Getting it wrong

English is a difficult language to understand.  Sometimes I swear we do all we can to make understanding English even more difficult.  I’m thinking of contract legalese and Congressional obfuscation; of tax returns; of argot of all sorts.

I’ve dedicated a website to making at least one form of English, Caycian metaphysicalese, intelligible.

Do you want a translation?  I’ve dedicated my website to making the readings of the American medium, Edgar Cayce, easier to understand.  The website is edgarcayceaz.com, and with it I hope to make Cayce more accessible to New Age readers. 

Right now, the readings, all of them, are available on edgarcayce.org.  The Association for Research and Enlightenment, or A.R.E., asks a very small membership fee for access to the readings, but once you get there, the world of Edgar Cayce opens up to you.

And that’s the problem: Cayce’s world is overwhelming.  In a fairly brief period, from about 1925 to 1945, when he died, Cayce laid down twice a day, put himself into a trance, and answered questions from whoever wanted to ask.  During World War II, he did four or more a day.  The number of subjects he replied to is enormous.  His stenographer had her hands full just translating her shorthand, verbatim, into English.  What no one has done in the intervening decades is to translate what he said into modern English.  Edgar Cayce was an American.  He spoke English.  Why do we know his words mostly through others’ explanations? 

On my website you’ll find, in the weeks ahead, guidelines I use in my translation of a very limited number of his 14,067 readings.  I’m most interested in the series of readings from which the book, A Search for God, Books I and II, were derived.  Some of the readings need only a general grammatical clean-up, while others need extensive work – in my opinion.  What I hope to do on my website is to help you get started translating in your area of interest, so that eventually there will be a network of us who are willing to present Edgar Cayce’s message to the world in plain English.

The risk to the readings is that we could get the meanings wrong.  That’s the nature of metaphysics.  The real travesty, in my opinion, is that the readings might remain untouched, read only in passages that are quoted in context, in companion books and readers, and in study groups, when in fact they deserve to be as widely read and appreciated as the quatrains of Nostradamus.   

Our translations are going to be flawed, colored by our understanding of Cayce and the language of metaphysics, and flavored by our word choice.  Consider them the start of future discussions, the initial commentaries on an important and original body of work.