"What Is...?" Wednesday

The Akashic Record

A theosophical term that refers to an "universal filing system" which records every occurring thought, word, and action. The records are impressed on a subtle substance called "akasha" (akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or "aether") . In Hindu mysticism this akasha is thought to be the primary principle of nature from which the other four natural principles, fire, air, earth, and water, are created.

Information about these Akashic Records can be found in folklore,  myth, and throughout the Old and New Testaments. It can be traced at least as far back as the Semitic peoples (and includes the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, and the Hebrews). Among each of these peoples was the belief that there was in existence some kind of celestial tablets which contained the history of humankind as well as all manner of spiritual information.

A more modern example  regarding the Akashic Records comes from the clairvoyant work of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), a Christian mystic and founder of A.R.E. For forty-three years of his adult life, Edgar Cayce claimed the uncanny ability to lie down on a couch, close his eyes, fold his hands over his stomach, and put himself into some kind of an altered state in which virtually any type of information was available. The results of  some 14,000 of his  readings are currently contained at the Cayce headquarters. 

Skeptics often argue that the concept of Akashic Records has been attributed indiscriminately and inappropriately to a wide range of historical religious figures and movements and  this theory has also been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.  Just how the scientific community  is able todismiss theories that cannot be seen, touched  or quantified (such as The Akashic Record) and retains  other conceptual theories (such as those  found in Quantum Mechanics), is a topic for another day.