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.
It's not one thing, it's consilience. A whole bunch of disparate pieces to the puzzle and when I put them together it tells me that we survive the death of the body.
And my favorite are deathbed visions. I find them endlessly comforting and uplifting. Even more than near death experiences. There is just something about them that I find real.
And just for the record I find NDEs pretty evidential too because of their connection to the holographic universe theory and quantum physics stuff I've read.
Posted by: Art | November 09, 2020 at 11:48 PM
I can't say i am persuaded that the Akashic record is a good explanation. How would the medium access these records if not via psi? This means we can rule out the usage of the Akashic records where there is no motive or mechanism that could trigger a psi process. Secondly, there are three important lines of evidence that i think contradict such explanations, shared Near Death Experiences in which two people share the same experience harmoniously during a period of clinical death, secondly apparitional NDEs in which an apparition is seen by a third party and which corresponds with a reciprocal experience on the part of the person having the NDE. Lastly there are intermission memories. Memories of the time before birth, if the person perished at death such memories should be impossible. Furthermore, such memories are far more likely to occur when the child has more past life memories, and when those memories are accurate. This indicates that these memories were really something that the previous person experienced.
Posted by: Shaun | November 10, 2020 at 08:15 AM
Tapping into the Akashic Records for bits and pieces of information is one thing, but a give-and-take dialogue seems to go well beyond that. There are too many good examples of such dialogues to discount the survival hypothesis and believe that it is all coming from some computer chip stored in the "ethers."
Posted by: Michael Tymn | November 19, 2020 at 11:31 PM
Yes, but my point is that the "computer chip" may simply be the whole constellation of memories and experiences that constitute a personality. And the give-and-take is possible because universal consciousness is reading the chip and "breathing fire into the equations." Which would be true whether a given personality is embodied or disembodied.
In other words, each of us, right now, is a matrix of information serving as a prism for universal consciousness. And the situation remains unchanged after physical death.
A unique data set + consciousness = personality/ego/self. Here and hereafter.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | November 20, 2020 at 01:09 PM
This post is interesting, Michael. As you affirm, on the one hand, there are experiences, memories, thoughts (information), and on the other hand, there is someone who experiences, who remembers, who thinks (self). According to the Akashic records hypothesis, all experiences, memories or thoughts persist and can be collected by mediums. This does not say something about an afterlife, that is, about what happens to those who experience after the death. We do not know what is the nature of the self. According to physicalism, the self is the brain, with which there would be no afterlife, and physicalism and Akashic records would be compatible.
I think that physicalism and Akashic records cannot explain all the data because there are reports of mediumship where no one alive had any motivation to present the information provided, as Shaun commented. Motivation (will) is something different from information and the best indicator of the existence of an independent self. We also note that there are reports of mediumship and people who seem to remember previous lives about what they have done in the afterlife realm. The latter includes memories of what they experienced between death and rebirth. If physicalism + Akashic records are true, then those memories are fake. Those memories are unverifiable, but they are accompanied by verifiable and true memories about alleged past lives, which points that they are also true memories, then physicalism + Akashic records are false.
Posted by: Juan | November 21, 2020 at 10:55 AM
Erlendur Haraldsson died yesterday, November 22nd.
Posted by: Shaun | November 23, 2020 at 01:51 PM
I'm very sorry to hear this, Shaun. From following his Facebook account, it's clear that Erlendur lived life to the fullest, almost until the end. Just a couple of years ago, he rode a motorcycle a distance of hundreds of miles for the sheer fun of it. He seemed like a really great guy, and I'm sorry I never got to know him outside of Facebook. I hope that he is experiencing a gratifying and soul-healing afterlife right now.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | November 24, 2020 at 08:30 PM