by Laura

In the summer of 2003, a poster known only as Laura — writing from Denmark, a regular of the alt.out-of-body community — composed a remarkable philosophical meditation in reply to a skeptic's dismissal of the "quaint notions" of astral planes and akashic libraries. What emerged was not a defense of mysticism against science, but a synthesis: an argument that quantum foam, the seething substrate of virtual particles underlying all spacetime, meets every traditional criterion for God — omnipresent, creative, pre-existing the universe itself — and that the akashic library, far from a naive fairy tale, might describe information stored in the very fabric of space. The post moves through emergence theory, neural networks, the quantum vacuum, and the nature of mind with the fluency of someone who has read both physics and mysticism deeply and refuses to let either have the last word.

What you need to remember when dealing with these notions is, that they are for the most part very old notions, and may be only symbolic representations of actual reality. Take God, for example, and the whole christian cosmology. I mean, far from all christians today believe that God is really a humongous white-bearded chap who sits on a celestial cloud in heaven (heaven being that bright place beyond the dome of the sky, the light of which can be seen through all the little holes in the dome, which we call stars). Or, for that matter, that the planet earth as well as the whole universe is only about 6000 years old, and came into being in just 6 days. The notion of the akashic library as a place you can go and read everything about every human being who has lived, is living, or ever shall live, is quaint and clearly symbolic in the same way, as is the notion of an astral plane which is only there to recieve the souls of dead people. They're simplistic notions, created to describe in terms that even children can grasp, something that is much more abstract.

Consider that seething quantum foam of infinite creation and destruction of sub-atomic particles — not virtual ones, but real ones. The only reason they're called virtual is that they exist so briefly that talking about how long they exist is pointless — they exist out of time. One very seriously contemplated theory holds, that even before the big bang there was this quantum foam. That means it was there even before space and time was there, and that one or more freak occurrences within this foam brought about the initial singularity which then exploded into what we now know as the universe. The quantum foam is still there, but where was space before the big bang? It seems you can't equate space with the quantum foam, since that is, and always has, been there, whereas space and time has not. So, the quantum foam created the universe, and it is omnipresent. What else is said to have those properties? God is.

God is supposedly sentient. What is sentience, anyway? It is probable that it is an emergent quality of complexity, as has been tentatively shown through the construction and study of neural network computers. Perhaps this holds true not only for brain-like stuctures, but for complexity in general, which would mean that sentience may emerge out of any system that is sufficiently complex. It would mean that the universe could be considered sentient when seen as a whole. It is obviously more complex than the brain. It must be more complex than 6 billion brains, not to mention the countless billions of other sentient beings with brain-like structures that must, statistically, inhabit the universe. It is true that we haven't been able to sit down and have a chat with the universe, so we could argue that it is not a sentient entity, but then again we can only observe it for very brief periods of time. The history of humanity, while seeming long to us, is but an infinitesimally brief moment on the timescale of the universe. It is unlikely that we'll ever have enough time to empirically prove or disprove that the universe is a sentient entity. But it could be. It certainly meets all the criteria.

So, how about that akashic library? The name is from jewish cabbalistic tradition, by the way, and is likely to have originated as far back as the sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. The tradition holds, that it is an actual place where all the thoughts and deeds of every human being are being recorded. It also holds, that the mystic can actually go there and read these records. This is obviously every bit as quaint as the notion of the white-bearded God. If there is any reality to it, it must be more abstract. First of all, it must hold all the thoughts and deeds of every being in the entire universe. Second, it can't be a building full of books. Third, it must record absolutely everything — not just the thoughts and actions of living beings, but every single occurrence in the universe. Fourth, it must exist outside of time, as it is held to also hold records of future events. What it really is is hard to imagine, but maybe space has properties that we haven't demonstrated yet (or that we are only beginning to find out about... dark matter... what is it really?). Or maybe it's the quantum vacuum. One of these could be synonymous with the astral plane. Astral does literally mean "of the stars".

Ok then, how could the human mind possibly visit these places? Much is not known about what the mind really is. The brain is slowly being understood, but mind itself is more elusive. According to neural net theory, it is an emergent quality. The mind is obviously more than the sum of the parts of the brain. A single neuron isn't very complex. One would think that a lot of neurons are no more complex than a single one, but somehow amazing complexity arises from what is essentially just a vast array of very simple components.

We could also turn it around, and speculate that the mind is actually independent of the brain entirely, and is part of an entity of energy, or an astral entity if you will. The brain, then, would serve as a sort of user interface for the mind to make it able to manifest in a physical form and interact in a physical way. If that is so, then what is mind, or more accurately, what is the mind when not connected to a brain — if such a thing is possible. Maybe mind is first, giving rise to the brain, or maybe it's the other way around. It's the classic chicken and egg problem. Both are possible. Based on the scientific evidence we have now, the mind would have to emerge as a result of the workings of the brain. Occam's razor demands it. But both are still possible, because we don't know everything yet.

Let's assume for a moment that, whatever the origins of the mind, that it is able to leave the body and the brain behind, and visit the astral plane. Or transcend the physical level and experience the fabric of space from a non-material point of view, seeing the underlying structures — perhaps even the quantum foam. Not seeing it as it really is, of course, but in a way that makes sense to it. Perhaps events really are imprinted somehow in the fabric of space, and the mind is capable of tapping into this, but creates the image of a great library because that makes sense to it. Perhaps it is more than just an image. Perhaps, within the medium through which mind is moving, the image is real, being a manipulation of the quantum foam to temporarily assume a kind of shape and structure. Maybe mind is quantum physical in nature... That would certainly explain a lot of so-called paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy and psychokinesis, as manifestations of such quantum-foam manipulation on a scale grand enough to cause a physical manifestation.

All of this is, of course, speculative. It is also an attempt to find possible common ground between mysticism and science. It is certainly food for thought, if you don't mind speculating on things that you, as yet, have no way of proving or disproving. It is also the recipe for a killer headache.

Colophon

Posted to alt.out-of-body on 24 June 2003. Author: Laura (Denmark). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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