Perhaps everything that ever happens, including our thoughts and memories, is stored in permanent “Akashic records,” a cosmic memory field hidden in yet unknown aspects of reality.
In “Esoteric Buddhism” (London, Chapman and Hall, 1885, available online as a free download), A.P. Sinnett was among the first to note that early Buddhism “held to a permanency of records in the Akâsa, and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evoluted to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”
The term, derived from akasha (ākāśa), a Sanskrit word for ether or space, was popularized in the West by Theosophy writers including Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky thought of the Akasha as “indestructible tablets of the astral light [with] the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform.” In modern terminology, we can think of the Akasha as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.
In “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum,” mathematician Ralph Abraham and physicist Sisir Roy quote the polymath genius Ervin Laszlo:
“A universal information and memory field could exist in nature, associated with the fundamental element of physical reality physicists call the unified field… Honoring an ancient insight, this is the aspect or dimension of the unified field that I have called the Akashic Field.” – Ervin Laszlo
A version of “Demystifying the Akasha” is available online as a free download. Sisir Roy, the author of “Statistical Geometry and Applications to Microphysics and Cosmology,” is a physicist interested in the geometry of quantum space-time near the Planck scale. Ralph Abraham is a top mathematician and maverick scientist who, besides the acclaimed textbook “Foundation of Mechanics” on advanced mathematical physics, wrote about esoteric aspects of mind and physical reality with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
In his preface to Laszlo’s “The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness,” Abraham wrote: “When a great grand unified theory will appear it will very likely conform to the prophetic vision of Ervin Laszlo.” After “The Connectivity Hypothesis,” Laszlo wrote a simplified but thoughtful account of his ideas in “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything,” and then several related books.
“Demystifying the Akasha” is a short and compact book that covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, and recent advances in quantum gravity theories and the digital physics of discrete space-times. Fully understanding everything requires specialized knowledge of all those fields, but the book is readable and has something for everyone. The references, a careful selection of the best related writings, fill the gaps in the book.
“We have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum, originally due to Requardt and Roy, as a model for consciousness,” note the authors. “Demystifying the Akasha” includes the full text of the 2001 article by Requardt and Roy titled “(Quantum) Space-Time as a Statistical Geometry of Fuzzy Lumps and the Connection with Random Metric Spaces.”
Modern quantum physics shows that the vacuum, the simplest configuration of space-time, has a complex dynamic structure. “The quantum vacuum is a seething froth sparkling with elementary particles emerging from nowhere in pairs, and after a very short time, vanishing again as they came,” write Abraham and Roy. A fundamental information field associated with the quantum vacuum is, according to Laszlo, “the deepest and most fundamental level of physical reality in the universe.”
Abraham and Roy build a model for the fundamental field based on a “pre-geometry” of dynamic cellular networks – huge graphs with internal dynamics similar to cellular automata – that exist beyond space-time, and from which the geometry of space-time is derived. The pre-geometry “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Ordinary space and time emerge from pre-geometry.
Abraham and Roy don’t intend to propose a “final” unified theory of everything (there is no “final” in science). Rather, they intend to show a template mathematical model of reality, compatible with current scientific knowledge, which includes an Akashic information and memory field. “Our intention is to contribute a theory, more precisely a mathematical model, in which all paranormal phenomena may be understood, including quantum entanglement and the measurement problem.”
I have always realized that Akashic field theories are related to my own ideas on technological resurrection, but now I am realizing that they are essentially equivalent.
Following Fedorov and the Russian Cosmists, I have often argued that future scientists equipped with “magic” space-time technologies will be able to resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future.” For such a thing to be possible, it’s necessary that the information needed to resurrect the dead – life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings – exists somewhere out there. In other words, there must be an Akashic memory field. Conversely, if the Akashic field exists, future scientists could resurrect the dead by solving the engineering problem of how to read the Akashic records.
Therefore, following Laszlo, I will honor the ancient Akashic insights and use the term “Akashic physics” for the yet unknown physical theories upon which future resurrection technologies could be based. If seems very plausible that, as Abraham and Roy argue, future Akashic physics will be able to explain all sorts of “paranormal” phenomena.
In passing, I think the term “paranormal” is misleading because, if something happens, then it is normal, but “paranormal” is easily understandable: it includes telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, reincarnation and related phenomena that can be physically explained if the mind can extract information from the cosmic Akashic records.
There is a roadblock in the quest for Akashic physics. Apparently, information is irreversibly erased from the universe all the time. In the current standard formulation of quantum physics, information is erased in principle by the collapse of the quantum wave-function, and even in classical (non-quantum) physics information is erased in practice due to chaotic dissipation. Viable theories of Akashic physics should keep the apparently lost information safely stored.
For example, in Everett’s “Many-Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics (MWI) the collapse of the wave-function is local to the single branch of the multiverse that our senses perceive, and the apparently lost information is scattered to other branches. Therefore, information is preserved in Everett’s multiverse, which is a possible stage for Akashic physics. In “The Fabric of Reality,” physicist David Deutsch shows that other times are just special cases of other universes. Therefore, the apparently lost information – including the life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings of everyone who ever lived – are out there in the Akashic multiverse, and future scientists could search for – and find – ways to retrieve it.
In the opening quote, A.P. Sinnett was (probably) thinking of spiritual rather than technological means to read the Akashic records, but Robert Pirsig’s words come to mind:
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.” – Robert Pirsig
The scientific literature is full of ideas that could be useful in the quest for Akashic physics. Which ideas will break through? I think it’s much too early to tell. However, I will start a collaborative meta-research (research on research) project titled “Akashic Physics Roadmap” to scan scientific articles and books and find, review, cross-reference, and discuss the most interesting and promising ideas. I hope the project will be at least inspiring for the participants and permit developing some kind of rough roadmap.
A question is which web framework is the best for the project. I am thinking on a wiki based on Mediawiki (like Wikipedia), either with access control (only authorized users can contribute), or completely open (everyone can contribute). Comments and suggestions welcome.
I am happy to announce that Sisir Roy has accepted to give a talk at the forthcoming “India Awakens” conference, now in its early planning phase, which will explore Akashic physics as part of the convergence of Eastern and Western thinking.
Image from sgeier.net
Note: Of course the ideas of Laszlo, Abraham and Roy are attacked by atheists because they sound like religion. “Must we give up the freedom from Enlightenment and return to the dark ages of superstition, replacing God, the Bible and the Catholic Church for the quantum consciousness and the Akashic field, whatever those may be,” notes an atheist blogger.
Most professional scientists take special care to hide the more “mystical” implications of their work behind layers of innocuous scientific jargon to protect themselves from the academic thought-police.