Anyone who has ever had a reading from Edgar Cayce knows that the language in which it was couched was often very hard to understand. A person coming upon the involved phrases and expressions for the first time might well wonder if it is not a case of making the waters muddy so that they may appear to be deep. Such a suspicion is not unnatural; but any person who has made a careful, impartial, and thorough study of the material knows that it is quite unfounded. Although what one critic called the "rambling, redundant, ambiguous, and evasive verbal meanderings" there ran a current of high and genuine import. Thousands of people whose physical health has been transformed and whose psychological difficulties resolved by the contents of the readings will testify to this fact.

But the question remains: Why WAS the language so odd? Why the psychic double-talk? Why not come out and say, "this is a spade" instead of pussy-footing around with, "this as we find, has to do with not the consciousness in spirituality (as commonly conceived) but rather the consciousness in materiality, as condensed in what is known as, or called, in the present, an implement of spading, or a spade."