History and Akasha – A Walk on the Wild Side… September 4, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, Medieval , trackback
Bit of an unusual post today as Beachcombing plunges, with misgivings and fear, into Akasha.
Akasha is – for those of you, like Beachcoming a week ago, who have not the foggiest – ‘an unseen substance which is all around us all and present in every atom of this world and of the universe. This substance is capable of being impressed by the images, thoughts, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings of what it comes into contact with, and because it is in contact with everything, everything is recorded. It is like having a multi-sensory photograph or holograph being constantly taken and kept on file’.
It is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘space’: though as with many ‘oriental’ ideas there is controversy over whether it is not really a recent western invention. Those rare individuals who can read the Akasha can access the past and re-experience events there – that would be useful for historians to say the least!
Beachcombing came across akasha while visiting Elizabeth Chadwick’s blog. Elizabeth, pictured here, is a fine historical novelist and, with her friend, Alison King, Elizabeth supplements her more conventional research with akasha readings of the period in question. ‘I use the Akashic records as the flash of gold in my research braid.’
How does it work? ‘I will ask Alison to go to a particular person at a certain incident in their lives or at a certain date, and place and she will access them. She gets their physical feelings, their thoughts and a whole range of sensory details. She can ‘zoom in’ and pull back, which is fortunate since sometimes she is accessing situations such as moments of child-birth or illness or anger and it can get pretty uncomfortable (on the plus side there is love and laughter and pleasure too).’
Elizabeth then gets a second opinion. ‘I have the work looked at by an academic with a doctorate in Medieval history and a particular interest in the culture of the 12th and 13th centuries. I also have the details checked by people with skills in genealogy and medieval studies. I am told that what is coming through is medieval mindset, not modern.’
How does Elizabeth square history and mysticism? I’m a healthy sceptic but I also have an open mind. So I said go for it. What came through was so astonishing in the detail that I knew that here was a resource I just had to use.
Beachcombing by contrast is an unhealthy (a cowardly?) sceptic. His world is constructed of scientific certainties and scientific uncertainties. He likes ‘weird’ things – he is fascinated for example by peculiar accuracies in so-called past-life memories. But he only reads about them when everyone else in the house is asleep and tries to hide them from prying eyes as teen boys hide pornography. The print outs he’s made of Alison and Elizabeth’s meetings together will probably end up under the bed as well.
Take, for example, Elizabeth’s question about what Ida de Tosney thinks of King John. ‘Ida finds John’s mouth particularly repulsive. He’s got a bottom lip that droops forward a little bit. She finds it repulsive and slimy. She doesn’t like his hands. It’s sexual connotations as well. She’s frightened of him. He’s very forceful in a very focused narrow way. When he puts his focus on someone he really focuses. She really doesn’t like him. If she has to have anything to do with him, she melts away, she goes into the furniture, it’s as if she’s not there.’
In the end Beachcombing can’t bring himself to take all this ‘nonsense’ seriously for two reasons, one creditable and one contemptible: (i) he knows how humanity longs for the numinous to the point of delusion (many happy years of marriage to Catholic Mrs B speaking) and (ii) people would laugh at him (though perhaps the boat has already sailed on that one).
He was, however, fascinated to Elizabeth’s reaction to a recent post of his on adult Renaissance breastfeeding: One particular time, I asked Alison to go to Roger Bigod’s interactions with women before his marriage with Ida de Tosney. She came across a scene in an army camp after a battle, but the woman was doing the exact same thing as the one in that painting [squirting breast milk]– except she was a good time girl and they were a bunch of soldiers after a battle. Alison and I thought this was a bit off kilter and bizarre, but we went along with it, and a version of what Alison accessed appears in The Time of Singing. So to read your article, albeit that the examples are later, was very interesting to both of us.
If Beachcombing has complexes about unconventional historical methods then he begins to hyperventilate over adult breastfeeding so he will avoid comment here.
But, well, wow… Beachcombing has accumulated about fifty questions about the past that he desperately wants answered, but that he knows no surviving source will ever elucidate. He sometimes idly wondered if he would find out at the point of death or immediately after. Others will see a bright light at the end of a tunnel, Beachcombing will see his secondary school history teacher carrying a pile of unearthly books
Instead, all he had to do was find a good akasha reader.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for any alleged psychic points of access into history. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
A special thanks to Elizabeth for allowing Beachcombing to quote from her website and for answering his interminable questions.
