The following is excerpted from The Self-Actualizing Cosmos: The Akasha Revolution in Science and Human Consciousness, published by Inner Traditions.
The Idea of the Akasha
The tenet that the observed world is a manifestation of a deeper dimension is now rediscovered at the cutting edge of quantum field physics. It is not new: it has been a basic element in classical Indian philosophy. Samkhya, one of the earliest philosophical teachings in India, held that there is a compendium of knowledge and information conserved in a nonphysical plane of reality, referred to as the Akashic Records.
The Hindu rishis (seers) specified this concept as a full-fledged cosmology. They held that there are not four but five elements of the cosmos. These are Vata (air), Agni (fire), Ap (water), and Prithivi (earth)—and also Akasha, variously described as space, brilliance, or all-encompassing light. The Akasha is the fundamental element. It holds the other elements in itself, but it is also outside of them, for it is beyond space and time. According to Paramahansa Yogananda, the Akasha is the subtle background against which everything in the material universe becomes perceptible.
In his classic Raja Yoga, Swami Vivekananda (1982) gave the following account of the Akasha:
It is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha. It is the Akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids, that becomes the solids; it is the Akasha that becomes the sun, the earth, the moon, the stars, the comets; it is the Akasha that becomes the human body, the animal body, the plants, every form that we see, everything that can be sensed, everything that exists. It cannot be perceived; it is so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception; it can only be seen when it has become gross, has taken form. At the beginning of creation there is only this Akasha. At the end of the cycle the solid, the liquids, and the gases all melt into the Akasha again, and the next creation similarly proceeds out of this Akasha (Raja Yoga, p. 33).
The Akasha is not merely one element among others; it is the fundamental element: the ultimately real dimension of the cosmos. It is what in its subtle aspect underlies all things and in its gross aspect becomes all things. In its subtle aspect it cannot be perceived. But it can be observed in its gross aspect, in which it has become the things that arise and evolve in space and time. The same concept is present in the Upanishads. “All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.” (Chandogya Upanishad I.9.1)
David Bohm (Nichol 2003) enunciated an identical concept:
What we experience through the senses as empty space is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.
In contemporary science space is rediscovered as the fundamental matrix in which the manifest things and events of the universe arise, in and through which they evolve, and into which they again redescend.
The Holographic SPACETIME
As we have seen, the deep dimension has been recognized in a number of traditional cosmologies, perhaps the most remarkably in the Akasha concept of the ancient rishis. In Hindu philosophy the world we experience is not the ultimate reality: it is only a manifestation of that reality.
In Akashic cosmology we add a further element to this perennial insight. The deep dimension, we maintain, is beyond spacetime. It creates the holographic spacetime in which we live and which we observe. This conception has now received significant experimental support.
Evidence for the holographic nature of spacetime has surfaced in the spring of 2013. As reported in New Scientist, Fermilab physicist Craig Hogan suggested that the fluctuations observed by the British-German gravity-wave detector GEO600 may be due to the graininess of spacetime (as noted, according to string theory, at the supersmall scale spacetime is patterned by minuscule ripples: it is “grainy”). The GEO600 gravity wave detector did find inhomogeneities in the matrix that constitutes spacetime, but they were not gravity waves. Could it be, Hogan asked, that they are the ripples that string theory claims pattern the microstructure of spacetime? This would be the case if the micro-inhomogeneities are 3D projections of information coded in 2D at the circumference of spacetime. In that event we could assume that events within spacetime are 3D projections of 2D information encoded at the periphery.
The holographic spacetime hypothesis has been revived to account for the anomaly connected with the “evaporation” of black holes. In the 1970s Hawking (1974) found that, as black holes evaporate, the information contained in them is lost. All the information about the star that had collapsed and become a black hole vanishes. This is a problem, because information, according to contemporary physics, cannot be lost in the universe.
This problem was resolved when Hebrew University cosmologist Jacob Bekenstein discovered that the information present in the black hole (a quantity equal to its entropy) is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon, the horizon beyond which matter and energy cannot escape. Physicists have shown that quantum waves at the event horizon encode the information present in the black hole. This information is proportional to the volume of the black hole; thus there is no unaccounted-for information loss as the black hole “evaporates.”
Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft applied the principle of information coding to spacetime as a whole. They pointed out that spacetime has an event horizon of its own: it is the circumference of the area that light has reached in the period since the birth of the universe. Juan Maldacena demonstrated that the physical properties of a 5D universe are identical with the coding of its 4D spacetime boundary. The coding is in “bits”: each Planck dimensional square at the boundary codes one bit of information. This theory resolves the problem of black hole information loss in the universe, but it is not observationally verifiable: events at the Planck scale are too small to be observed.
Applying the holographic coding theory to the whole of spacetime overcomes the verifiability problem. Since the volume of the universe is larger than its surface (we can calculate the difference by dividing the surface area by the volume), then it follows that if the 2D codes that project 3D events within spacetime occupy a Planck dimensional area on the surface, the three-dimensional events they code must be of the order of 10−16 and not of 10−35 centimeter. Events of this larger dimension are observable. If the ripples found by the GEO600 gravity wave detector are of the order of 10−16 cm, they could be ripples in the microstructure of spacetime. Observations made at the time of writing indicate that this is indeed the case.
Further support for holographic spacetime theory came in the fall of 2013 when Yoshifumi Hyakutake and colleagues at Ibaraki University in Japan computed the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon, its entropy, and several other properties based on the predictions of string theory and the effects of virtual particles. Hyakutake, together with Masanori Hanada, Goro Ishiki, and Jun Nishimura, also calculated the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. They found that the two calculations match (Masanori Hanada, Yoshifumi Hyakutake, Goro Ishiki, Jun Nishimura, 2013). It appears that black holes, as well as the cosmos as a whole, are holographic. The microstructure of space is patterned by 3D ripples that correspond to 2D codes at the spacetime periphery, and the internal energy of a black hole and the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos are equivalent. This suggests that spacetime is a cosmic hologram, and that quanta and systems constituted of quanta are intrinsically entangled elements of it.
The dimension that generates the holographic spacetime we experience is the Akasha. The Akasha harbors the geometrical relations that govern the interaction of quanta and of all things constituted of quanta in space and time. It is the seat of the fields and forces of the manifest world. The Akasha is the universal gravitational field that attracts things proportionately to their mass; it is the electromagnetic field that conveys electric and magnetic effects through space; it is the ensemble of the quantum fields that assigns probabilities to the behavior of quanta; and it is the scalar holofield that creates nonlocal interaction among quanta and configurations of quanta. The Akasha is the integration of all these elements in a unitary cosmic dimension that is beyond space and time. It is the fundamental, if in the everyday context hidden, dimension of the world.
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Works Cited
Hawking, Stephen. 1974. “Black Hole Explosions?” Nature 248: 30-31.
Nichol, Lee, ed. 2003. The Essential David Bohm. New York: Routledge.
Vivekananda, Swami. 1982. Raja Yoga. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama.
