Venturing Inward. Hugh Lynn Cayce
problems. Daniel and Ezekiel’s visions from the Old Testament were no more symbol-filled than many we heard described in our youth. I will never cease to wonder about the man who, after pledging us to secrecy, would accurately and instantaneously tell exactly how many small rocks were in a pile or how many blackberries were in a can or a bucket. Each day when he was able to join us provided a new opportunity to challenge him. He was right so frequently that we lost interest after a few rounds. There was another man who would stick pins in himself, apparently without experiencing pain; and an older teenage boy could imitate any sound he heard. We became acquainted with a very interesting group of people.
From these troubled individuals, as from the more normal young people, I learned that the mind beyond immediate consciousness was filled with strange patterns, capable of unusual feats of memory and remarkable control over the body.
More than any other experience or observation, it was the day-today examination of the words pouring out of one unconscious man which brought me face to face with a world about which we know very little in normal consciousness. When I was born, my father was already attracting local attention through his ability to speak from a self-induced unconscious state. By the time I was three years old, the accuracy of the psychic content of his unconscious speech had become the subject of national newspaper publicity. My earliest memories include fragments of discussions about the value and dangers of, as well as how to handle, this peculiar ability. Throughout the years a great many people came to ask for help, question, study, test, and sometimes ridicule and persecute my father. It was natural that my interest in psychic subjects would grow. And it is understandable that in considering the activity of the unconscious mind I must draw heavily upon my experiences with him and the information which he gave during his unconscious states.
I have become acquainted with an enormous, and frequently confusing, mass of writings by and about people who had experiences beyond normal consciousness. More exciting and rewarding have been the years of investigations and comparative studies of contemporaries who (like my father) spent considerable parts of their lives in unconscious states. I have visited mediums, talked with people who claimed to have had visions, read thousands of pages of automatic writing, and been involved in various types of experiments with hypnosis.
In considering any type of unconscious state, questions always occur far faster than they can be answered. How does the mind work beyond physical awareness? How valuable is the information which comes through or from the unconscious? What can an understanding of this area of the mind tell us about the dimensions of ourselves? Through various doorways—hypnosis, the use of drugs, trance, automatic writing, meditation, spontaneous experiences, religious ecstasy, and the everyday, universal experience of sleep—people slip away from physical consciousness. Throughout many decades I have observed the weird and grotesque, the amusing and the filthy, as well as the beautiful and complicated, the profound and challenging, aspects of this hidden mind. Perhaps here we can find some answers to questions about the nature of our being.
The type of the outpourings from an unconscious is governed to some extent by whose unconscious is being explored and by who is doing the exploring. It must have been an exciting experience in olden times to watch the unloading of a ship returned from the Orient laden with exotic and beautiful treasures. When slave ships docked, however, some would have witnessed the unloading with horror and apprehension. Just so the material from an unconscious can be stimulating or disturbing. Obvious tensions, conscious fears, dreams, and repeated mistakes in speech are only a few of the psychological indications of unconscious mental activity. Psychology and psychiatry have made great strides in tracking such material to its source, at times in some deep-hidden memory bank. When exploring the unconscious, we are like children walking at night through familiar woods, imagining trees to be wild animals and waving bushes to be ghosts and dragons. In the unconscious, as in the woods, a little light can be most helpful. Reports are sometimes so incongruous that it is not recognized that explorers are describing small sections of the same labyrinth.
It is obvious that much of the furnishings of the unconscious are memories of forgotten conscious experiences. Some memories are beautiful; some are unsightly; and there is a considerable mixture. Childhood recollections of the old swimming hole can be pleasant—unless the individual almost drowned there. Or a war experience which contains many painful reminiscences may also include thought patterns of friendships which remain strong and positive.
In attempting to discover just where our memories are located, it is logical to begin the search in one of the most remarkable components of the human creature—the fifty ounces of pulpy, gray mass in the head—the brain. This is a world in itself, made up of millions of cells. Though the functions of some groups of these cells are known—sight controlled through the occipital lobe, hearing through the temporal—the activity of a large part of the brain is unknown. Humankind knows far more about the surface of the earth than it does about the human brain.
I have tried visualizing the earth and attempting to locate the various continents and countries in them. Then, I have tried to think of the brain. My knowledge of even the areas from which the control of activities of the body stems is woefully limited. A few years ago I learned of the discovery of a new country in the brain.
Dr. Wilder Penfield, until 1960 director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, speaking before a 1957 meeting of the American National Academy of Sciences, described experiments with tiny electrical currents which when applied to an area in the fine tissue covering the brain, stimulated memories of forgotten experiences. Apparently details of consciousness are physically recorded and can be recalled when activated. The brain seems to contain a very efficient tape recorder. Almost a thousand patients reported vivid recall more real than remembering. One patient not only heard a forgotten song again but also recognized it as being heard in the present. The interpretative process seemed to work simultaneously with remembering. This discovery locates at least a part of what is known as the unconscious mind of man. However, the memory of conscious action, as complicated as it may be, does not seem to account for all of the strange discoveries being made by many “inward” explorations.
When the North American continent was first sighted by Europeans, the first landing crews penetrated only a few hundred yards inland. Most of the observations were made as the ships sailed along the coast. Later, better-organized expeditions returned, bringing explorers and settlers who kept records and journals. The discoveries of areas of the mind have been like this. First explorations skirted around its edges; then more trained scientists led expeditions into the interior. Their findings have become the basis for many of our psychological theories. Psychiatrists like Freud, Jung, and many of those who followed them would have been the first to acknowledge that their discoveries only began to measure the dimensions of the unconscious mind. Comparable to vast forests, rivers, and mountains or ore deposits of a new-discovered continent, there are areas of the mind which lie unexplored and undeveloped. Like the urges which drove our early American pioneers, fever-like in their intensity, there seem to be similar impulses in our modern society to explore the unconscious. Popular motion pictures, plays, television and radio programs, wide-read books, newspaper and magazine articles reflect a trend of interest which amounts to fascination, as man begins to unlock doors leading off the dimly lighted corridors of his mind.
Even at the risk of oversimplifying the profound concepts of some of the first modern discoveries about the mind, it seems to me that a few brief definitions will help us move forward in our thinking about the unconscious. Sigmund Freud, one of the earliest explorers, described it as that part of our mental life of which we are unaware. Unconscious material is shut off from consciousness when it is not needed or is unacceptable. He concluded that the unconscious holds infantile instinctual material with all its inherent amorality. The “id,” according to Freud, is that part of our mental personality which clings to all primitive cravings and instincts.
C.G. Jung, for a time a student of Freud’s, spoke of the unconscious as having two layers—the personal and the collective. He said that the personal layer includes the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the preinfantile period—that is, the residues of ancestral life. Jung explained that our consciousness floats like a little island on the boundless sea of the unconscious. In describing the help which can come from it, he suggested that the unconscious gives us all the encouragement and help that