe, reliable approach if you have a clear, personal ideal and sincerely make efforts to apply what you learn. In the next chapter are details about the specific methods by which some of that guidance may come.

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Chapter 4

Methods of Receiving Spiritual Guidance

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Sincerity of purpose and clarity of need are ultimately the two most important variables to the guidance process. But there are also pragmatic factors, the practical steps one can follow in order to recognize spiritual direction.

This chapter will explore some of the specific techniques that have previously been alluded to. All of the methods described in this chapter could be seen as ways of being alert for synchronicity. Synchronicity is a precept of connectivity between the inner and outer world—a non-causal connecting principle—and we can understand experiences such as intuitive insights from meditation as well as psychic impressions from dreams as expressions of synchronicity touching our lives. We have no proven, cause-and-effect way of explaining these remarkable experiences which often convey profound guidance. And even though we can’t force the issue, we can’t make them happen, we can still invite them, be alert for them, and be carefully attentive when theyarise.

We can use the principle of synchronicity as an umbrella concept for a wide variety of inspiration or even paranormal experiences. That is well within the scope of how a psychiatrist such as Jung or a spiritual philosopher such as Cayce saw the relationship between our inner and outer life. For example, Jung was fascinated with psychic phenomena and saw it as a manifestation of synchronicity. Cayce’s teachings emphasize that the fundamental ordering principles of oneness, relationship and connectivity stand behind any dream, vision, or meditation experience by which our soul nature reveals itself.

Meditative Insight for Guidance

For many people the principal method for receiving guidance is the inspiration that comes during meditation. This is something we can do almost any time during the day, every day. The spiritual philosophy of Edgar Cayce contains frequent references to the way in which meditation can be a tool for guidance.

For example, he was asked by one person: "Is it possible to meditate and obtain needed information?" His answer: "On any subject! whether you are going digging for fishing worms or playing a concerto!" (1861-12) Apparently he meant that everything else fits somewhere between those two extremes in life—from the most down-to-earth pragmatic question to the most sublime problem of creativity. Meditation can be a valuable guidance tool anywhere along that continuum.

Someone else asked a question regarding the development of intuitive faculties with meditation. She wondered how she could best develop her intuitive ability. "By meditation" was Cayce’s terse answer. The question-and-answer sequence continued, "And for what purpose should she use it?" Here Cayce emphasized that the intuitive, problem-solving skills that awaken with meditation should always be used in service to other people. "In developing herself and aiding others" was his exact answer. (803-1)

One kind of insight or inspiration that might come in meditation presents an interesting problem: situations in which you feel as if you are really getting guidance for someone else. When Cayce was asked what to do in such an instance, his advice was, "Be willing to share, but never force the issue." In other words, make an effort to communicate the information that may be for or about someone else, but never forget that you may have been wrong (i.e., it may really have nothing to do with that person). Don’t force the issue. For example, upon hearing the account of your purported guidance, if the other person indicates an unwillingness to consider the accuracy of what you’ve said, then just drop the matter. "Never force the issue"—that’s always a good rule of thumb.

One secret to meditating for guidance is to remember that meditation is a receptive state, a quieting of the conscious mind. It’s an effort to put your attention on a focal point related to your spiritual ideal. Meditation is amatter of shifting your sense of identity from your familiar personality self (i.e., your everyday concerns and agenda) to your spiritual self or individuality. It’s a matter of laying aside the personality self and awakening the individuality self.

The word or the phrase that you’ve chosen for your spiritual ideal could be a focal point for your attention during meditation. Or you could pick a favorite biblical verse, a positive affirmation, or mantra that’s consistent with your spiritual ideal. It takes some practice keeping your attention single-mindedly on your chosen word or sentence. But with consistent, repeated efforts you’ll learn how to begin to quiet down the agenda and the chattering of your conscious personality self. You’ll learn to begin to be receptive and open to your higher mind and its guidance. In one of Cayce’s most important teachings about meditation, he emphasizes that even in thirty to sixty seconds one can begin to make a reliable connection with the inner self. Even in half a minute—you can begin to make an attunement to the spirit within.

Let’s consider more carefully how this would work in terms of getting guidance. Do not meditate upon the problem or the question itself. Instead, meditate first on your spiritual ideal or on your affirmation to get yourself connected to your wiser and more enlightened individuality. It may take thirty seconds, sixty seconds, five minutes, or half an hour.

At the end of this quiet time of focused attention, it’s a good idea to have healing prayer for others and for world peace. And then at the end of your meditation time you would call to mind the question or the problem that you formulated earlier in the eight-step guidance process.

Pose the question inwardly, be silent, and listen for a response. What might you expect to receive? Here are several possibilities:

1. You may literally hear a still, small voice that comes to you as words—not words that other people in the room would hear if they were meditating with you, but inward words that may seem almost audible or words that are placed in your mind.

2. A new understanding or a new angle on the issue or on the problem comes to you. Many people who meditate for guidance experience this frequently. In many ways this is similar to what happens in certain forms of dream guidance. Cayce suggests that in our dreams and in our meditations, often we move to a new perspective or a new state of consciousness from which we can look back at our problem with new eyes. And with that new angle, we can see more accurately what’s going on. Simply having that new perspective allows us to deduce what ought to be done next to solve our problem. And so in meditation you may not so much get the direct answer, but you’re able to see the problem in a fresh way so that you can later determine the answer.

3. As you’re sitting silently in meditation holding the question, a third possibility is that you will get an insight about what has been an obstacle, what has kept you from finding a solution. As with #2 above, you’re not getting the solution directly. Instead, you’re being shown something that has to be dealt with so that later you can find the solution or the answer.

4. Some people during this silence period of meditation get a strong hunch or an intuition about exactly what to do in order to solve the problem. It may be a gut-level feeling or just a strong impulse about what would be right.

5. Remember that in the eight-step guidance process you will have made a tentative conscious decision. When you seek meditation guidance, the response may be feedback on that preliminary decision. You may get a feeling of rightness to confirm your tentative answer. Or you may get an unsettled or inharmonious feeling, warning you about that preliminary decision.

People experience this feedback process in meditation in different ways. Some people literally get a bodily feeling. Some get an impression or a sensation in a certain part of the body. It’s different for each person, and it’s a matter of practicing this to learn for yourself. In other words, from trial and error you learn for yourself the clues, or the cues, that tip you off to warning or to confirmation.

6. There’s one other type of experience that may come as you sit in silent meditation, holding your question in mind. You may get nothing! You may just sit there, open and receptive, but no feeling, insight, or impression comes. In fact, for many experienced meditators that happens frequently. The only thing to do is try again. And it’s a good idea to follow this meditative process multiple times, anyway, especially for important problems.

But if you continue to get no inner response in meditation, something may still be going on. Watch your dreams that night, be alert for synchronistic signs (including what’s said to you during the day), and stay open to other forms of spiritual guidance that may come your way. It could well be that the attunement work that you did in meditation set the stage for spiritual guidance to flow into your life in a different form.

Give this process a try. A good place to start is with human relations. For example, consider a person that you’re having trouble getting along with. Suppose it’s a person at work, and you are this individual’s supervisor. The question at hand concerns the fact that this person is up for a promotion. Making a tough decision like this has a context: you’ve already set a spiritual ideal for your life in general and you’ve set more specific ideals for your work life. The question you face is simply: Should I promote this person who works for me? You’ve collected all the facts. You’ve arrived at a tentative decision but you haven’t told anybody yet, and you certainly haven’t acted on it yet. First you want some meditative guidance to confirm your provisional decision or to warn against it.

The next step is to have a period for silent meditation. The initial five or ten minutes is exclusively for attunement. Then at the end of meditation you inwardly raise the question and see what comes. Perhaps it’s a still, small voice that speaks to you, or a new consciousness about this particular situation, or a new awareness about an obstacle that needs to be overcome before you can clearly see what’s best for this person and for the company. Or maybe you’ll get a strong hunch or intuition about what to do. Or perhaps you’ll just get a feeling of confirmation that your tentative decision is right or a feeling of something not quite being right about your preliminary decision. Or if you get nothing, you may simply want to stay alert for guidance to come in a different form later in the day or in the days ahead. In fact, this very practical and straightforward exercise for inviting guidance through meditation is something you can use for virtually any problem in life—from knowing where to dig for fishing worms to how to write a concerto, as Cayce playfully put it.

Dream Guidance

A second approach to spiritual guidance is working with dreams. We dream every night, and we’re continually getting guidance from that source. If you’re not remembering dreams every night, you’re missing out on a great opportunity for practical direction.

But not only do guidance dreams come regularly and spontaneously, we can go about preparing ourselves to get a guidance dream. We can follow a procedure called dream incubation. It has sometimes been referred to as programming ourselves to get a guidance dream, and it involves following the preliminary steps already described: setting a spiritual ideal, articulating a question very carefully, doing our homework, collecting facts, having a tentative decision.

In fact, to prepare for dream guidance on a given night, you may want to review the results of these previous steps just before you go to bed. For example, you may even want to write in your journal about the issue or problem that you’re dealing with and include a written statement of your tentative decision. Finally, just before going to sleep, you may want to come up with a one-line dream incubation request, something to have on your mind as you’re falling asleep that night.

That one-liner can be a very powerful way to alert yourself to the synchronistic events that may come in your dreams—inner events that relate meaningfully to the difficulty or challenge in waking life. For example, your one-liner might be, "What shall I do next in this relationship?" Or, another night it might be, "What’s the best career track for me?" or "What medicine do I really need to be taking to get well?"

Of course, it’s not enough just to complete all these preparatory steps. One has to get to sleep, dream, and remember the experience. Then, it’s very important the next morning that you be willing to write down anything that you remember, even if at first it doesn’t seem to have to do with the problem at hand. For important questions, it’s usually a good idea to follow this procedure over multiple nights. As we work with dreams in a series and begin to put together the pieces of the puzzle, the wisdom and the guidance may begin to emerge.

Dream interpretation is, of course, a critical part of the guidance equation. My own experience as a dream guidance workshop leader suggests that certain types of dreams are likely to occur when we’ve tried to prepare ourselves for inner direction. Knowing about these types of dreams can be very helpful for interpretation.

First of all, you may get a dream that simply gives you a new perspective on the current problem. There is no direct solution but it’s a valuable chance to look at the issue from a different angle. Most people would prefer that their guidance dream would just give them the straightforward answer. But more often than not, the dream will give you a new way of looking at the current difficulty but will not immediately depict a solution. (A similar process can occur sometimes with meditation guidance, as already noted.) Your dreaming mind may simply stand aside, look back at the problem in an objective way, and show you a novel orientation for seeing the difficulty.

In counseling psychology this is called "reframing." For example, suppose you tell a problem to a psychologist, and she listens and then replies, "What I hear you saying is . . . " Without giving any advice or offering any solution, she proceeds to restate the problem or the difficulty from a little bit different angle. You might well listen to the problem being reframed and say, "Of course! When you put it that way, I can see that’s what is going on." You then begin to recognize an effective solution, simply from being exposed to this reframing approach. Our dreams can do the same thing for us.

A second type of dream guidance is precognitive dreaming. Remember, you already have a preliminary decision that you’ve made and haven’t yet acted on. The precognitive dream will show you what’s likely to unfold in your life if you follow through on that provisional or preliminary decision. Based on what you see happening in the dream, you can decide: Is this the kind of outcome I want or not? It was only a dream—one that envisioned a likely future if you continued on the current pathway. But you still have the freedom to go back and change your course of action and change your decision.

The third frequent type of dream guidance is a direct solution, and this is the one we all want. Recall the personal example I described in chapter 3 concerning my move to Virginia Beach. It took two dreams for the message to get through, but a fairly direct solution was being offered. Of course, not all direct guidance dreams involve a dream character being so direct as to say, "Come on, move to Virginia Beach; I’ve got a job for you that begins Christmas." More often, this third type of dream guidance involves you the dreamer or some other dream character acting out a part of what needs to be done in waking life. In other words, you’re shown an action that will lead to an answer or lead to a resolution of the problem.

A fourth type of frequent guidance dream seems at first to be off the point of the immediate problem or concern at hand. The dream speaks to some other problem or issue that has to be resolved first. Only when it has been resolved can your main issue really be dealt with. This is why sometimes, after having incubated a guidance dream, we seem to get something that has nothing to do with the question. Our soul self and our dreaming mind recognizes that something else needs to be done first, and once that’s taken care of, then we can really deal with the primary concern. And we need to be willing to take the problem-solving in the sequence that our dream wisdom is showing us.

Of course, sometimes you may get no dream, even when you’ve prepared yourself carefully to get some guidance in the night. What if you wake up and you’ve got nothing? Suppose you sincerely tried to apply the dream incubation procedure and nothing came. Take heart in this principle: Your mind has been working creatively on your daily life issues all night long. Your mind is active, not just in those ninety minutes while you are dreaming, but all night long. The mind of the soul is always active.

So, here’s a practical step you can follow when no dream comes to mind upon awakening. Lie or sit quietly, meditatively, and ask inwardly the question on which you incubated the dreaming process. Even though you don’t remember a dream, trust that there has been soul work going on during the night. As you ask inwardly—and as you are open with a meditative frame of mind—insight, inspiration, or an answer may come to you right there in the waking state. You may not have a specific dream to write down in your dream journal for interpretation. However, the intuitive insight that comes may be just as valuable.

Finally, in our consideration of dream guidance, a cautionary note is important. Sometimes we have dreams that simply reflect our fears. Just because you dream something does not mean it’s precognition and it’s going to take place. If you can recognize that you fear an outcome that’s depicted in a dream, you should conclude that the message is ambiguous and very likely isn’t prophetic at all. It may simply be what Cayce called a projection of the fear into the dream state. Until, through prayer or counseling or meditation, you begin to release and let go of that fear, you’re not going to be able to rely on a dream like that one because of the possibility that it’s only fear or anxiety produced. In a similar way, we can have wish-fulfillment dreams. Just as a fear can create a dream, so can a desire. As much as we might like to think that we are beyond Freudian wish-fulfillment dreams, we all, from time to time, have dreams that merely reflect our desires. In fact, this is why having set a spiritual ideal is so critical. You need to be able to ask yourself about possible dream guidance, "Is this merely a reflection of my conscious desires?" And if the dream is simply playing back to you something you want anyway, you can’t necessarily take it as guidance from your higher mind.

In my own experience, the best dream guidance that I’ve ever received has sometimes included some elements of my desires but then built upon it and stretched me to something more than I had consciously wanted. If that element of surprise and stretching isn’t in there, we need to be very careful about assuming this is reliable spiritual direction to be followed.

Here’s a reason why you may also find that working with a friend or a small group is very valuable for dream guidance. Sometimes other people working with you on dreams can provide the objectivity that’s required for honest, safe interpretation.

Guidance from Professional Intuitives

Another way of working with spiritual guidance is to turn to professional advice-givers. This could, of course, include mental health professionals such as counselors and psychologists. But in this section, let’s consider sources of guidance that aren’t quite so traditional. In most communities there is a growing number ofsincere, high-idealed people who offer their intuitive faculties to help clients find solutions to problems and questions.

How are we to understand psychic ability? As yet, parapsychologists have not been able to determine a testable, verifiable model to explain how the thoughts of one person could be received by someone else (telepathy), how an individual could have access to knowledge about a distant condition without the benefit of any sensory data (clairvoyance), or predict future events (precognition). The evidence that such experiences are possible, far beyond random chance occurrence, is nearly irrefutable. And yet, how is it to be explained?

Carl Jung prefers to view paranormal phenomena like these as manifestations of synchronicity. To his way of thinking, parapsychology was a descriptive science that could document extraordinary, synchronistic happenings but would always be frustrated in its attempts to find causes. If we adopt this point of view, a consideration of guidance that comes from someone elseclaiming to be a psychic is just another expression of synchronicity.

It is my opinion, based on more than twenty years of professional experience working with intuitives and talking to people who use their services, that often there is a valuable place for getting psychic input from someone else—especially when it’s one part of a broader effort to receive guidance. That is to say, a psychic reading works best when it’s in the context of working also with synchronistic influences of spiritual direction that may appear in one’s own dreams, meditation experiences, signs, and outer events.

For those who want tips or recommendations on how to find the proper intuitive, I suggest that people go about looking for a professional psychic as they would any other professional person, whether it’s a dentist or a plumber or a physician. Get references from other people. Check out sources, perhaps getting second opinions. That’s just a common-sense way that we work with any type of professional service.

We should also be clear about what’s reasonable to expect from a skilled psychic or intuitive counselor. That person doesn’t have all your answers—maybe just some clues about how to more effectively find answers for yourself.

The point is well illustrated from a research study I conducted with a colleague, Dr. Henry Reed of Atlantic University in Virginia Beach. The research project was conducted over a two-year period—five week-long episodes in which we worked in-depth with fifty people at a time who were committed to finding guidance for important life issues. We led people through experiences with many different guidance modalities for their questions and problems. Psychic readings were part of that research project, along with all the other methods for obtaining spiritual guidance covered in this book.

After pooling the research data from all 250 participants, we arrived at several significant conclusions—one of which was that getting multiple readings (that is, at least two) was very important in order to make comparisons. With only one reading or one intuitive counseling session, a person is likely to feel vulnerable to blind acceptance (e.g., "I guess that statement must be true because a psychic told me"). Having two or more readings which address the same set of questions put the power of evaluation and judgment more readily back with the seeker.

Another important conclusion concerned factors that influence whether or not an individual is likely to get satisfactory results from consulting a psychic. It was interesting for us to note that the people who were happiest with their psychic readings were the people who had asked particular kinds of questions. In general, people who asked the psychic questions which requested further information about the problem or difficulty were more inclined to report a helpful encounter. This was in contrast to people who chose to ask questions requesting the psychic to come up with direct answers.

This is a subtle but very important difference, and it suggests that often the best results to be gotten from psychics happen when we, the requesters of help, don’t surrender our free will or decision making to someone else. Instead, by our attitudes and the types of questions we pose, we can use psychics or intuitives simply as a further source of gaining facts and information about decisions we have to make. For example:

"What key talents should I keep in focus as I shape a personal mission statement?" rather than "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?"

"What factors, both internal and outer conditions in the world, should I keep in mind as I make important financial decisions next week?" rather than "What should I do with my money?"

The validity of psychically derived information is an important matter. Another valuable byproduct of that research program was the creation of a list of criteria for evaluating psychic information. The items on the list came both from the researchers’ insights and the feedback from the participants—that is, what they found to work best in their own experiences. Each of the ten can be posed as a question concerning the information received.

1. Does the psychic reading or the intuitive information have "a ring of truth" for you? "Ring of truth" means confirmable facts (material life realities that can be checked and validated) and it also means "feeling a tone of rightness" (something more subjective and personal).

2. Does the information give you applicable things that you could be doing? And when you put those things into application, what are the results? It ought to show benefits to yourself and to other people.

3. Does the psychic reading call you to the best you know to be doing, not merely something that’s "acceptable" but falls short of your best?

4. Does the psychic reading empower you to take charge of your own life? It should be a red flag of warning if the psychic says, "Now come back in two months and I’ll give you more information," rather than "Here’s what you can be doing to be finding your own answers."

5. Does the psychic information leave you with a sense of hope about your life? There may be facts or may be insights in the reading that are hard to face up to—maybe even points of discouragement—but overall it should give you a sense of hope about your life.

6. Does the reading speak your language? Does it use words and metaphors and images that speak to you? That’s indicative of the clairvoyant having tuned in to your soul.

7. What’s the evaluation from a trusted friend? Get a second opinion. Let somebody else listen to the reading or read the transcript of the reading—perhaps only the parts of it you’re comfortable sharing. Then carefully consider the evaluation of that person whose judgment you trust.

8. Does that reading speak to unasked questions? In other words, did the psychic tune in deeper than what you revealed by the nature of your stated questions? As a case in point, when Edgar Cayce was at his best, he answered questions that hadn’t even been asked by the individual. They were deep soul concerns that had not been articulated on that list of questions submitted to Cayce.

9. Does the psychic reading stretch you to new and unconsidered parts of yourself, not just confirm things you already know? Reliable intuitives usually give information that goes beyond the status quo and really pushes you to grow.

10. Finally, does the psychic reading seem to get better over time? In the case of top-notch advice, as the weeks and the months and the years go by, and you look back at that reading, more and more will you appreciate the high quality of what you received.

Of course, all ten of these points are relevant to intuitive information that comes from within yourself, as well. However, many people have found that this list is especially helpful in an area where it’s easy to feel vulnerable or worry that you may be gullible: evaluating the statements that come from a professional psychic.

Guidance from Inspirational Writing

One further method deserves attention as we consider the array of approaches to connecting with guidance. It’s called inspirational writing, something that should be distinguished from automatic writing. Inspirational writing grows out of meditative attunement. It begins with an exploratory willingness to take paper and pencil and, after a period to center oneself, just begin to write about an issue or concern.

Cayce’s spiritual psychology advocated this method, but clearly distinguished this safe, reliable method from a technique called automatic writing. For example, he was asked by a twenty-three-year-old university student, "Would a development of automatic writing establish a better contact with my Maker?" His answer: "For this body we would not give automatic writing as the channel. Rather the intuitional, or the meditation and then writing—knowing what is being written, if it’s chosen to be inscribed in ink." (440-8)

With inspirational writing one is fully in control of the pencil. At its best, one has a sense that the ideas are flowing through the conscious mind, even though they feel as if they aren’t coming directly from the conscious mind but instead are inspired from higher sources.

Most people who try to apply Cayce’s suggestion have found that it works optimally if they begin to write about the issue or concern immediately after a period of meditation. It’s not so much a matter of getting inspiration in meditation and then quickly writing it down. Instead, it’s a process of making an attunement with the inner spirit and then just beginning to write. And if you don’t know what to write first, you can just write, "Here I am sitting with my pencil and my paper and I’m going to write about ideas that come to me in regard to this problem that I have." And as inspiration comes to you while you’re writing, you put it onto paper.

Of course, all this requires that your analytical mind take a break. You must put aside the logical aspect of the mind which is quick to want to evaluate whether or not the new thought or idea is worth writing down. But as you write inspirationally, everything’s worth putting down—whatever comes to mind. You must say to your analytical mind, "Step aside for a few minutes; later you will get to come back and look at what’s here on the paper and pick out the gems. In a little while, you’ll be needed to separate the wheat from the chaff."

Not everything that gets written on paper during inspirational writing is going to be a brilliant insight from spirit, but you may find that as you are writing for five or ten minutes, there are a few moments of breakthrough as some fresh new way of understanding the issue emerges. It may not be the ultimate solution to the problem, but it could be significant little pieces or a clue for what you need next.

Inspirational writing is direct and, when it’s done in conjunction with meditation, it is a very powerful tool for giving yourself a kind of psychic reading.

Applying the Methods for Receiving Guidance

The various approaches described in this chapter are not techniques to be used out of context or merely to satisfy curiosity. They are specific methods that you can actively pursue when you get to the fifth step of the eight-step guidance process outlined in chapter 3. Here again is the sequence:

1. Clarify your spiritual ideal.

2. Carefully formulate your question. Exactly what is it you want to know?

3. Collect the facts. Do your homework.

4. Arrive at a preliminary conscious decision that you could act on and still be in keeping with your ideal.

5. Seek guidance from outer sources and from inner ones.

6. Evaluate the guidance that comes to you.

7. Arrive at what you think is a guided decision, making sure that it’s consistent with your spiritual ideal. That guided decision may be the same decision you had at step four or it may be new.

8. Act on the decision, staying open for further guidance.

 

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Chapter 5

Value-Directed Guidance

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Spiritual guidance requires more than just sound methods and reliable techniques. Its essence is a personal ideal, which is shaped by one’s purpose and motive. In other words, the core value one has set for his or her life has a tremendous influence on the quality of guidance one receives, in addition to the powerful role that that central value or ideal plays in evaluating and applying the guidance.

An ideal is crucial to the guidance process because within oneself there are so many contradictory opinions and points of view, each clamoring to be the primary source of direction. Just think back to the last time you had to make a difficult decision. If you carefully watched your feelings, rational analysis, and intuitions about the matter, you may have felt as if you were fighting your way through a jungle of diverse options. You probably needed something like a sharp machete to cut through the tangle and see your way free to move ahead. A clearly articulated ideal is that tool.

Or consider another analogy. Sometimes a problem in life leaves us feeling as if we’re in a fog, adrift on a turbulent ocean. In trying to deal with the problem, the fog symbolizes the many confusing options that come to mind. An ideal is like a beacon that shines brightly through the mist and indicates a path home. Through the many layers of the mind, an ideal serves like a lighthouse guiding a ship over stormy, foggy seas.

We all want our decisions and choices to be good ones; that’s why we even consider the need for guidance—be it from a counselor, the I Ching, a dream, or any of the other avenues for getting direction. We want direction that bears good fruits—a more fulfilling and healthy life for ourselves and those around us. And that is what is most likely to come if we have formulated a clear and distinct sense of a personal spiritual ideal or core value.

A Model of Ideals in Spiritual Guidance

The Cayce philosophy of spiritual guidance includes a fascinating concept about dimensions of consciousness. Although this has often seemed complex and abstract to many people, the elegance and simplicity of this model of human consciousness shows us exactly why ideals are critical to spiritual guidance.

Consider first the notion that our normal, waking consciousness is three-dimensional. Our perception of reality is by and large focused on the physical world and our minds tend to understand things in terms of three measurements. For example, we see time as threefold: past, present, future. We see space as threefold, too: height, width, and depth. Modern physics and the teachings of mystics suggest that time and space may be much more complex than our everyday conscious minds think; but for the most part, three-dimensional consciousness serves us well day in and day out.

What is the next higher dimension? On this point, Cayce and Jung agree. It’s the realm of ideas or thoughts.

Best definition that ever may be given of fourth-dimension is an idea! Where will it project? Anywhere! Where does it arise from? Who knows! Where will it end? Who can tell! It is all inclusive! It has both length, breadth, height and depth—is without beginning and is without ending! Dependent upon that which it may feed for its sustenance, or it may pass into that much as a thought or an idea. Now this isn’t ideal that’s said! It’s idea! see? 364-10

If we wished to form a vivid picture of a non-spatial being of the fourth dimension, we should do well to take thought, as a being, for our model. (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 184)

 

In other words, the mental realm has reality, which in many ways is just as genuine as the physical world (or maybe more so). As Cayce put it:

For, thoughts are things! and they have their effect upon individuals, especially those that become supersensitive to outside influences! These are just as physical as sticking a pin in the hand! 386-2

 

At first it may take a little effort to appreciate the reality of this thought-form world. Where is a thought? What does it look like? How can it be real if you can’t grasp or measure it? Consider this example: What makes this book you are reading real? Is it the weight of the paper and the color of the ink? That’s a superficial way of looking at it. A more profound answer to this question says that it’s the ideas in the book, ideas that come to life in your mind as you read. What’s more, you can have the same idea which can be shared with any number of other people scattered throughout the world, and even throughout generations. An idea isn’t limited to space or time.

Via the fourth dimension we discover the extraordinary power of the mind. We experience the amazing creative potential of our thinking—that we can literally create miracles by our thoughts (or, as one Cayce passage warns, we can also create serious crimes with our thinking). Fourth dimensionally we find that we are connected to each other. ESP works largely by this higher dimensional bridge from person to person. What’s more, the fourth dimension is the source of the third. Over the years we have created a physical reality out of our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions. In this sense, the Cayce philosophy says that the third dimension is a projection of the fourth—that "Mind is the builder, and the physical is the result."

But the fourth dimension also has the potential to be a morass. It contains many different perspectives and options of human consciousness—many of them are expansive and liberating, but others are self-centered and ultimately unhealthy. One can easily get lost amidst the fascinating array of possibilities offered by the unconscious mind, and this becomes a critical issue whenever we try to engage inner tools for guidance, such as dreams, meditation, hypnosis, or psychic impressions. Something more is needed if we are to find our wayreliably through all the possibilities. That something more is the next dimension.

The fifth dimension is an ideal. Whereas an idea (i.e., the fourth dimension) is the specific mental construct of an attitude, thought, or emotion, a fifth-dimensional ideal is the motive, purpose, or value that stands behind that fourth-dimensional idea. Remembering how the third dimension of physical reality can be understood as a projection coming from the next higher dimension (where "Mind is the builder"), a similar relationship exists between the fourth and fifth dimensions. An idea or thought or emotion is a projection of some underlying purpose, motive, value or ideal (i.e, the stuff of the fifth dimension).

5th dimension (ideal)

 

projects as

 

4th dimension (idea)

 

projects as

 

3rd dimension (physical reality)

 

But what does all of this have to do with spiritual guidance? Simply that using the guidance tools that draw upon the fourth dimension isn’t enough. Studying our dreams, listening for guidance in meditation, allowing synchronicity to work through the I Ching, or any other methodology, still requires something that helps us sort through all the images, impressions, and feelings that come. This is where a personal spiritual ideal (the fifth dimension) plays such a helpful role.

Like a lighthouse beacon it moves us through the variety and complexities of the fourth dimension. And as it draws us through, we can pick up along the way the fourth-dimensional images, insights, and inspirations that we need, the ones that are consistent with that fifth-dimensional ideal we’ve set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Psychology of Ideals

As already suggested, in Cayce’s spiritual psychology for receiving guidance, ideals are a frequent topic. Anyone who has studied the Cayce teachings knows the importance of motives, purposes, and ideals. For example, the approach to meditation advocated in this material is essentially ideals-centered. What’s more, Cayce’s elaborate theory of dream interpretation largely rests on the following assumption: the dreaming mind uses one’s own ideals to shape dream experiences. In order to interpret many dreams we can ask what sort of ideal or motivation each key symbol represents. The dream as a whole can be addressed with the question, "What do I see about my life when I compare the action in my dream to what I hold as an ideal for my life?"

Cayce’s pioneering work with natural healing methods and holistic health also rests on a foundation of ideals and motives for the patient. The person who wants to get well needs to have a sense of purpose for life. As Cayce often asked those who came to him for guidance about healing, "What do you want to do with your life and your healthy body once the ailment has been cured?" Those who didn’t have a good answer weren’t very likely candidates for his healing methodologies.

The most-quoted Cayce passage about ideals comes from advice to a forty-year-old woman working as a clerk during World War II. "Then, the more important, the most important experience of this or any individual entity is to first know what is the ideal—spiritually." (357-13)

Cayce described an essential human dilemma. Our minds—with extraordinary creative potential—are pulled in two directions. On the one hand is the attraction of an ideal, a positive, creative image of what is possible. In contrast there is the tug of material desires. Unfortunately it’s those limiting, destructive influences that frequently gain the upper hand.

How do those desires which are focused on materiality gain our attention? Usually it’s either by (1) crises and emergencies or (2) good excuses and rationalizations. Think about your own life in those terms. What interrupts or diverts you; what interferes with the pursuit of your ideals? For most of us, it’s an endless stream of material life demands that seem too important to ignore. In these stressful modern times, almost everyone has days that seem to be ruled by crises or emergencies.

The second attention diverter is a frequent impulse to say or do something that seems justifiable in the moment. In those instances, simply because we can rationalize it, we settle for something less than our best.

See if you can remember personal examples from the past twenty-four hours—instances in which diversions or detours took you away from your most deeply held values and your best self. This exercise isn’t meant to make you feel guilty. It’s merely a matter of seeing just how commonplace is the process that Cayce described.

Of course, merely recognizing this aspect of the psychology of ideals still leaves unanswered one vital question: "What is the best ideal for us to hold?" Clearly the Cayce philosophy has in mind a specific spiritual ideal as the optimum: the universal Christ. It was demonstrated and lived by Jesus. Just as significantly, it’s a seedlike pattern in each one of us, no matter what faith tradition one may be following.

Of course, many people aren’t ready to make a commitment to the "universal Christ Consciousness" (or even to similar wording to which they can better relate). For many individuals, that seems like too much to bite off, too big a stretch. Instead they would prefer to select an ideal that seems more within reach, although stilldemanding of them an effort to grow and change. Perhaps an ideal such as "lovingkindness" or "peaceful centeredness" or "fairness" would be more appropriate for now. Later in this chapter we’ll examine one way in which you can decide for yourself on the best spiritual ideal to which you can make a commitment. Perhaps you’ll choose the optimal ideal Cayce encouraged, or you may select something that is a more modest stepping stone, eventually leading you to that optimum.

What happens in us when we make a commitment and invest ourselves in a personal spiritual ideal? The setting of a core value engages forces in the unconscious mind that can dramatically alter our lives. That’s exactly why Cayce called it the most important experience that a soul can have.

But precisely what does it mean to "set a spiritual ideal"? Is it just a matter of telling someone else what you’ve done, or of writing it down on a piece of paper? Two crucial elements are central to the psychology of ideals. Both aspects play a role whereby the forces of soul, lying dormant in the unconscious mind, are stirred to life. Both involve an act of free will and an engagement of the creative mind.

Aspiration is the first ingredient in Cayce’s psychology of ideals. To hold the universal Christ as a spiritual ideal means to aspire to its qualities. Maybe those qualities seem out of reach, but we can feel ourselves inwardly stretching and reaching for all that the Christ Consciousness means to us. The same would hold true for any other spiritual ideal chosen. What’s most important to understanding the psychology of ideals is that the striving involves both the will and the creative side of the mind. We have to make the choice, and we need to use the imaginative forces to shape a relationship to that possibility for ourselves.

It probably comes as no surprise that "aspiration" is one of the two key ingredients in Cayce’s view of how ideals work. Just think about how people use the word "ideal" in everyday language. It usually has the flavor of aspiration. For example, the ideal home situation is something that we can creatively imagine as the very best possible way of getting along with our family members. The ideal job is an imagined workplace situation that we long to have because all of our talents would be used.

Trust is the second ingredient in Cayce’s psychology of ideals. This is a more subtle factor than aspiration. Think about how you might aspire to something but not trust that it’s really alive within you, not trust that it’s possible to experience for yourself. Without investing yourself through trust, you haven’t yet set a spiritual ideal.

This may not be a point of view that’s easy to swallow, simply because most of us find trusting to be very difficult. To trust requires a more challenging use of free will than does aspiration alone. Trust means a willingness to surrender and let go of fears and doubts. It means to place ultimate belief in forces beyond our personal, conscious selves. According to this perspective, you haven’t yet set the universal Christ—or anything else—as your spiritual ideal until you let go and put your trust in it.

Think about a somewhat superficial example—one that allows a quick remembrance of what it feels like to trust. When you turn on a light, you trust that the electricity will be there, ready to light up the room. When you turn the handle on the faucet, you trust that the water will start flowing. In other words, you spend little of your day worrying about the availability of power and water. Now, of course, a critic could say that you’re mindlessly taking it all for granted—that many people in the world don’t have immediate access to these resources. But the point isn’t how fortunate we are. These examples teach us something about trust—something that is related to trusting an ideal.

The authentic ideal you hold is the one you don’t have to spend time thinking about or questioning. It has become so much a part of your life that it’s a "given." When you meet a difficulty or a challenge, you know you can count on the inspiration and power of that ideal just as surely as you count on electricity and water when you need them. Some days your genuine ideal has the quality of being almost invisible to you because it’s so deeply a part of how you look at the world. It’s so essential that you don’t stop to question it or worry about it. You can take it for granted.

Today’s world at the turn of the millennium is an era that deeply needs a renewed vision of the power of ideals. Not pie-in-the-sky idealism. That too often fails to make the connection with practical life. What’s so badly required in today’s world is respect (even reverence) for that crucial step called "setting an ideal for one’s own individual life." Cayce’s spiritual psychology offers one very effective way to home in on exactly how to do it and make it work. Vivid aspiration is one key; the other is the courage to trust.

How to Set a Personal Spiritual Ideal

The best way to go about setting a spiritual ideal is to refer to our own peak spiritual experiences. These are moments in our lives—perhaps going back to childhood or early adult years—in which we caught a glimpse of a higher order of life. They are not intellectual abstract understandings about what our ideals ought to be. They are direct personal experiences, in which we caught a glimpse of God or the Truth or of a higher realm of life. We’ve all had these experiences. You would not be interested in the subject of spiritual guidance if you had not had some peak experiences. You may or may not have called them peak spiritual experiences at the time—maybe just special moments. They are the unforgettable moments—for example, an extraordinary time out in nature, or a moment of love with someone, or a special dream, or a powerful prayer or meditation experience.

As an act of clear remembering you can bring back to mind two or three of these events from your past. But it’s not just remembering what the experience was but actually reliving it. And as it begins to awaken certain feelings about life, you can just be open and be present to that sense of yourself and of your God and of the meaning of life. Finally, after a couple of minutes of reliving those peak spiritual experiences, you can invite a word or short phrase to come into your mind that describes that place in yourself. That word or phrase is a way of representing your spiritual ideal.

Of course, over the months and over the years, that word or that phrase may change as your experience deepens. But you are setting a spiritual ideal based on something you know is possible. Even though you may not be able to be in touch with it every hour of the day, you know it’s possible because you’ve been there, at least a few times.

Here’s a script that I use in my spiritual guidance workshops when we come to the point of setting an ideal. You can read this script into a tape recorder with your own voice (or have a friend make the tape for you), then listen to the tape meditatively and do the exercise. Each set of ellipsis points ( . . . ) indicates a pause of perhaps five seconds.

Sit comfortably now, I’m going to lead this brief exercise, and I want you to begin by closing your eyes with me and just observing the flowing in and flowing out of your breath. You don’t need to try to change the rate or depth of your breathing. Just be present to this great rhythm of your body . . . And I want you to imagine a timeline in which your whole life experience is before you . . . back through yesterday . . . last week . . . last month . . . your whole adult life is before you on this timeline . . . your adolescence is there . . . your grade school years . . . even your preschool years.

And as you lightly scan that timeline, I want you to notice that just a few experiences stand out, with a certain luminosity to them—because these were peak spiritual moments in your life, when you caught a glimpse of something different about life. These were very positive moments, moments when you were in touch with life in a more authentic and meaningful way than regular, daily living . . .

I’d like you to remember and try to relive just two or three of those special moments right now. . . [pause for about sixty seconds]

And as you move back into the feelings of those moments, be still and allow a word or a phrase to come to your mind that describes that place within yourself. . . [pause for about twenty seconds]

And as you have that word or phrase now in mind, you can begin to bring your attention back to your breathing . . . to that great rhythm of your body . . . and let your breathing bring your attention back to your sense of physical presence here and now . . . And when you’re ready, you can open your eyes.

Of course, having a word or phrase to describe your spiritual ideal is really just the beginning of spiritual guidance. No matter what quality, word, or phrase you choose—love, or Christ Consciousness, or Buddha, or oneness with the Divine, or peace, or freedom—it should describe a place in you which you know is possible because of your peak spiritual moments.

What’s more, the spiritual ideal becomes a beacon to your consciousness as you move into the myriad dimensions of the soul mind. It designates the place from within yourself where you want the spiritual guidance to come. Remember that there are many different levels to the unconscious mind, each with the potential to offer its own perspective on your problem or issue. And not all those possible sources of inner guidance are going to be effective. For example, places of fear or self-doubt within your unconscious mind may offer up advice in the form of feelings, impressions, or dreams. But just because something comes from the unconscious doesn’t necessarily mean that it leads to soul growth or success in the material world.

No, we’ve got to be more discerning when it comes to inner guidance, and focusing upon a spiritual ideal is the key. The ideal designates the level of consciousness from which we invite a guiding spirit to reveal itself. In addition, that spiritual ideal begins to serve as a standard or measuring rod against which you can evaluate information that comes from your dreams, or from psychics, or any other form of inner or outer guidance. Truly, without an ideal, we’re like a ship without a rudder.

 

 

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