All right, I shouldn't have gone. Common sense told me to stay home, but my curiosity got the better of me because I felt like the only person, dead or alive, on the planet or off, who had never been to a psychic fair. Yes, I can attest that there are a lot of dead people at psychic fairs. If you squint your eyes and hold your tongue just right you can see them.

Dead people, healers and readers of every sort, just not the ones I wanted to see. I thought if one more person came up to me and offered to heal me, I'd deck ‘em.

And prophets. Good grief, the prophets.

Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet," prophesied that this would happen. Now that it's common knowledge that we're all psychic to some degree, too many have rushed out, bought a candle and made a career change. Oh, puleeeeze. Stop it already.

Stop it, or at least back it down a little, until we go back and re-read Hugh Lynn Cayce's book, Venture Inward, A Guide to the Doorways to Inner Exploration, A.R.E. Press, 1964, 5^th printing 2002. Hugh Lynn was Edgar's son. Yes, I know Hugh Lynn is dead (no, he was not present at the psychic fair and neither was Edgar, though both of them were expected any minute). I wish everyone who is interested in psychic ability would read the part in Hugh Lynn's book about how a bewildering blend of nonsense, filth, and homespun philosophy comes out of a subconscious mind that is very willing to fool the conscious in order to gain authority and recognition (pp. 127-128). According to Hugh Lynn, the subconscious is the name of the game, and the jungles of Yucatan are well-marked city streets in comparison.

On more than one occasion Hugh Lynn Cayce warned, "People, the subconscious mind is a garbage pit." Edgar Cayce seems to have been more tactful than Hugh Lynn when he referred to the subconscious as the storehouse of every act, thought, or deed, every patterned response of the past, such as addictions and habits, and every memory, both relevant and irrelevant. The Edgar Cayce readings say the subconscious is where the ego self lives and can easily act as a barrier to accurate prophecy. Many of these phony psychics running around don't know they're phony because they don't know enough about how psychic ability works even to know they are phonies.

Accurate prophecy:

We glean from the Edgar Cayce readings that for predictions to be accurate, the soul mind joins with the soul of the soul. One way of saying it is, the imaginative forces form memories of the future- precognitive visions. At the level of the soul's soul there is no time. With time out of the way the mind of the soul connects with the soul of the soul, taps into the Infinite so to speak, makes the quantum leap into Infinity, then charges back through the barrier of the subconscious - which knows only the present, not the past and future - and presents the information.

Inaccurate Prophecy:

If the barrier of the sub conscious is not cleared completely, the visions get mangled and become blurred and/or inaccurate. But this mangling occurs at a level unperceived by the conscious mind of the "prophet" or psychic.

Certainly there are legitimate psychics but even they have their problems. When Cayce gave a reading, someone acting as a "director," usually his wife or his secretary, would ask questions of the sleeping Cayce. Cayce said if the mind of the person directing a reading was "wishy-washy, willy-nilly," the same could be expected of the information derived.

Cayce compared the way the subconscious mind reflects distorted images to the way a "mirror may be waved or bended to reflect an obtuse manner." (Cayce talked funny when giving these readings.) He said the way in which the question is asked may affect the answer given. The suggestion itself may "bend the reflection of that given; (but) the image itself is what is reflected and not that of some other." In other words, what we believe to be psychic information coming from someone else may be nothing more than a distorted reflection of ourselves - or worse yet, the fortune teller!

Is it possible to obtain an accurate reading under carnival conditions?

Probably not. Accurate soothsaying seems to depend on how we perceive ourselves. The subconscious may distort the images, like carnival mirrors. If we have a problem with self-perception we may ask, like the wicked queen, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" If we aren't seeing ourselves clearly, the subconscious may lie, out of a sense of self-preservation.

During one particular reading, Cayce experienced an unpleasant, "extraordinary physical reaction," caused, he said, by "the seeking of irrelevant questions." Later, he said each person present during a reading should seek the protection of the Christ Consciousness; that each should lay aside the conscious self and "enter in communication with the highest that may be attained in self. And those who cannot conform should not be present."

So much for readings at psychic fairs.