The Akashic Records: How a Sanskrit Word for Space Became a Cosmic Library
The phrase “Akashic records” was first used in 1899, but the idea behind it was put together from many pieces: a Sanskrit word for space, a mathematician’s library in the air, a French magician, Theosophy, Edgar Cayce, hypnotherapists and physicists.
This is a shorter version. The full audio/video covers the older traditions as well, see links below.
A hotel room in Dayton, 1923
October 1923, a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. The curtains are drawn against the afternoon. Edgar Cayce lies on the couch with his hands folded over his stomach, and his eyelids are starting to flutter, the way they always do when he comes up out of a trance.
Across the room sits Arthur Lammers, a well-off printer fascinated by astrology and by Theosophy. He is the one who asked the questions this afternoon. Near the door sits Gladys Davis, a young woman who has taken down every word Cayce said in shorthand.
Cayce opens his eyes. He doesn’t remember any of it. He never does. For more than twenty years he has put himself to sleep, answered questions about people’s illnesses in a voice that isn’t quite his own, and woken up with no memory of what he said. So he asks what came out.
Gladys reads him the notes. Speaking in trance, Cayce has just told Lammers that he has lived before. That he was a monk, in another century, in another body.
Cayce teaches Sunday school. He is a devout Christian from Kentucky, forty-six years old, and he has read the Bible cover to cover forty-six times, once for every year of his life. Past lives aren’t in the church he sits in on Sundays. Yet those words came out of his own mouth, and the pages are right there in Gladys’s hand.
He can ask her to tear them up, call the afternoon a mistake, and go back to the medical readings that have helped so many sick people. Or he can leave the pages where they are and keep listening to whatever it is that speaks through him.
That afternoon is where the modern story of the Akashic Records begins. The idea is that everything ever done, said or thought is written down somewhere, and that it can be read. The phrase itself is barely more than a century old. The pieces it was built from are older.
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The word: ākāśa
The word comes from India. In the oldest Sanskrit literature, ākāśa means space, or sky, the open expanse that holds everything. Indian thinkers taught that the world is built from five great elements: earth, water, fire, air and ākāśa.
ākāśa is the subtlest of them. It has no weight, no color and no shape you can touch. It is the first to appear, and the others unfold from it.
Each element was given one defining quality. Earth has smell, water has taste, fire has sight, air has touch. And ākāśa has sound. In this way of thinking, sound doesn’t merely travel through space. Sound is the quality space carries, the way water carries wetness.
Walk into an empty cathedral and say something quietly, and the room answers. A footstep comes back to you a moment later. The silence there feels full, as though the building were holding every sound ever made inside it.
In the Chandogya Upanishad, a man of immense learning named Narada goes to the sage Sanatkumara and says that for all his study, he has no peace. The sage leads him up a ladder of realities, each rung greater than the one below: name, speech, mind, will, and on upward through food, water and heat.
Above heat is ākāśa. In space the sun and moon exist, through space we call, we hear and we answer. And when Narada asks whether anything is greater than space, the sage says yes. Memory is greater than space.
The Indian sages never said that ākāśa records anything. It is space, and sound, and the room in which the world takes place. A great deal of time passes before anyone connects that room to a library.
Babbage’s library in the air
London, 1837. Charles Babbage, who has spent years building the enormous brass calculating machines that are the ancestors of every computer on Earth, is furious. The Earl of Bridgewater has left money in his will for eight scholarly books proving that nature shows the power and wisdom of God, and Babbage isn’t among the authors.
One of the chosen eight, William Whewell, even writes that mathematicians have nothing useful to say on the subject. So Babbage writes his own volume and calls it The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.
In the middle of it he explains something that sounds like science fiction. When you speak, your voice sets the air in motion. The particles you push move the ones beside them, and the motion spreads outward in every direction. It grows fainter and fainter, but it never reaches true zero.
So every word ever spoken is still present in the air, as a tiny trembling passed along for centuries, and a being with enough perception and enough mathematics could trace it back to the voice that made it.
The air itself, he writes, is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. The sea and the solid earth keep records too. No crime is ever truly hidden, because the world itself is the witness.
Babbage built a cosmic record with no scribe-god, no angel and no trance. It runs on physics.
In 1846 a German writer named Felix Eberty did the same for light. Light from any event travels outward through space and never stops, so somewhere, a being at exactly the right distance could be watching Earth’s history happen right now.
You can confirm part of this on any clear night. The light from a bright star left it years, centuries or even thousands of years ago. You are seeing the star as it was.
In America in the 1850s and 1860s, a geologist named William Denton worked with people he called psychometrists, who could hold a stone, a fossil or a piece of ancient pottery and describe scenes from its past.
A woman would press a fragment of rock to her forehead and speak of an ancient shoreline and animals no one alive had seen. Denton set out his idea in a book called The Soul of Things: matter takes in the pictures of whatever happens around it, the way a photographic plate does, and keeps them until a sensitive mind brings them out.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the universe was being imagined as a book that writes itself, in sound, in light and in stone.
Lévi and the astral light
Paris. Alphonse Louis Constant was the son of a poor shoemaker. He trained for the Catholic priesthood and rose as far as deacon, then fell in love and left. He became a radical socialist, and in the 1840s the French government locked him up for his pamphlets. His marriage failed.
By the early 1850s he was in his forties, broke and out of roles, so he invented a new one. He took the pen name Éliphas Lévi, and in 1854 he published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Nearly every Western occultist who came after him either quoted it or argued with it.
At the center of the book is the astral light, a single subtle substance filling all of space, an invisible fire running through every object, every body and every mind.
Lévi taught that the astral light receives and keeps the images of everything that happens. Every form in the world sends its likeness into this light, and our imagination is the organ that can look at it. A seer who sees the past or the future is reading images in the astral light.
And when a medium calls up the spirit of a dead person, what usually appears is not the person but their image, kept in the light like a photograph that moves.
He added a warning later writers never forgot. The astral light is double-edged. A person who drifts into it passively, through drink, a wild imagination or unguarded mediumship, gets swept along and sees distortions and lies. Only a trained, balanced will can command it.
His influence is sitting in a bookstore near you. Lévi matched the twenty-two major arcana of the tarot to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and nearly every deck designed since follows his arrangement.
Blavatsky and the tablets of ākāśa
October 1874, a farmhouse in the hills of Vermont, famous for séances. Henry Steel Olcott, a former army colonel sent to decide whether it’s all a fraud, notices a woman across the dinner table.
She is in her early forties, with a wild frizz of hair and a bright red shirt, rolling her own cigarettes at great speed and speaking English with a thick Russian accent. Her name is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A year later, in New York, the two of them found the Theosophical Society.
In her first great book, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, Blavatsky took Lévi’s astral light and made it central. She wrote of indestructible tablets of the astral light, on which every thought and every act of humankind is imprinted. Then she and Olcott sailed for India, and her thinking changed.
In The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, she brought in the Sanskrit word ākāśa and made it the highest part of the system, the pure, divine substance of the universe. Lévi’s astral light sat far below it, as its lowest and murkiest layer. She called it the dregs of ākāśa. What untrained psychics and mediums see is a reflection in troubled water.
She also introduced the Lipika, from a Sanskrit word for writing. They are the recorders, the lords of karma, who inscribe the deeds of every being onto invisible tablets, in a place she called the picture gallery of eternity.
And she gave the record a reason to exist by joining it to karma and rebirth. Every action returns to the one who did it, and a soul lives many lives, so the record becomes the soul’s account across all of them: what you did, what you owe, what you have learned.
Without karma and rebirth, the record would be a museum. With them, it becomes a curriculum.
Blavatsky never once wrote the phrase “Akashic records”. But the ingredients were all hers, and everyone who came afterward worked from her pantry.
Leadbeater names the records
Spring 1909, the beach at Adyar, near Madras in southern India, headquarters of the Theosophical Society. Every evening a tall, white-bearded Englishman walks down to the sand to watch the local boys in the surf.
Charles Webster Leadbeater was once an Anglican curate and is now the Society’s most prolific clairvoyant author. On this evening his eye falls on a thin, shy fourteen-year-old named Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Within days he announces that the boy is the vessel for the coming World Teacher, and he says the proof lies in the boy’s past lives, which he has seen.
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Ten years earlier, in his 1899 book Clairvoyance, Leadbeater had used the exact phrase “Akashic records” for the first time, and written the first operating manual for them.
The true record, he said, is the memory of the divine mind itself, kept on very high planes of existence. On the astral plane, where most psychics operate, only a distorted reflection appears, like a face in rippling water. A trained seer can rise to the level where the record is clear, and step into a past scene as if standing in the room.
Say he wants to see a day in ancient Rome. He watches the street, from above, from a doorway, or from the shoulder of a particular merchant. He can follow one person from morning to night, slow a single gesture until it takes a full minute, or watch a whole year pass in an afternoon.
He hears every word spoken, even in languages he has never studied, because he grasps the thought behind the words. For beginners he offered the psychometrists’ doorway: an ordinary object stays linked to its own history, and holding it gives you a handle on the whole archive.
With Annie Besant, the Society’s president, he turned this on people. In The Lives of Alcyone they traced the past lives of Krishnamurti and a circle of fellow Theosophists back some seventy thousand years, showing who had been whose brother, rival or teacher in earlier ages.
If you have ever dragged your thumb along the bar at the bottom of a video, slowed a moment to half speed, or picked a replay angle on a sports broadcast, you know the tool Leadbeater was describing, applied to all of history.
Steiner’s living chronicle
Berlin, autumn 1900. Rudolf Steiner, the son of a railway telegraph operator, has spent years editing Goethe’s scientific writings in the Goethe archive in Weimar. Nobody who knows him would call him a mystic.
A circle of Theosophists asks him to lecture, then asks him again, and within two years he is general secretary of the German section, speaking to packed halls about the hidden history of the world. That history, he says, comes from the Akasha Chronicle.
Steiner is careful to say that his chronicle is not a library and not a film archive. It is alive. In the spiritual world, the past stays present in a changed form, the way a plant stays present in its seed. An event in the Chronicle is the event itself, still working, along with everything that flows out of it. It holds meaning and consequence, not just surface detail.
He is strict about how a person reaches it. No trance and no mediumship. A medium who goes slack switches off the one thing needed, a clear, awake mind.
A student trains in three stages. In Imagination, the spiritual world appears as living pictures the student has learned to hold steady. In Inspiration, the meaning behind those pictures is heard. In Intuition, the student stands inside the event and knows it from within.
None of it works without moral purification, because desire, vanity and fear all produce convincing pictures, and a student who hasn’t cleaned out his own character will see his own wishes and take them for the world. Accuracy, for Steiner, is a moral achievement.
The event he read above all others was what he called the Mystery of Golgotha, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, which he saw as the turning point of the whole Earth. In 1913 he began lecturing on a Fifth Gospel drawn straight from the Chronicle. By then he had broken with the Theosophists over Krishnamurti and founded his own movement, Anthroposophy.
You can see his work without opening one of his books. The first Waldorf school opened in 1919, and there are over a thousand of them now. His 1924 lectures to farmers became biodynamic farming. A bottle of biodynamic wine grew out of one man’s claim that he had read the living memory of the world.
Cayce’s hall and book
Back to Cayce, and how he described the trance itself, because his description gave the Akashic records their most famous picture.
When he lay down and closed his eyes, he said, he felt himself leave his body. At first there was only darkness. Then he saw a speck of light far above and rose toward it, past levels of beings, some dim and tangled and suffering, others brighter and calmer as he climbed.
At the top he came to a great hall, and in it was an old man, who held out a book. It was the book of the person Cayce had been asked about, who might be lying on a couch thousands of miles away. He opened the pages and read.
A hall, a keeper and a book. Almost every picture of the Akashic records you will see today, a vast library, a quiet guide, a volume with your name on it, grew out of that description.
Cayce also had a name for it from the Bible he knew by heart. The prophet Malachi speaks of a book of remembrance written before the Lord, and Cayce called the record the Book of God’s Remembrance.
The readings said the record is mostly written by the person it belongs to. Every thought, word and act leaves a mark on what Cayce called the skein of time and space. Mind is the builder: what you hold in your mind shapes what you do, and what you do is what gets written.
The record is a diary kept by the one who lives it. Karma is real, but above it is the law of grace. Forgiveness, love and mercy can reach into the record and change what it says.
Then he gave the book to ordinary people. Over his life Cayce gave more than fourteen thousand readings, mostly for neighbors, farmers, mothers and clerks who wrote him letters.
They asked what work suited them, why a marriage was strained, where a strange fear came from. The readings answered, and told each person how to open the door themselves, through meditation and through their dreams.
Before Cayce, the records were kept like a royal archive, open to kings, magicians and masters. After him, they were a public library.
The library between lives
Later in the century, hypnotherapists found the same library from another direction. In the early 1990s Michael Newton, regressing a client to an earlier life, took her past the moment of death and found her describing the time between lives.
He developed a method for doing it deliberately, and in Journey of Souls, published in 1994, he gathered what thousands of clients described: soul groups, councils of elders, and a place that looks like a library, where each soul studies its life books with a guide. The books are alive. A soul can step into a scene, feel it again, and watch what would have followed a different choice. The book holds the paths not taken as well as what happened.
Dolores Cannon found a similar library, with keepers, in the deep trance of her clients. Her contribution was where the access came from. In her sessions, the client’s own deepest mind, which she called the higher self, could reach the records and answer questions directly. No master was needed, and no prayer.
The field
February 1971. Apollo 14 is coming home from the Moon. Edgar Mitchell, a navy captain with a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT and the sixth person to stand on the lunar surface, floats in the cabin while the ship turns slowly.
The Moon slides past the window, then the sun, then the Earth, a blue and white ball the size of a fist held at arm’s length, over and over for three days.
Somewhere on the way he feels an overwhelming sense of connection. The atoms in his body, in the ship and in every person he has ever met were made inside ancient stars. He isn’t looking at the universe from outside. He is part of it, and it is aware. He cries, which surprises him. When he gets home, he founds the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Other thinkers were asking a plain question. If every deed leaves a record, where exactly is it kept? Babbage said in the air. Blavatsky said in a higher plane. A new group of writers said in the fabric of space.
In 1981 the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed that nature has a memory that needs no storage. He called it morphic resonance. Anything that has happened once makes it slightly easier for similar things to happen again, anywhere.
A crystal forms more easily once another of its kind has formed elsewhere, and rats in one laboratory learn a trick faster once rats in another have learned it. Your own memory may work the same way, by tuning in to your earlier self. In 2004 the Hungarian philosopher Ervin László, a former concert pianist, wrote Science and the Akashic Field, using the Sanskrit word on purpose.
Physics says empty space is a sea of energy, the quantum vacuum, and László said that sea holds information about everything that has ever happened in it, spread out like a hologram.
Mitchell proposed a quantum hologram along the same lines: every object gives off and takes in tiny packets of information encoding its history, adding up to a memory of nature that is everywhere at once.
Mainstream physicists don’t accept any of this, and one famous review called Sheldrake’s first book a candidate for burning. But the word ākāśa means space, and for centuries it was a puzzle how a record could live in something so empty. Now the proposal is that space itself is the record. The word has come home to its literal meaning.
Wherever you are, a wireless network is passing through the room. Emails, songs and video calls are streaming through the walls and through your body, and you feel nothing. Hold up a phone, and the stream turns into pictures and sound.
The prayer at the kitchen table
A Saturday morning in a rented meeting room, or a living room, or a kitchen with a laptop propped on the table. A small group sit with their eyes closed and their hands open on their knees, reading a printed page aloud, slowly, line by line. The prayer begins with the speaker’s full legal name. Within a few minutes, someone says that the records are open.
They are students of a Chicago teacher named Linda Howe, whose 2010 book How to Read the Akashic Records sets out what she calls the Pathway Prayer Process.
First you read a sacred prayer aloud using your current legal name, or the name of the person you are reading for, and speaking the name is what opens the records. Then you ask your questions and receive the answers as words, images or feelings, without forcing anything. When you finish, you read a closing prayer to shut the records again. Students come to it soberly, without alcohol or drugs, and with respect.
Nothing else is required: no gift of sight, no years of inner discipline, no trance. It can be learned in a weekend, and most of the Akashic courses and readers online today trace back to her method.
In her teaching the guidance comes from the Masters, Teachers and Loved Ones of the records, a softer, more personal version of Blavatsky’s Lipika. The records are entirely kind and never keep score.
Earlier readers went to them for information, the history of Atlantis or the details of a past life. Howe’s students ask how to forgive a parent, whether to change careers, how to grieve. They go for guidance.
Back in Dayton
It’s still October of 1923, and the afternoon light is fading on the wall. Cayce sits on the edge of the couch with Gladys Davis’s pages in his hands. A monk, in a past life. He reads the line a third time, slowly, the way he once read the Gospel of John as a boy in Kentucky.
Arthur Lammers waits and says nothing. Gladys has stopped her pencil. Cayce looks at the page, and then at the stove in the corner, where he could burn it. Nothing in the reading was cruel. Nothing in it was false to anything he had ever seen a reading do for a sick child or a tired mother. Only the source was strange.
So he sets the pages down on the table and nods to Gladys. Ask your next question, he says to Lammers. Gladys lifts her pencil.
By Babbage’s reckoning, the words spoken in that room never stopped. Cayce’s slow voice, Lammers’s questions and the scratch of Gladys’s pencil set the air trembling, and the trembling spread through the hotel, the city and the sky. Somewhere, faintly, it is still moving.
The space that carries it is the space the Upanishad called ākāśa, the first and finest of the elements, the home of sound.
And on the ladder Narada climbed with Sanatkumara, the step directly above it is memory.
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