How to Develop Your Psychic Ability Part 2
By Edgar Cayce
[Note: The following article is based on a lecture given by Edgar Cayce on 6/30/1932 at his home in Virginia Beach for the First Annual Congress of the A.R.E. It is included in the report document for reading 5752-2.]
Another definition of psychic forces would be found by comparing the finite and the infinite. These convey entirely different impressions to our minds.
The finite mind pertains wholly to our faculties or abilities—which may feed the soul, provided we give it whatever may build to sustain its life. But the infinite mind, about which the first question would be, "How can you know the infinite?" cannot be discerned through reason. It is the finite mind which tries to reason, to distinguish and to define by comparison—processes which are only a portion of the faculties called psychic forces. Thus infinite mind is outside the realm of ordinary reasoning. We can comprehend the infinite only by a faculty that is superior to reason. That faculty is the psychic force. One must enter a state in which the finite self no longer exists!
So often we pray as did the old lady who prayed for the hill to be moved; and every morning she looked out and said, "It is still there. I knew it would be."
We haven't gotten out of our finite reasoning self, so that the infinite can come in and aid. We must develop the faculty between the finite and the infinite, so that the infinite may become a portion of us. We seek to become one with the infinite by the reduction of our soul to its simplest self—its divine essence—and realize this union and identity.
Now, we might well go back and question how man developed this personality (finite) and how he lost his individuality, by losing the place he occupied with his Creator, in the beginning. This individuality is ever seeking to find expression through the faculties with which man has been endowed; for through these there may come expressions of the infinite, or God, into our lives.
We know that we have gradually lost our association, by our inability to close off our outer finite selves. In other words, we have thought so much about ourselves and the supplying of the needs of the physical, that we have gratified the fleshly desires until we have forgotten there is still an association of our soul with its Maker. That association is what we may choose to term psychic forces, or psychic abilities.
No one would deny that such faculties may be used by those who lose their physical consciousness; or that they may be discerned in a gathering which has been attuned to influences from within or without.
When we attempt to be very close to—or even on speaking terms with—our God, do we expect an answer? When we pray, do we always expect to get an answer? We must lose the finite self and be willing to be used, in whatsoever way or manner He sees fit. "Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him." He was not found among his brethren, because his faith was counted to him for righteousness. If our faith or if our abilities for that psychic faculty we all possess have been so abused and we have allowed them to be ridiculed because we see visions or hear things; then we have built a barrier which prevents the faculties latent within each individual from developing us toward the Infinite.
All that tends to purify and elevate the mind will assist us in this attainment, and will facilitate the approach and reoccurrence of these happy conditions. There are, then, different roads by which this end may be reached. The love of beauty which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One; that ascent of present science which makes the ambition of the philosopher; that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection—these all are the great highways conducting to the heights above the actual and the particular, where we may stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite which shines out from the depths of the soul.
The adherence to and developing of the ability to see and appreciate the beautiful, the pure, and the lovely in everything and everybody we contact—everything within the scope of what affects our body, mind and heart—will develop in us the abilities to be in closer attunement with the Infinite. And this is developing our psychic abilities within.
The answer comes to each one of us, as to whether these abilities are worth developing or not. If we have the proper conception of what psychic means, then we know it is a faculty which exists—has existed, and is ours by birthright; because we are sons and daughters of God. We have the ability to make association with the Spirit; for "God is Spirit and seeks such to worship Him." John 4:23
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