Institute For The Future

Cutting the Akashic Records

Reality is becoming indexed, stored, and searchable

Science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, the smartphone in our pockets is a magical device. Entering a high-resolution virtual world is a magical experience. And the Internet of Action’s power to reconfigure our perception of reality is a magical process. Considering how these kinds of technologies will evolve over the coming decades, or centuries, is nothing short of astonishing. Thinking about the future through the lens of magic can help us get our heads around the possibilities that were once considered by many to be impossible.

Consider the Akashic records, an idea developed in occult philosophies during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Akasha is a Sanskrit word from traditional Indian cosmology that refers to the “aether.” In the late 1800s, writers in the occult philosophy movement called “theosophy” posited the idea of the “Akashic records,” a compendium imprinted in the akasha of all human experiences from the past, present, and future. According to theosophists like Rudolf Steiner and CW Leadbeater, the Akashic records can be accessed through certain states of altered consciousness. A far out idea, for certain.

Yet in the last few decades, we’ve begun to create a kind of primitive system of Akashic records that are stored in the digital aether of the Internet. Pervasive networks of sensors, from microscale environmental monitors to wearable computers to ubiquitous surveillance cameras, are recording our world at myriad scales. We share our life experiences on social media. Every interaction we have becomes a data point. Meanwhile, emerging neurotechnologies can detect our emotions while machine learning systems recognize people and their behaviors in the physical world and tag them with metadata. Reality is becoming indexed, stored, and searchable.

Yet the Akashic records are not just a high-definition collective consciousness. They’re also described as an oracle of sorts. And while nobody can actually predict the future, we can simulate and visualize how it could play out. Enabled by breakthroughs in complexity science and supercomputing along with the endless streams of data populating our nascent Akashic records, we’ll simulate multiple tomorrows at increasingly higher fidelity.

Sure, a real system of Akashic records is still far off on the horizon. But the questions that the concept raises around privacy, equitability, control, and access are relevant right now. Grappling with those issues doesn’t require magical thinking. But it does demand an open mind, as does looking at tomorrow’s technology through the lens of magic.