Dr. James Hardt on the Akashic Records (Interview Archive)
Erik: Psychology, philosophy, right. So maybe you could just walk the listeners through it.
James: Akasha is a Sanskrit word for primordial substance. The Akashic records, a phrase that gets tossed around in a lot of spiritual circles, refer to an energetic archive holding everything that has been known, is known now, and will be known. The claim is that once a person drops into theta, that archive becomes available to them.
Now, if you're hearing this for the first time, I know how it sounds. Very New Age, very floaty. So when someone reacts that way, I ask them a simple question: do you know who Thomas Edison was? And they say, of course, the man who gave us the electric light bulb. Right. Edison held more than a thousand patents, and my position is that he pulled the ideas behind those patents out of the Akashic records.
He never called it that. His method was physical. He'd stretch out in a recliner with a heavy steel ball bearing cupped in each hand, arms hanging over the armrests, and a metal pie pan set on the floor beneath each hand. Then he'd lean back and try to drift off, holding in his mind some problem he wanted to solve.
The moment he slipped into theta, stage one or stage two sleep, his muscle tone would go and his fingers would open. The ball bearings dropped into the pans with a racket that jolted him awake. He'd snatch up a pencil and pad and scribble down whatever was sitting in his head, which was usually a fragment of the thing he was inventing.
So before anyone had even measured a brain wave, Edison had worked out a way to mine that record for knowledge nobody in his day possessed. A thousand-plus patents came out of it. That's convincing enough for me.
Maybe a better-known example is Kekulé and the benzene ring. This was the late 1800s. Benzene had turned into a valuable industrial solvent, demand outran supply, and the still-young field of organic chemistry set itself the task of synthesizing benzene so there would be more of it to go around.