On the Akashic Records
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@ On the Akashic Records @
@ by: RenownedPsychohistorian (2016) @
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“In theosophy and anthroposophy, the Akashic records (a term coined in the late 19th
century from akasha or ākāśa, the Sanskrit word for “sky”, “space”, “luminous”, or
“aether”) are a compendium of thoughts, events, and emotions believed by theosophists
to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the astral plane. There are
anecdotal accounts but no scientific evidence for existence of the Akashic records.”
-Wikipedia
“The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires
and earth experiences of our planet. Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon:
The life experiences of every human being since time began, the reactions to experience
of the entire animal kingdom, the aggregation of the thought-forms of a karmic nature
(based on desire) of every human unit throughout time. Herein lies the great deception
of the records. Only a trained occultist can distinguish between actual experience and
those astral pictures created by imagination and keen desire.”
-Alice Bailey, The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect
One of the questions I am asked the most often is “how do I access the Akashic Records?” It’s a good question- after all, if there is this giant library of all knowledge floating off in the vastness of “Somewhere,” wouldn’t it be nice if we could hook up some kind of cosmic Google search to it? Unfortunately, it really isn’t that easy. It’s not a matter of getting there- there are many different techniques that people say can be used to get to the records, which will not be discussed here. The real crux of the problem lies in finding anything useful once you’ve arrived.
To illustrate, let us examine a much smaller set than “the set of all possible knowledge,” or A, which the Akashics purportedly contains- say, for instance, the set of data directly pertaining to the accumulated sensory experience of humanity, or B, with a relationship such that B⊆A. Current estimates place the number of people who have lived at any point in the history of the Earth at roughly 108 billion. If we peg the average lifespan of these people at 40 years (far, far below the majority of figures out there, but the lowest average figure I could find), you come up with 4.32 trillion years of aggregate experience. It is estimated that the senses gather 11 million bits of data per second, which would translate to 1.375 MB of data if written directly to disk. After doing a lot of math using Wolfram Alpha, it can be concluded that the approximate size of B on disk is approximately 187.3 yottabytes (YB). To give you an idea of how big 1YB is, it is the estimated size of the entire World Wide Web, which would take approximately 11 trillion years to download using “high power broadband.”
But even assuming that you figure out a way to hook up your mind to B and read from it directly at “high power broadband” speeds, it would take you almost 2 quadrillion years to stream it all once, and after only one of those quadrillion years, the universe would have entered “the Degenerate Era,” at which point it is hypothesized that the only things that would exist in the universe would be brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes.
So obviously, you can’t read all of B, simply because by the time you knew everything, there wouldn’t be any real point to knowing it. You also probably wouldn’t have a good way of finding the particular information you were looking for once you’d accessed B, because it’s highly unlikely that it’s contained in a SQL-compliant datastore. Even assuming that you’d be able to understand what you’re seeing (which I suppose we can reasonably grant, as given the fact that B is comprised of information encoded by a human mind, it would probably be readable by a human mind accessing it, in some kind of “streaming experience” format), you wouldn’t have a good way of traversing the dataset in a meaningful way.
You’d need a query language, a parsing script, or some kind of algorithm to find anything useful, and it’s not altogether clear to me how one could feasibly go about rewiring their mind to such a degree that they could “manifest” algorithmic processing on the level that would be required. The problem with this is that you’d be going in blind. Thus far, nobody has been able to come up with a scientifically verifiable way of querying B (though many have claim to have succeeded in such feats as remembering past lives or seeing the past). This would suggest that you’d need to write your own “software” from scratch, more or less. That seems like a pretty daunting task to me, considering that
You could accidentally forget to close a loop and condemn yourself to experiencing B for the rest of your life without hope of disconnection (people don’t really have “reset buttons”), essentially binding yourself far tighter to the fabled wheel of samsara than you would have if you’d just left this whole business behind and had an ice cream instead. You could have a memory leak somewhere, and through no fault of your own (and for lack of a better term), crash your mind. In the old days of computing, when that happened, computers would catch on fire. Now we have failsafes in place to prevent that, but those things only came into being after lots and lots of computers catching on fire. It’s entirely reasonable to assume, operating under the “brain as computer” paradigm, that anybody foolish enough to attempt to parse out the contents of B would just explode from the strain put on the hardware of their brain.
So we’ve already run up against “you might overload your brain and die like the villain in Indiana Jones IV,” and we’re not even dealing with A yet! We’re dealing with B, which is just a tiny subset of A. To give you an idea of how tiny it really is in comparison with the staggering majesty of A, let’s consider the first expansion of B that we can reasonably perform: how big is the set of all possible combinations of human experience (PB)? Assuming again that we are dealing with data expressed in a binary form, the number of all possible combinations of the bits within B would be expressed as 21.873×10^26, which is a number so big that Wolfram Alpha just returns 21.873×10^26 as the best possible way of expressing it.
Not to be deterred…
I asked one of my Top Mathematicians, Douglas, to help me figure out a way to visualize this. He first linked me to the following visualization aid, provided by u/youcantstoptheart in the thread “What’s something interesting that few people know about?”
“The crazy amount of sets of playing cards you can have. The number is 52! Which is
52 * 51 * 50… Etc ask the way to one. That in scientific notation is 8.0658175e+67.
Like holy fuck I don’t think you comprehend how incredibly large that number is. These
next paragraphs are not my writing but it’s how I have helped people visualize this
number in the past. I’m on mobile now so I don’t want to have type all this out.
Start Visualizing
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We’re going to start a timer that counts down 52! Seconds to 0.
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You’re going to walk around the
world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion
years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters.
Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of
solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop
of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at
one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each
time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers
of water.
Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat
on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again,
adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the
timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still
have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to
the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers.
So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more.
Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds
remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.
And you thought Sunday afternoons were boring.
To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal
yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery
ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands.If that ticket wins the
jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled
up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest.
Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve levelled Mt. Everest, look at
the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357
trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would
still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime
during your 256th attempt.”
Then Doug did Math, and said:
“[Now] take 52!, which has just been thoroughly described to you, and multiply it by
itself 7.3 x 10^{23} times…so I think it is the case that for EACH SECOND in the
process, you would repeat the process 187 septillion/255 times.”
Now imagine that instead of seconds, we’re talking about bits of data.
There’s no comprehensible way to access even a tiny portion of it. Incomprehensible numbers of possible universes would spontaneously arise from the foam of chaos, burn, twist, and die, in the time it would take to read it all if it stopped happening altogether right now. And again, even that is just a small fraction of the information stored in the Akashics. Even assuming that this universe is the only one, and there is no “soul” or “free will,” the A would theoretically contain data tracking the precise movement of every particle in all 10 (or however many you like) dimensions. The size of this subset is truly massive, as the number of records for one time interval alone, not even taking into account the size of their contents, would be expressed as (number of dimensions) ^ (number of particles). If we go solely based on the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons in the universe (discounting dark matter particles and photons), we end up with 10^(10^80) records per time interval. Even if it was somehow possible to store all of the information required to track this position in a single bit per record, the size of one second’s worth of data in this set on disk would make PB look utterly insignificant, and there would have to be 4.3 x 10^17 record sets present in A– one for each second that the universe has been in existence.
I’m not even going to attempt to provide a way to visualize that- but if it was a dog, it would be some kind of cosmic Clifford.
So remember, kids, the next time you decide to try and attune to the Akashic Records instead of studying, remember that the real shortcut is doing it the old-fashioned way.