Edgar Cayce on People Without Souls

If you are familiar with the Gnostic literature, you understand that existence as we know it was created by an imperfect being or god called the Demiurge. In his ignorance, he tried to create a human being. I think it is Pistis Sophia that describes the process. The problem is that, lacking knowledge of the Light of the true God or Monad, his creations lacked the divine spark that is the essential characteristic of a soul. Sophia attempted to slip that divine spark into the Demiurge’s creations but may not have covered all of them. The result that we would expect would be a human being without a soul.

In his readings, Cayce identified that there are humans among us – not great in number – that have no soul. Here is a video that discusses his readings on the subject (34:54 minutes).

Questions and Problems

1. The theory of reincarnation has the body dying and the soul returning to a spiritual plane for learning and planning its next incarnation. This gives a soul an eternal pathway to existence. The body itself dies and decays. It does not reincarnate. So humans without souls should die and nothing would carry forward.
2. From his readings, some souls encounter difficulty in catching the right child at conception and do not merge with it until some (short?) time later. Presumably there could be cases where no soul is found to merge with the fetus. One might expect a stillbirth, but what if the child is carried to term and is born? Should such happen it would have no soul.
3. From the video, Cayce’s understanding or description of soulless beings seemed to change over time. This is disturbing because it brings into question the believability of his readings. At least one might question the source or nature of his readings that would account for an apparent difference over time. Having said this, I remain confident in Cayce as a source.
4. The next problem I don’t know quite how to frame. There is a problem of consciousness. The consciousness of which I am aware, the reflexive self-awareness of the ‘I am’, I associate with my higher state of beingnesss. It is where self-awareness abides when asleep. It maintains continuity through the death transition. Such a belief is consistent with the NDE, reincarnation, the Gnostic literature and all that I have been exploring the last two years. So what kind of consciousness then does a soulless being have? Is it different from mine? If not, why not? If it is, how so?

Reflecting on this has lead to the solution of a problem that I have carried for most of my life.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

When I first read Genesis as a teenager, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil stood Out. It is the root of the Christian paradigm’s claim to relevance. We ate the fruit, a sin, fell, and can only be returned to God by the actions of the Church. The result was death which can be understood as a separation from God.

But here’s the first problem. Psalm 139 vv 1-18 tells us that we can never be apart from God. We can close our eyes to him – think of how a young child makes people disappear by covering its eyes, but he is always with us. Yeshua reinforces this in Luke 17:21. The Gnostics explain this by telling us that we are an emanation of God as an aspect of Him. We are not a creation of God as the notion of a creation is something that is external to or apart from.

Think of a vast ocean as representing God. You are a wave on the surface of the ocean. As such you have uniqueness, individuation as Jung would describe it, but are fully ocean at the same time.

The Gnostics explain that God formed us so He could observe and experience Himself from another perspective. God had a problem. He could only act from love and its attributes. In forming man, He gave us free will. That is, we were given the ability to act in a manner that was not of love. If He only wanted actors that acted from love he could have formed such but His curiosity would be unsatisfied.

We were given free will. We were expected to act in ways – without love . In so doing, th4e full nature of God’s love became manifest.It is the Yin and the Yang of the Tao hast both aspects are fully realized and balance or unity is achieved.

It came to me today that the knowledge referred to of the tree is the Gnostic meaning of that which is known through experience. Genesis was right in that acting in a manner which was not of love would create in us a separation from God but only from our perspective. As it says in the scriptures quoted above, God is always with us. We are apart only in a false illusion of separation. The whole Christian paradigm then is seen as based on error. We were expected to fall or sin so that God could more fully grasp His greatness based on love.

In becoming immersed in illusion by choice we became trapped by it. Yeshua’s incarnation bringing us the full Christ nature as an example for us was to be the lead out of the illusion.

Articles in This Series

Refer to the series index in Gnostic Wisdom.

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