The quest for Akashic physics
Editor note (Giulio Prisco): My friend Nupur Munshi has rescued from internet oblivion and improved our 2015 review of “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum,” by Ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy. I have also added some thoughts.
Ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy participated in our online conference “India Awakens” in 2017. Roy participated in a video discussion, and Abraham also contributed a video talk titled “The Quantum Akasha” and a paper titled “Theosophy and the Arts” (see the proceedings).
The promised “main conference in Kolkata, February 2018” took place in a very reduced format: I was invited to give a talk titled “Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition” at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC), Kolkata, India. Here’s the full video of the talk and Q/A.
A transcript of my talk was published in the December 2018 issue of the Bulletin of the RMIC. Here’s a copy of the transcript.
Later in September 2018 I had the pleasure and the honor of meeting Ralph Abraham face to face in Santa Cruz, California.
See also my updated text below.
Perhaps everything that ever happens, including our thoughts and memories, is stored in permanent “Akashic records,” a cosmic memory field hidden in yet unknown aspects of reality.
In “Esoteric Buddhism” (London, Chapman and Hall, 1885), A.P. Sinnett was among the first to note that early Buddhism “held to a permanency of records in the Akâsa, and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evoluted to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”
The term, derived from akasha (ākāśa), a Sanskrit word for ether or space, was popularized in the West by Theosophy writers including Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky thought of the Akasha as “indestructible tablets of the astral light [with] the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform.” In modern terminology, we can think of the Akasha as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.
In Indian / Hindu philosophy, Akasha is one of the five elements (“panchamabhutas” the five “bhutas” which are the essential block” of everything in Creation including the human body ), the other four being Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Akasha (or Aether, or Space) is more subtle than others yet physical, the imperceptible, eternal all-pervading space that encompasses the whole of existence the “ethereal fluid imagined as pervading the cosmos.”
While science is generally seen in opposition to nonduality, “this book sets out to prove the compatibility of the scientific outlook and the spiritual nonduality of India by constructing a mathematical model of cosmic consciousness,” reads the description of “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum.”
In the book, mathematician Ralph Abraham and physicist Sisir Roy quote the polymath genius Ervin László:
“A universal information and memory field could exist in nature, associated with the fundamental element of physical reality physicists call the unified field… Honoring an ancient insight, this is the aspect or dimension of the unified field that I have called the Akashic Field.” — Ervin László
Ralph Abraham during his visit to India in 1972 in the Himalayan foothills felt that “novel information seems to come to me in dreams and meditations.” In his lecture at the RMIC (Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Golpark, Kolkata) in April 02, 2008, he said: “A key idea that is coming to me in this way is the metaphor of vibration, well known in Modern Science in the context of physical systems, sound waves radio waves quantum waves gravity waves etc the vibration metaphor is equally well known in Hindu philosophy in the literature on the Akasha.”
Later, when Abraham visited Kolkata in 2009 for the fourth time, he met Prof Sisir Roy of the Physics and Applied Math Unit (PAMU) of Indian Statistical Institute . “This book is an explanation of our agent-based Model for consciousness, coordinated with classical Indian philosophy. The RMIC (a spiritual and intellectual haven) has been very generous, giving me access to its Research Center for Indology, and thus providing the support very much needed for our book project.” Ramkrishna Mission as such is tirelessly working to uphold Swami Vivekananda's “religion, science and civilization are all unified in the fundamental level and hence one cannot be left out for the other.”
A version of “Demystifying the Akasha” is available online as a free download. Sisir Roy, the author of “Statistical Geometry and Applications to Microphysics and Cosmology” and “Understanding Space, Time and Causality: Modern Physics and Ancient Indian Traditions” (see our review) is a physicist interested in the geometry of quantum space-time near the Planck scale. Ralph Abraham is a top mathematician and maverick scientist who, besides the acclaimed textbook “Foundation of Mechanics” on advanced mathematical physics, wrote about esoteric aspects of mind and physical reality with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
In his preface to László’s “The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness,” Abraham wrote: “When a great grand unified theory will appear it will very likely conform to the prophetic vision of Ervin László.” After “The Connectivity Hypothesis,” László wrote a simplified but thoughtful account of his ideas in “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything,” and then several related books.
While “Demystifying the Akasha” is a short and compact book, it covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, and recent advances in quantum gravity theories and the digital physics of discrete space-times. Fully understanding everything requires specialized knowledge of all those fields, but the book is readable and has something for everyone. The references, a careful selection of the best related writings, fill the gaps in the book.
The authors note that they “have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum, originally due to Requardt and Roy, as a model for consciousness,” note the authors. “Demystifying the Akasha” includes the full text of the 2001 article by Requardt and Roy titled “(Quantum) Space-Time as a Statistical Geometry of Fuzzy Lumps and the Connection with Random Metric Spaces.”
Modern quantum physics shows that the vacuum, the simplest configuration of space-time, has a complex dynamic structure. “The quantum vacuum is a seething froth sparkling with elementary particles emerging from nowhere in pairs, and after a very short time, vanishing again as they came,” write Abraham and Roy. A fundamental information field associated with the quantum vacuum is, according to László, “the deepest and most fundamental level of physical reality in the universe.”
Abraham and Roy build a model for the fundamental field based on a “pre-geometry” of dynamic cellular networks — huge graphs with internal dynamics similar to cellular automata — that exist beyond space-time, and from which the geometry of space-time is derived. The pre-geometry “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Ordinary space and time emerge from pre-geometry.
Abraham and Roy don’t intend to propose a “final” unified theory of everything (there is no “final” in science). Rather, they intend to show a template mathematical model of reality, compatible with current scientific knowledge, which includes an Akashic information and memory field. “Our intention is to contribute a theory, more precisely a mathematical model, in which all paranormal phenomena may be understood, including quantum entanglement and the measurement problem.”
It seems very plausible that, as Abraham and Roy argue, future Akashic physics will be able to explain all sorts of “paranormal” phenomena.
In passing, the term “paranormal” is misleading because, if something happens, then it is normal. But “paranormal” is easily understandable: it includes telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, reincarnation and related phenomena that can be physically explained if the mind can extract information from the cosmic Akashic records.
Updated text (Giulio Prisco)
I did some minor edits to the 2015 review:
Akashic field theories are very much related to my own ideas on technological resurrection.
Following Fedorov and the Russian Cosmists, I have often argued that future scientists equipped with “magic” space-time technologies will be able to resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future.” For such a thing to be possible, it’s necessary that the information needed to resurrect the dead — life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings — exists somewhere out there. In other words, there must be an Akashic memory field. Conversely, if the Akashic field exists, future scientists could resurrect the dead by solving the engineering problem of how to read the Akashic records.
This very document is a conceptual example: the original version of the document disappeared from the internet when I repurposed the domain turingchurch.com. But the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive had an “akashic” backup copy, from which we retrieved the document, which is now live here in an improved version.
Following Abraham, Roy, and László, I honor the ancient Akashic insights and use the term “Akashic physics” for the yet unknown physical theories upon which future resurrection technologies could be based.
If information is conserved in the universe as some experts believe, then the fabric of reality includes Akashic records. Scrambled beyond our current ability to unscramble, yes, but perhaps not beyond the ability of future scientists. They could unscramble Akashic records like we unscramble a hologram.
Other experts are persuaded that information is irreversibly erased from the universe all the time by way of quantum collapse and chaotic dissipation events. I tend to agree with this view, but no big deal. Viable theories of Akashic physics should show that the really important information is safely stored somehow and somewhere.
For example, in Everett’s “Many-Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics (MWI) the collapse of the wave-function is local to the single branch of the multiverse that our senses perceive, and the apparently lost information is scattered to other branches. Therefore, information is preserved in Everett’s multiverse, which is a possible stage for Akashic physics.
In “The Fabric of Reality,” physicist David Deutsch shows that other times are just special cases of other universes. If the past is a “place” that can be observed, then other times are Akashic records. Important information on the past — including the life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings of everyone who ever lived — is out there and future scientists could search for — and find — ways to retrieve it.
The scientific literature is full of other ideas that could be useful in the quest for Akashic physics.
In the opening quote, A.P. Sinnett was (probably) thinking of spiritual rather than technological means to read the Akashic records, but Robert Pirsig’s words come to mind:
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.” — Robert Pirsig
Cover picture from LibreShot. Yes, the fabric of physical reality is like a huge library with permanent records of everything that happens.
