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On the one hand I'm glad to see past-life phenomena subjected to this kind of rigorous study and thoughtful examination. On the other hand I'm frustrated by the author's reductionistic assumptions and conclusions. The data tells us something important--but not necessarily what the author concludes, namely, that the Cayce readings were all his subconscious imagination based on information he'd been previously exposed to.
My conclusion is quite different--it's that Cayce was getting real information, but that his subconscious mind was processing it in terms of what he was familiar with. Thus, if he saw that a person had been in a position of some authority in a previous life, that information was translated into the person being a prince in a geographic region and historical time-period the waking Cayce was familiar with from his education and reading. If he saw that the person had once been assistant to someone in a position of authority, that information was translated into being assistant to a historically-known monarch. And so-on.
In short, based on this sampling (and with the caveat that I am assuming the data-gathering was fair and objective), I agree with the author that the readings were clearly "symbolic." I do not, however, agree that they were merely symbolic.
The most damning evidence that Melton uncovered was the existence of duplicate readings, in which two separate people were identified as being the same figure in a Bible story. Melton found this duplication occurring twice just in his sampling (two different persons identified as the woman taken in adultery; two different persons identified as the rich young ruler). Anyone who assumes that Cayce's readings were literally, historically accurate is up against a profound challenge with these findings.
In carefully studying John Edward's work in his show "Crossing Over", one sees that Edward has to interpret the images he receives in accordance with his own frame of reference. Since he is conscious and not in a trance state when he receives these impressions, he can openly admit and describe the translation process of symbolism as it occurs. Edward is shown a popular movie that he's familiar with; he then translates that image into something that relates specifically to the person he's doing a reading for. Or, just as often, he refrains from interpreting at all, and asks the person being read to interpret it. He doesn't interpret literally that the person being read has any direct connection with that movie or the actors in the movie. Cayce, being in a trance, was not consciously filtering or assisting in the translation process. I think the error has been to interpret the material thus received in literal terms, and some of this decision to interpret literally may have been made by the people around Cayce.
There are, however, the medical readings to consider. Medical diagnosis isn't so much subject to symbolic interpretation as past-life material. It still isn't easy to verify, however, because the power of mental suggestion (i.e., faith healing) may have been the engine of some percentage of the cures even if diagnoses and prescribed treatments were wrong. However, compared to the past-life readings, the medical readings are much easier to study. If it is found that Cayce could be accurate well beyond the level of chance in his medical diagnoses (and I believe this will be found to be the case), we have no reason to doubt that he was probably about as accurate in his past-life readings.(1)
In short, if it is found that the medical readings were accurate beyond the level of chance, it's highly unlikely that the past-life material was all coming from Cayce's imagination. It has to be a mixture.
Support for this idea comes from the conclusions of Dr. Roger Woolger, Jungian past-life therapist. When I personally put the question to him, as to whether the past-life memories his patients report were symbolic representations of their psychological issues, or whether they represented real past-life events, he replied that it was probably some of both, but more real past-life events. This was also my impression from participating in and observing his week-long workshop. Dr. Woolger says that typically the core memories are real, but that the person naturally tends to embellish (i.e., in their own frame of reference, based on their own personal knowledge of history) to fill in the details.
A further issue, also addressed by Dr. Woolger, is the nature of imagination itself. We in the West tend to assume that imagination is entirely bogus, put together from previous memories which were gained in the usual way. However, there is another way of understanding imagination--as the surface level of intuition. Sufi master Inayat Khan also taught that imagination is the beginning stage of intuition, and that intuition in turn can deepen into direct mystical vision. Thus, when a person is perceiving something of a psychic nature, he is learning to work with a faculty which is imagination at its surface, intuition a little further down, and direct vision at its depth.(2) It would be expected that the person would move up and down along this continuum--now seeing something directly, now intuiting it with mixed accuracy, now imagining.
There is another possibility, one which would probably not be well-received by the Cayce organization but which I feel, based on my limited experience with psychics, needs to be considered. That is that Cayce might not, in fact, have been directly accessing the akashic records as was interpreted, but rather was being given information by disincarnate people. (I believe there is such a thing as the akashic records, and I think it is probably accessible by very spiritually advanced persons, but for years I have had a nagging doubt that ordinary psychics can read it directly.) That would mean the information was passing through an interpretive "filter" before it got to him. From what I've seen, it's possible that the great majority of psychics rely on this kind of second-hand information. The disincarnate persons providing it, while perhaps having access to greater information than incarnate persons, may yet be fallible and subject to their own beliefs and prejudices. I don't believe they are omniscient simply as a result of being disincarnate.(3)
The important point is that scholarly research, and the data it yields, is always subject to interpretation--and that interpretation is always driven by the explicit or implicit assumptions of the person interpreting. In good research, the method itself is not so much tainted by the researcher's assumption-bias; but in poor research, even the method itself is thus tainted. In this case, the method seems objective (although it would have been nice if the researchers had taken more time with information-gathering, instead of estimating numbers by the "thickness of the index cards" when the work got too tedious), while Melton's underlying assumptions and conclusions are skewed. This can clearly be seen inasmuch as he did not first attempt to establish the degree of accuracy Cayce achieved in the medical diagnoses, which, unlike the past-life material, was more easily evaluated. Although the anonymity of the cases would prevent followup for most of them, there are cases where the results of the treatments are known. Further, the diagnoses and treatments could be judged as to their soundness in terms of current medical knowledge. Melton appears to have assumed that Cayce did not have any genuine psychic ability, and so while he recommends that the medical readings be studied, the fact remains that he didn't test for Cayce's psychic ability where it would have been easiest to verify. He tested for it where it would be most difficult to verify, and concluded what he already believed. (Taking the weakest case and knocking it down is called "straw man".)
Thus, the first step in this research should have been to study the medical readings, not the past-life readings. If the medical readings were found to have an accuracy above statistical chance, and/or were determined to show a knowledge of medicine well-beyond the reach of the waking Cayce, then the past-life readings--and any discrepancies in their literal intrepretation--would also have to be interpreted in terms of Cayce having genuine psychic ability, yielding radically different conclusions.
--Stephen S.
1) One can conceivably take the position that psychic readings of medical conditions are possible, while reincarnation doesn't exist. However, if one is open-minded enough to accept psychic medical readings as real, you would think that the strong evidence that exists for reincarnation would also be persuasive--unless psychic ability is acceptable in one's belief system, while reincarnation is not. One can also conclude, as some apparently have, that both psychic ability and reincarnation exist, but that Cayce was only competent in giving medical readings. I personally don't think this is very likely.
2) Another way of looking at this is that it is not the fact that something is of the mind and consciousness which gives it the quality of being insubstantial or illusory, as we interpret in the West. Rather, what matters is the degree of spiritual ignorance distorting our perception. We are all imagining all the time, including in our experience and interpretation of the physical world. Just because you can bang on something--or measure something or predict an outcome--doesn't mean you are experiencing it in its reality. To do that, you have to experience it in its true relation with the one Source. Starting with the same faculty we normally use to reach out with our imagination, we train this faculty until it becomes intuition, and then finally, direct perception. This kind of training requires, among other things, cleansing of the heart, and a correct balance between the heart and the mind. It isn't anti-science--a truly intuitive scientist makes the best scientist. The surprising conclusion, then, is that a scientist who is out of balance, using his intellect at the expense of his heart, who has not cleansed his heart, or who cannot experience things in their proper relation to the one Source, is missing reality even if he can make predictions, manipulate outcomes and build powerful machines. Our definition of reality is paltry, and so we accept such things as proof that something is true and not imagination. Perhaps what we experience as reality is actually crystallized imagination. Perhaps the true criterion for whether or not something is real is much more profound.
3) I have read, for example, about encounters with disincarnate people who do not believe in reincarnation. Since in my opinion reincarnation has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, this means that not all beliefs of disincarnate persons are accurate, i.e., merely by virtue of their being disincarnate, they do not become all-knowing. Since birth, to a disincarnate person, is tantamount to "death," denying reincarnation, for them, would be tantamount to death-denial, and probably would carry with it a strong personal incentive.