In this Q&A, the Akashic Records details an interesting history weaving together ancient language, oral tradition, and modern usage of language and multiple spiritual traditions to explain the difference between Akasha and the Akashic Records.
Q: What is the element Akasha, what are the Akashic Records, and how are they related?
Participant: I understand the five elements, water, fire, earth, space, and the air. I want to ask this. What is the element Akasha? What are the Akashic Records? Are they related? If related, how are they related?
Cheryl:
I love this question. So what are the Akashic Records? What is Akasha? And how are they related?
So first of all, the Founders are saying, where they want to start is this, is that your question identifies the origin of the word Akashic, which in English means of, or pertaining to the Akasha, and the Akasha is a term that is Sanskrit in origin. The language that the word Akasha comes from is Sanskrit and Sanskrit is a very old ancient language.
It would go back further in time than Latin and further in time than Babylonian. It is a language that is Proto-Indo-European so it’s an origin language and Sanskrit then is also a holy language that’s used in the manuscripts, the holy manuscripts of a variety of religions and spiritual traditions. The ones that are probably most common and most known would be Hinduism, Buddhism and Tibetan Bon. And there’s other languages that use Sanskrit and use versions of Sanskrit. There’s a particular school of Buddhism that uses a slightly different form of Sanskrit.
It’s very old. And a lot of all of this has to do with the development of humanity, particularly across the Indus River Valley, in what we would think of as India and bordering Afghanistan, that area of the world. And so we’re then talking about a history that goes back, not just 2 or 3000 years ago, it goes back six, seven, eight, 10, 000 years ago, a long ways and therefore it also has its origin before there’s any sense of a written language. And so Sanskrit in its earliest forms was very much an oral tradition about how meaning was passed from human being to human being.
So not just in the sense of language, of communicating what we do between people on a daily basis, right? Like, how we eat, how we live, where we live, all of those kinds of things, they see that as a little more mundane. Sanskrit really came out of what we would think of as the sacred traditions.
Various groups of people across the history of the use of Sanskrit, and that means across the history of Hinduism and Buddhism and Tibetan Bon, you had different groups of people at different time periods transmitting meaning in different ways.
To start with, they want to focus on Hinduism.
Hinduism, in a sense, is actually a more modern religion, because Hinduism as a term was basically the way the British who were colonizing India referred to the religion of India, and lumped it all into one pot that they called Hinduism. And in fact, there are many separate spiritual and religious traditions that comprise what we now in a modern sense think of as Hinduism.
And so the word that’s used, and again it’s a Sanskrit word, is Darshana. And basically, the English way of translating that word is to say that it is a school of religious philosophy or a school of religious belief. If we go back to the ancient times and focus on thinking about how we understand the meaning of life, part of what was developed within Sanskrit was the Akashic Records.
Creating awareness, and therefore drawing attention to how does life work? Like, how does life on the planet work? How did we come to be human beings? How did animals come to be? How did this all work? And with different experiences that run through the people of the Indus Valley, River Valley, they came to different ideas about how to answer that question of meaning.
But what was similar is that they all talked about how manifested reality becomes physical. And essentially the origin of what we call elements is born within that effort by humanity to have meaning and to find meaning and to see where meaning comes from. How to be present to it and how to exchange meaning between people. And so the elements are an idea of how physical creation came to be.
And if you look at it in a modern sense, and you look at the different darshanas, and you look at the different versions of Buddhism, like Mahayana, Theravadin, and Tibetan Buddhism, which are the main motions of Buddhism, and then you look at the different darshanas within Hinduism, you can see a flow of understanding meaning in each of those.
In some respects, the origin of it is hidden from us at this point. But we can see that there is like this river of flow in which different groups of people explained meaning in different ways and therefore they looked at the elements in slightly different ways. And part of it has to do with when human consciousness manifests within the present moment. And some folks see that only happening after physical reality is manifested, and some folks see that happening prior to physical manifestation. And so how you look at the elements, and how you describe both their combined expression and then their individual expressions differs between where you see consciousness first coming into being.
For example, with the way that I work with the Akashic Records, my personal belief is that human consciousness precedes physical manifestation. That you have divine consciousness prior to that.
And so, when you go into the Akashic Records, the way that I do this is that you’re going into Divine Consciousness, outside of anything physical. That means that in all of this, in some way or another, the element called Akasha is the first element. Some see Akasha in the mind of God, in divine consciousness as the first thing that emerges with the potential to take physical form, so that it’s Akasha and Prana working together to create physical manifestation, where in another perspective, Akasha is seen as the primary element after several others, like after mind is established within physical reality and Akasha is what steps forward to create what’s called the subtle essence.
And that subtle essence is what then becomes manifested physical reality. So that to answer the question, Akasha isn’t just this simple element. It’s an expression of how humanity, both individually and collectively, has grappled with the idea of the difference between divine consciousness and manifested physical reality.
And then from Akasha comes the other four primary elements, at least within Hinduism. You get air, fire, water, and earth. If you’ve studied anything about Chinese energy perspectives, they name metal as an element. But whatever words you’re going to use, it’s this idea that as energy moves from potential to form, that form has a point at which the element of Akasha begins to also differentiate itself into what we see as other subtle elements.
So the term Akashic Records is a modern term. I believe, though I have never found proof of this, but I believe that it was a term that was put into play by, or at least promoted by Helena Blavatsky, who was the founder of the Theosophical Society and lived in the 1800s. She was originally Russian. And then she lived in Egypt for a while. She was in Europe for a while. She did some work in the United States and New York.
But when the ideas of Buddhism and Hinduism began to become more familiar to European and American society, that’s when you had the appearance of this word Akasha. And so, in trying to explain the ideas of consciousness, both human and divine, they used the word Akashic, so pertaining to the Akasha and so that there is a way that the Akashic Records are a part of Akasha, but it’s really more that the Akashic Records have this symbiotic relationship between human consciousness and divine consciousness. That’s really the pathway. So it’s not to say that there isn’t some aspect of Akasha in the Akashic Records.
It’s just that, when you open the Akashic Records, you’re not opening the Records of Akasha, unless you do that intentionally. You can open the Records of Akasha and connect that way with Akasha, but you are only connecting with Akasha if you have that intention.
Because everything comes out of the Records through intention, partly because there’s just so much there. And it’s also because divine assistance works through the concept of ask and receive. That’s why it works with questions. It doesn’t even have to be a complete question. You could just raise an issue and say, I want to know more. That’s enough of an intention.
So then the Akashic Records are this: I finally came up with a definition of the Records I could live with, which is something I’ve struggled with my entire experience of this, but so the definition of the Akashic Records is: human consciousness made manifest with intention through divine consciousness.
And because there is this interactive, I like the word symbiotic, relationship. Because it’s about how energy comes and integrates and exchanges, right? There is in that relationship between human consciousness and divine consciousness such that the opposite of the definition is also correct. Divine consciousness made manifest with intention through human consciousness.
It’s a back and forth. It’s an exchange. It’s an interaction and it’s not about something physical here in our reality. It’s about how consciousness is connected across the entirety. Everything possible.
Did that answer your question?
Participant: Definitely! That means so much and it takes me even to a deeper understanding of what it is.
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