Akashic records

One of my yoga instructors mentioned the akashic record(s) a month or so back. I had not heard of this/them before, but found it fascinating. Something about the concept deeply resonated with me.

I googled it when I got home. The word comes from akasha, Sanskrit for "sky" or "space" or "aether" or "primary substance."  This word is actually made up of two smaller ancient Tibetan or northern Indian words, “aka” means space, storage place, or repository, and “Sa” means sky, hidden, or secret.  So a simple translation of “Akasha” is “an unseen space or storage place.” (Yes, I lifted this from the Internet.)

The akashic record is a record of all the experiences of the cosmos: all of human experience, all of the experiences of the entire planet. Everything. Every thought. Every desire. Every action. All remembered. All documented. Location and time don't affect it. It contains past and present, as well as possibilities for the future. It is available everywhere, all the time. It's said that flashes of intuition that we sometimes receive are glimpses into these akashic records, and that the information is actually available to us if we become skilled at accessing it.

Wow, right? Whether you decide to embrace this idea or not, how cool. And before you roll your eyes at me, thinking this is some yoga whoo-whoo touchy-feely swami-guru mumbo jumbo, know that this concept, or some version of it, is referred to in all major religions. Yep, even those uptight, bible-thumping, small-minded, fundamentalist Christian types can lay claim to it -- it's the Bible's Book of Life. 

The theosophists popularized it in the 19th century. But you don't hear much about it now.

Or do you? Like seemingly all things in life, once you hear about it, once your consciousness opens to it, you find that you stumble upon it again soon, you run up against it in your day-to-day life. I just read a great, short description of it in the fiction book I'm currently reading -- "The Swan Thieves" by Elizabeth Kostova. 

In it, the character, Kate, is describing the amazing first years of her relationship with her ex-husband:

Robert and I lived together in New York for almost five years. I still don't know where that time went. I read once that there's a good probability that everything that's ever happened is stored somewhere in the universe, one's personal history--all history, I guess--folded away in pockets and black holes of time and space. I hope those five years survive out there somewhere.

Me too. I do. There is so much good stuff out there. Pain and misery too. But to think, to imagine, to believe that this is out there? To sense that it is ALL contained in some energetic record makes me giddy, makes me feel the same dizzying way I do when I raise my head to see how tiny I am in relation to the peaks of the Rockies, or to the pounding of the Pacific, or to the pull of the moon. 

I love this idea of being one human, one soul, adding my thoughts, movements, desires, and experiences to those of all who have come before, and all who will go after. Or agian, as the case my be.....