Edgar Cayce on Human Origins 

People usually demand a beginning, so in the beginning there was a sea of spirit and it filled all of space. The spirit was static, content, and aware of itself. It was a giant resting on the bosom of its thought and contemplating what it is.

Then the spirit moved into action. It withdrew into itself until all of space was empty. In the center, the sparkling mind of the spirit shone. This was the beginning of the individuality of the spirit. This was what the spirit discovered itself to be when it awakened. This spirit was God.

God desired self-expression and desired companionship; therefore, God projected the cosmos and souls. The cosmos was built with music, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, system, and balance. The building blocks were all of the same material - the life essence - God simply changed the wavelength and rate of vibration of these building blocks thereby creating the patterns for multitudes of life forms. This action resulted in the law of diversity which supplied endless patterns. God played on this law of diversity as a pianist plays on a piano - producing melodies and arranging them in a symphony.

Each design carried within it the plan for its evolution - both physical and spiritual. This plan corresponds to the sound of a note struck on a piano. The sounds of several notes unite to make a chord; chords in turn become phrases; phrases become melodies; melodies intermingle and move back and forth, across and between and around each other, to make a symphony. Then in the end, the music will stop and the physical universe will be no more; but between the beginning and the finish of the music, there was glorious beauty and a glorious experience. The spiritual universe will continue on.

Everything assumed its design in various forms and their activity resulted in the laws of attraction and repulsion. All forms would attract and repel each other in their evolutionary dance.

All things are a part of God and an expression of God's thought. The Mind of God was the force which propelled and perpetuated these thoughts. All minds, as thoughts of God, do everything God imagined. Everything which came into being is an aspect of this One Mind.

All things, including the souls of individuals, were created as "fractals" of God for companionship with God - the "Whole." This revelation from Cayce revealed the astonishing fact of how self-similar the universe is on every scale: from the atom to biological organisms, from human beings to the planet Earth, from solar systems to galaxies, from the universe(s) to God.

The pattern God used to create souls was the pattern of God's own Spirit. The spirit is life. From the spirit, the mind builds patterns. From the mind, the physical creation is the result. This is how the spirit, the mind, and individuality, became the pattern for souls. This is how cause, action, and effect became the pattern for everything. First there was the spirit (the first cause); then there was the action which withdrew spirit into itself; then there was the resulting individuality of God.

The spirit of the individual existed before the soul of the individual was created. The spirit keeps the knowledge of its identity with God. The soul has the ability to experience the activities of the mind in a manner separate from God.

Thus, new individuals issued from God and remained dependent upon God; but individuals were also aware of an existence apart from God. Individuals were given the power to choose (free will) and direct their own activity. Without free will, it would only remain a part of the individuality of God. The mind, issuing as a force from God, would naturally fulfill God's thoughts unless directed otherwise. The power to do this - to direct the force of mind individually from God - is free will. And the record or memory of this freedom is the soul. The soul began with its first expression of free will  through the force of mind. The first thought the spirit generated from free will - the first diversion of the force of mind from its normal path of unity with God - was the beginning of the soul.

The nucleus of the soul was the balance of positive and negative forces equal in power. These forces produce harmonious activities: the positive force initiates, impregnates, and thrusts forward; while its polar negative force receives, nourishes, and ejects. The steps of this evolutionary process are also the stages of the thought process: perception, reflection, and opinion.

Thus, the soul consists of two states of consciousness: (1) the spirit which bears a knowledge of its identity with God, and (2) the soul which bears a knowledge of everything it experienced.

The plan for the soul is a cycle of experience unlimited in scope and duration. Through this evolutionary cycle, the soul will come to know the creation in all its aspects at the discretion of the will. The cycle would be completed when the desire of the will was no longer different from the thought of God. The consciousness of the soul would then merge with its spiritual consciousness of its identity with God. Then the soul will return to its source as the companion it was intended to be.

As a companion, the soul would remain conscious of its separate individuality and would be aware of its own free will as it now acted as a part of God, but not diverting its mind because it was in agreement with God's influence on the mind of the soul. Until this state of at-one-ment was reached, the soul would not be a companion in the true sense of the word.

The idea of returning to God means a loss of individuality is paradoxical, since God is aware of everything happening and must therefore be aware of the consciousness of each individual. The return of the soul is the return of the image to whom imagined it. The consciousness of the individual - its soul record - could not be destroyed without destroying a part of God. When a soul returns to God it becomes aware of itself not only as a part of God, but as a part of every other soul, and everything.

What is lost is the ego - the desire to do other than the desire of God. When the soul returns to God, the ego is voluntarily relinquished. This is the symbology behind the crucifixion of Christ.

The plan for the soul included experiencing of all creation, but it did not necessarily mean participating in all forms and substance. Nor did it mean souls can interfere with the creation. Nor did it mean souls are to spin their own little worlds, twisting and bending laws to make images of their dreams.

But these things could happen. The soul was the greatest thing God made because it has free will. Once free will was given, God did nothing to curb it. However it acted, it had to act within God's reality. By whatever route, the soul will return to God.

The apparent fact of the human body being a speck of dust on a small planet in a regular galaxy in a universe of galaxies can lead to the illusion of  humans being a small creation. But the soul is the unlimited activity of the mind and the grandeur of imagination.

At first there was little difference between the consciousness of the new individual (i.e., soul) and its consciousness of identity with God (i.e., spirit). Souls merely watched the flow of the Mind, somewhat as people daydreaming, marveling at its power and versatility. Then souls began to act itself, imitating and paralleling what Mind was doing. Gradually souls acquired experience, becoming a complementary rather than an imitative force. It helped to extend, modify, and regulate creation.

Certain souls became aggressive with their own power and began to experiment with it. They mingled with the dust of the stars and the winds of the spheres - feeling them - and becoming part of them. One result of this was an unbalance between the positive and negative forces. To feel things demanded the negative force. To express through things (and directing and managing them) required the positive force. Another result of souls becoming aggressive with their own power was the gradual weakening of the link between the two states of consciousness (i.e., spirit and the soul). Some souls became more concerned with and aware of their own creations rather than God's. This resulted in the fall of certain souls to an even lower consciousness. The Bible allegorically refers to this event as the Fall in the Garden of Eden and the revolt of the angels in the Book of Revelation. This event is also the basis for the cosmology of Christian Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism.

To enter into another level of creation and become part of it, the soul had to assume a new, or third consciousness - a physical form. Assuming a physical form is a way of experiencing that particular level of creation by means of a conscious mind (i.e., the third consciousness). Through the conscious mind, an individual can experience physical consciousness: the physical body, the five senses, the glandular and nervous systems. This transformation of consciousness does not apply everywhere at this level of creation. In other worlds and solar systems, the transformation may differ. One can only imagine the number of these other worlds and the aspects of divine mind which they represent.

When a soul enters into another level of creation and its consciousness, it separated itself temporarily from the consciousness of its own soul, and became even further removed from the consciousness of its spirit. Thus, instead of helping to direct the flow of creation and contributing to it, the soul found itself in the stream and drifting along with it. The farther the soul traveled from the shore, the more it succumbed to the pull of the current and the more difficult was the task of getting back to land.

Planets and solar systems became a temptation to souls. Each solar system had its own course and its own plan. Souls moved toward them through the activity of a constant stream of mind. When a soul leaped into the stream (by immersing itself in the system through which the stream was flowing) it had the force of the current to contend with, and its free will was hampered. It was very easy, under these circumstances, to drift with the current.

Each solar system also represents an opportunity for development, advancement, and growth toward the ideal of complete companionship with God - the position of co-creator in the vast system of universal mind.

Our solar system also attracted souls. Since each solar system is a single expression of the divine, with its planets as integral parts, the Earth came into the path of souls.

Each solar system in the universe is like an atom in a universe of worlds. Atoms have quantum levels for electrons to travel around. The sun has "quantum levels" for planets to travel around. The planets of our solar system are physical representations of heavenly dimensions. These levels as a whole are the consciousness of our solar system. There are nine planetary-afterlife dimensions to the consciousness of our solar system. The planet Earth represents the third dimension where three-dimensional life is experienced in our solar system.

The Earth is an expression of Divine Mind with its own laws, its own plan, and its own evolution. Souls, longing to feel the beauty of the seas, the winds, the forest, and the flowers, mixed with them and expressed themselves through them. They also mingled with the animals, and made thought forms in imitation of them. Souls played at creating and imitated God. But this interfered with the evolutionary plan of the Earth. Thus, the stream of mind carrying out this plan for the Earth gradually drew souls into its current. Souls had to evolve into the bodies they had themselves created.

This entanglement of souls into physical form was a probability from the beginning. But God did not know when it would happen until the souls, of their own free will, had caused it to happen.

All souls were created by God in the very beginning - before the universe was created. No other souls have been created since then. This means all souls on this planet, pre-existed before birth. Of the souls which God created, only a comparative few have entered into the experience of our solar system. Many other souls have gone through or are going through a similar entanglement in other solar systems in the universe.

A way to liberate the souls entangled in matter was created. A physical form became available as a vehicle for the soul on Earth. A way became available for souls to enter the Earth and experience it as part of their evolutionary/reincarnation cycle. Of the physical forms already existing on Earth, a species of anthropoid ape-man most nearly approached the necessary pattern. Souls descended on these apes - hovering above and about them rather than inhabiting them - and influenced them to move toward a different goal from the simple one they had been pursuing. They came down out of the trees, built fires, made tools, lived in communities, and began to communicate with each other. Eventually they lost their animal look, shed bodily hair, and took on refinements of manner and habit.

The evolution of the human body occurred partly through the soul's influence on the endocrine glands until the ape-man was a three-dimensional objectification of the soul hovering above it. Then the soul fully descended into the body and Earth had a new inhabitant: the homo sapien.

Homo sapiens appeared in five different places on Earth at the same time, as the five races. This evolved human is what the Bible refers to as "Adam". When souls incarnated into physical form, it would bring the divine consciousness (i.e., the spirit) in with it. Cayce referred to this divine consciousness as the "Christ Consciousness" or "Buddhahood" or the "superconsciousness". Christ consciousness has little to do with the personality known as Jesus. It means a person has attained a complete human-divine unity. This human-divine unity has been attained by many people thus far - one such person was Jesus.

The problem for the soul entangled in flesh was to overcome the attractions of the Earth to the extent the soul would be as free in the body as out of it. Only when the body was no longer a hindrance to the free express of the soul would the cycle of Earth be finished. This is the condition of having a perfect unity of the human with the divine.

In a smaller field, this was the evolutionary drama of free will and creation. In a still smaller field, each atom of the physical body is a world in itself where a drama of free will and creation is occurring. The soul brings life into each atom, and each atom is a physical reflection of the soul's pattern.

With the advent of consciousness, humans became aware of sex meaning something more to them than to the animals. Sex is the "door" which new souls enter the Earth, a door unnecessary in other heavenly planetary/realms. Sex is the only means which trapped souls have of being liberated from their predicament - through the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

The plan for the Earth cycle of souls was a limited series of incarnations with periods in between of dwelling in other heavenly dimensions of consciousness. Reincarnation would continue until a soul's every thought and action of the physical body was in accord with the plan originally laid out for the soul (i.e., a human-divine unity, Christ consciousness). When the body was no longer a hindrance to the free expression of the soul - when the conscious mind had merged with the subconscious, the Earth cycle was finished and the soul liberated to move on to new adventures. This conquest of the physical body could not be attained until there was perfection in the other dimensions of consciousness which are physically represented by our solar system. Astrologically, the goal for the soul is to attain a level of consciousness representing the total divine expression of the sun and its planets. Whichever level of consciousness the soul assumes, it becomes the focal point of activity. The other states of consciousness receded to the position of urges and influences.

The human race was fostered by a soul who had completed his experience of creation, attained Christhood, returned to God, and became a companion to God and a co-creator. This is the soul known as Jesus. The first evolutionary transformation of ape-men to homo sapiens is who the Bible refers to as "Adam". This was the beginning of the divine consciousness into flesh on the Earth. The soul known as Jesus, was one of the first souls to enter into one of the Adamic races.

The soul of Jesus was interested in the plight of its fellow souls trapped in Earth. After supervising the influx of souls into flesh, the Christ soul took form itself, from time to time, to act as a leader for the people.

At first, these souls just slightly inhabited the bodies of ape-men while remembering their true identities as spirit beings. But gradually, after many incarnations, these souls descended even further into physical consciousness and the result was a decrease in their spiritual mentality. They remembered their true selves only in dreams and in fables which were handed down from one generation to another. Religion came into being as a ritual of longing for lost spirit memories. The arts were born which included music and geometry. This knowledge was brought into the world from incoming souls who gradually forgot their heavenly source. This knowledge had to be written down, learned, and taught to each new generation.

Finally, humans were left with a conscious mind separated from their own individuality as souls. This individual identity as a soul became the subconscious mind. The individual identity or awareness of the physical world became the conscious mind. The subconscious mind (i.e., the soul) influenced the conscious mind and gave it its stature and quality. The subconscious mind dwelt in the "suit of clothes" which is the physical body and only in sleep is it disrobed.

Conscious minds, left to its own influence, will work out the plans and desires of God. Humans eventually developed theories for what they felt was true, but no longer knew to be true. The result was the creation of philosophy and theology. Humans searched and discovered higher knowledge which they carried within themselves but could no longer reach with the conscious mind. This resulted in the creation of science.

Humans evolved from having an awareness of higher spirit knowledge to having only mystical dreams, revealed religions, philosophy and theology. This evolution of consciousness ultimately reached a plateau and humans generally only believed what they could see and feel and prove in terms of their conscious minds. Then humanity began the struggle of regaining this higher knowledge.

Meanwhile, the Christ soul continued to teach and lead humanity by incarnating as the Biblical characters named Adam, Enoch, and Melchizedek. Enoch and Melchizedek experienced neither birth nor death. Then Christ soul realized after these incarnations it was necessary to give humanity a pattern by which they could follow in order to return to God. The Christ soul achieved this goal by incarnating as the personality known as Jesus, who became victorious over the death of the physical body by laying aside the ego, accepting the crucifixion of the body in order to return to God. Jesus created a pattern for humans to follow. Through the acts of leading a perfect life and becoming unjustly killed, this reversed the negative karma (i.e., the law of God, an eye for an eye) which came from Jesus' first incarnation as Adam.

At present, humanity is in a state of great spiritual darkness - the darkness which precedes dawn. Humanity developed a level of skepticism which reached a point where it forced humans to make conclusions they knew was intuitively wrong. At the same time, humanity continued their investigation of natural phenomena to the point where conscious awareness disproved all the higher knowledge souls had acquired in the beginning. The free will of humanity is discovering how all roads to higher knowledge leads toward the same destination and conclusions. Scientific, theological, and philosophical knowledge, which has no desire to join forces, are approaching a point of merger. Skepticism faces destruction by its own hand.

Humanity is at all times the total of what they have been and done, what they have fought and defended, and what they have hated and loved. In the three-dimensional consciousness of every human, in every atom of the human body, is a reflection of the soul and a crystallization of their individuality. Their emotional and nervous structures, their mental abilities, aptitudes, aversions, preferences, fears, follies, ambitions, and character, are the sum of what humans have done with their free will. This makes every personality, as the earthly "cloak" of an individuality, is different from every other personality.

The law of karma, which is Earth's law of cause and effect ("of reaping what one sows") also makes humans different from one another in their joys and sorrows, in their handicaps, their strengths, their weaknesses, their virtues and vices, their appreciation of beauty, and their comprehension of truth. Transgressions humans make in life must be corrected in life, if not in the same life, then in a future incarnation. The Earth's natural law, not the law humanity or God, demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

This same law applies to groups of people, as they act together. There is karma for families, for tribes, for races, and for nations. For example, when a nation of individuals started a war in a previous lifetime and are reincarnated, a war will be committed against that nation. Only when such a nation is defeated in humility by a nation with justice and mercy, will the karma of war be lifted from the defeated nation.

Every person's life is shaped to some extent by karma: their own, their associates, their loved ones, their nation, their race, and the entire world itself. But karma is not greater than free will. It is what a person does with these influences and urges, how they react to them, which makes the difference in their soul development. Because of karma, some things are more probable than others, but as long as there exists free will, anything is possible.

Thus free will and predestination coexist within human beings. Their past experiences limit them in probability and incline them in certain directions, but free will can always "draw the sword from the stone." The combination of free will and predestination means humans freely choose their own predetermined destiny to return to God.

No soul incarnates without having a general plan for the life to be experienced. The personality a person expresses in life is only one of the many personalities (i.e., facets of the soul) a person can express. The mission of every soul is to work on one or several facets of the soul's karma (which can be thought of as the soul's memory of its prior actions). A soul does not choose a mission which is more than the soul can handle or which is too much for the personality assigned to or chosen by the soul. Some souls can freely choose their own conditions in which to be born and complete their missions. Other souls who have made too many mistakes in past lives and who have become dangerously influenced by worldly desires, are incarnated into conditions chosen by law of karma at a time and under circumstances best suited to help them with their karmic debt. Their mission is seldom perfectly fulfilled because of the such a soul's large amount of negative karma. Their mission is sometimes badly neglected.

The circumstances and conditions a soul chooses to incarnate into is usually made at conception, when a channel for a soul's expression is opened by the parents. When this occurs, a pattern is made by the mingling of the soul patterns of the parents. This sets up certain karmic conditions. A soul whose own karma approximates these karmic conditions will be attracted to the opportunity presented. Since the karmic pattern created by the parents will not be exactly the same the incarnating soul's own karma, the soul must take on some of the karma of the parents.

Conditions other than the created pattern are conditions the soul must consider when choosing a body to be born with. Such conditions include: the future of the incarnated person's life, former associations with the parents, the incarnation of souls it wishes to incarnate with, live with, and with whom the soul will have problems to work out with. In some cases the parents are the only reason for a some souls to incarnate. Such a child will be devoted to them and remain close to them. The child then completes its mission by dying so the child's death can teach the parents very valuable lessons in life and of spirit. In other cases, the parents are only used as a means for which the child can leave home and go about its business in completing its mission.

The soul may actually occupy a fetus as early as three months after conception or even as late as a month after birth. In the latter case, the soul hovers over the infants body since birth to decide whether or not to occupy it. Once the decision is made and the occupation completed, the separation between the conscious mind (i.e., personality) and subconscious mind (i.e., the soul) takes place and the soul record (i.e., memory) of the child begins. The fact that some babies are miscarried does not mean it was refused as a vehicle for a soul. Just the opposite is true. The opportunity to incarnate was taken away from the soul due to natural forces and this made the occupation of that particular body impossible.

The personality is a facet of the soul's individuality experienced in three-dimensional consciousness (i.e., body, soul, spirit). The other facets of the soul remains in shadow - in the background. It gives tone to the personality through its urges, appreciations, tastes, avocations, and intuition.

A particular personality of an individual is shaped by three or four incarnations. The emotions and talents of a person reflects these past incarnations. A person's dreams, visions, and meditations are reflections of the soul's experience in other dimensions (i.e., heavenly realms) of consciousness associated physically by our solar system. The human intellect was created from the stars and planets. The intellect is the mind force of the soul which is conditioned by its previous incarnations on Earth and its experiences in other dimensions and even in other solar systems. The intellect becomes dimmed or brightened by its recent experiences within the three-dimensional consciousness of the solar system and the experiences within other dimensional realms of consciousness.

Thus, a personality is only one facet of the soul. The soul may incarnate as any facet to express that particular portion of itself. As a soul approaches its completion of the solar cycle of consciousness, the personality becomes more multi-sided and expresses greater facets of the soul. This is because each incarnation "burns off" negative karma which requires less and less attention. Finally, the personality will become a complete expression of the soul and the cycle of reincarnation is finished for the soul.

As the soul succumbs to worldly desires by abandoning its intellect for sensuality, it becomes more and more one-sided.

When the individual has attained complete human-divine unity, its cycle of reincarnations is finished, the soul is liberated, and the soul then merges with its spirit and, therefore, with God. The soul record (memory) is forever retained. This record is, at all times, is the sum total of what the soul personality has been: all it has thought, all it has experienced; all it has eaten, drunk, and felt through the ages.

Thus, as the soul is subjected to reincarnation, both the atheist and the religionist are correct. The atheist believes the personality does not survive after death. The religionist believes the soul is judged after death by its Creator. Substituting "personality" for "soul", both are expressing the truth. The personality is evaluated after death and then returns to the soul which created it, thereby giving up its own independent existence and becoming once again a facet of the soul. This process is different from the process where the soul merges with the spirit after it completes its cycles of reincarnation.

With each incarnation into the physical realm (the solar system) and the other realms of consciousness, the general plan for perfecting the soul proceeds. Another facet of the soul is assumed and incarnated to experience tribulation in order to reinforce the character of the soul's entire personality.

The trials and tribulations of individuals, groups, nations, and races, are dealt with time and time again through free will until they are solved. Then souls are free to journey to other worlds, or other solar systems, or other universes, or other dimensions of the hierarchy of consciousness.