When mediums produce strongly evidential information under conditions designed to prevent cheating, three explanations are commonly given. The first is that the medium is actually in touch with the postmortem consciousness of the deceased "communicator," who continues to exist and function in an afterlife environment. The second is that the medium is using ESP (or psi) to read the minds of the sitters, or a more robust form of ESP, sometimes called super-ESP (or super-psi), to read the minds of distant strangers, clairvoyantly access hidden documents, etc. The third explanation is that the medium is accessing the Akashic Records.
What are these records? According to certain strains of mystical lore, probably originating with Madame Blavatsky's theosophy movement, the Akashic Records consist of the total life experience of every embodied being throughout all of history. The records, which might be visualized as books or computer files, can supposedly be accessed by people with sufficiently powerful psychic talents. The idea is that the medium, rather than getting in touch with a discarnate personality that still functions on another plane, is absorbing the information from these records and then presenting it as if it came from the deceased person directly.
If this interpretation is correct, then it could be argued that all the evidence that comes from mediums, no matter how accurate and convincing it may seem, really does nothing to advance the hypothesis that human beings survive death. All that survives, it could be said, is a complete record of their experiences, but the unique self-aware ego – the personal "I" – has been extinguished. This line of thinking is somewhat popular among people who embrace a spiritual dimension but are not too keen on personal survival.
What I want to question is whether there is necessarily any conflict between the idea of the Akashic Records and the idea of personal survival. This point has been brought up before, as I recall, by Matt Rouge in comments on this blog. But it's worth a post of its own.
First let me explain my view of the personal self. The easiest approach is via an analogy involving light and refraction.
Imagine a beam of pure white light that passes through a prism. The prism refracts the light into a variety of colors. Now, let's say the pure white light is the universal consciousness that is the ground of being, the sine qua non of all existence. Just as pure white light contains all other colors as potentials, universal consciousness contains all varieties of individuated consciousness and potential form. But that potential is not actualized without the prism. Only when consciousness passes through the prism is the rainbow of colors brought out.
(Another possible analogy is a beam of laser light passing through a holographic plate and bringing out the three-dimensional image encoded in the plate. But I think the prism is simpler.)
For purposes of my analogy, let's say there are countless prisms, each of which is different from any of the others. When the light of consciousness passes through any of them, it produces a unique pattern. To reverse the motto on our currency, e pluribus unum, it's a case of "out of one – many."
But what is this prism? It's the whole constellation or matrix of experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories, and other subjective content connected with any particular embodied existence. This is why every prism is different from all the rest. Each is built up out of a unique set of experiences and responses.
The prism, then, is just like one of the books or computer files in the Akashic Records. It is a complete record of all the experiences and attendant mental states that make up a particular life. And in this sense, I think the Akashic Records do exist. It is irrelevant whether we think of them existing in some library somewhere or floating around in space or whatever. Conventional concepts of space and location are probably inapplicable to higher planes of reality anyway. The bottom line is that the complete dossier on each one of us that mediums are said to access, according to the Akashic Records hypothesis, is probably very real.
Even so, it does not follow that postmortem survival is not real. In fact, I think the opposite conclusion is implied.
What, after all, is the self, the personal consciousness or personality or ego or "I" that would survive death? It is the interaction of the pure light of consciousness with a specific prism. All that is required for the personality to exist and function is a) a matrix of experiences that defines that particular personality and makes it unique from all others, and b) pure consciousness focused on this matrix.
As long as the matrix exists, the person with whom it is associated will also exist – at least if universal consciousness continues to interact with the matrix. And if universal consciousness is the ground of being, it must continue to interact with the matrix, because it interacts with everything. Anything outside of universal consciousness would be outside of existence altogether; it would not be a thing at all; it would not exist.
In short, it is perfectly possible to combine the idea of the Akashic Records with the idea of personal survival. Moreover, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the two. As long as the matrix of one's life experience exists, then it must be bathed in the pure light of consciousness that perfuses everything, and so the individual personality must continue.
Now, it could be argued that the whole idea of a record of one's life – a matrix – surviving after death is mistaken. We might think that this matrix just crumbles away once physical life is over. In that case there would be no Akashic Records and no postmortem survival, and the only explanation for evidential mediumship, other than fraud, would be super-ESP.
I find this alternative unlikely. The destruction of the information matrix would seem to be possible only in the context of linear time, because only in linear time do you have beginnings and endings (creation and destruction). While the matrix is certainly built up over the course of a lifetime in linear time, there is little likelihood that the matrix as such exists only in linear time. It is far more plausible that it is stored in some extracerebral fashion, which would place it outside the physical plane and therefore, presumably, outside of time and space as we understand them.
If this is not true, then we are left with the difficult task of explaining many documented cases that strongly suggest extracerebral consciousness, such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, epiphanies of cosmic consciousness, past-life recall, and savant syndrome.
To sum up, I think the likeliest scenario is one in which a nonphysical matrix of information, constructed over the course of a lifetime of experience, persists after physical death. Universal consciousness, which itself is egoless and impersonal, acquires the characteristics of ego and personality when it is refracted and individualized by this matrix. The intersection of the thoughts and memories that make up a unique mindset on the one hand and the vivifying power of pure consciousness on the other is what produces the individual self.
Recent Comments