The Akashic Records and Synchronicity
Generally, occultists believe that there is a repository of all human experiences throughout past ages. These are known as the Akashic records and are similar to what C. G. Jung termed the “collective unconscious“. For Jung, this existed below the level of our personal unconscious, in dreams for example, and was populated by the experiences of life embedded throughout human history. This stratum of consciousness is likely common to many mammals and has been shown to exist in cats.
Appalling as it will seem to many, laboratory reared cats had part of their brain removed, the part which prevented them from acting out dreams. Scientists discovered that cats who never left the windowless lab to which they were born, nor see another living creature, have identical dream patterns to cats that live normally in the outside world, proving that cats have memories and patterns of behavior that are inherited. These shared, or collective, ways of being however, exist below the level of the cats’ waking consciousness (5).
One of the lessons of occult philosophy is that ultimately, all existence is one.
This is echoed in psychology, where it is believed that at a deep level humans are connected by a great sea of collective memories, containing all human knowledge and all human behavior. On a consciously we are individuals, but subconsciously, we are at some level all joined.
Witches access the Akashic records in a number of ways, most commonly through meditative trance or through the use of intermediary forces such as one’s Holy Guardian Angel or other spiritual guides. This is the reason why many who practice divination will say a prayer or perform a short magical technique before they start calling on divine guidance.
There are two types of divinatory tools that allow access to the Akashic records;
- those that help to induce a state of trance
- those that use a combination of objects that can be examined.
For example, crystal balls and black mirrors are used to aid emptying the mind and allow it to develop a light trance, whereas Tarot cards, runes and yarrow sticks are obviously divination tools that involve the use of permutations. Sometimes both types of approach are used together; for example, some Tarot readers induce a trance state before reading the cards.
How divinatory tools function with regard to the Akashic records is perhaps best explained by the theories of Jung. According to his ideas, some symbols manifested themselves in waking conscious life in the form of a synchronicitous event. For example, Jung felt that one happening of this kind might be a clock stopping at the point that someone died. He perceived this kind of event to be more than just mere coincidence.
Could it be then that when the diviner casts their cards, or stones, or yarrow sticks, that the way they fall is more than just a random happening? Perhaps the patterns they fall into, and the interpretation they are given, are synchronicitous events with meaning and import, allowing the diviner to connect to the collective unconscious or Akashic records. The diviner then uses his or her intuition to decide what the future will hold, based on their understanding of all past and present events pertaining to the matter in hand.
A common criticism of divination based on the combination of objects, is that the same pattern that the diviner has cast is unlikely to appear twice over the same issue. But those who make this point have not understood the nature of synchronicity – it is of the moment, and when the moment has changed the circumstances have changed. The pattern of the objects, and thereby the reading of them, will be different.