Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This book offers a “radical new approach” to the Akashic Records. That would suggest there is an “old, tired approach” to leveraging what is both a steady artifact of ancient wisdom and what has become a staple of modern New Age thought.

Certainly, what we call the Akashic Records today can be found described in the texts of the world’s oldest systems of thought, philosophy and religions. That includes Vedic texts, the Torah and Kabbalistic writing, such as the Zohar, Greek oracular divination, Sufi wisdom, even the Bible — and much more. To take just one specific example, the sages in the Indian regions of the Himalayas proclaimed that the soul of every person — their “jiva” or “atma” — was recorded in a divine “book” that would remain for eternity as a permanent record of every second of every person’s life.

Fast forward to the 20th Century and we find guys like Edgar Cayce telling of his ability to travel to that certain etheric or astral realm where he could find a specific “book,” not only for the life of a specific person, but information on absolutely any event that ever happened in history — or all of time.

The Sanskrit word ākāśa translates variously as “sky,” “aether,” or “space” and is also sometimes said to refer to “the memory of nature.” The term Akashic Records itself was not in popular use until a founding member of the Theosophical Society, C.W. Leadbeater, solidified the concept in his 1899 book CLAIRVOYANCE. But it should also be noted that Henry Steel Olcott wrote in his BUDDHIST CATECHISM about, “a permanency of records in the Akasha, and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evolved to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”

But wait — there’s more. The case for the Akashic Records has gotten even better in recent years.

A growing cadre of outlier physicists and cosmologists are floating the theory that we live in a simulated universe, a virtual reality — a kind of cosmic computer. That would mean that each of us are akin to an avatar playing in the greatest computer game environment of all time. That would also suggest that when we die, our avatar could be “saved.” Everything we ever did, thought, hoped and dreamed would be kept like a computer file — and in this way we would never die. Furthermore, the “program” that is/was our life can be “called up” or “resurrected” at any time.

This is the way physicist Frank Tipler or Tulane University described it in his 1994 book, The Physics of Immortality. He makes a strenuous argument (along with a lot of mind-numbing math) that if our universe is not already a cosmic computer, of sorts, it is evolving toward becoming one — something he compares to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the OMEGA POINT.

In Frank Tipler’s scenario, being “saved” like a computer file is almost an exact analog for being “saved” for immortality in the traditional religious sense. Perhaps all of those blinking “Jesus Saves” neon signs hanging over those gritty inner-city missions have something going for them after all!

About a decade after Tipler’s book came out, noted Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom made waves with his proposal that we live in a simulation in 2003. Since then, the idea has continued to gain remarkable momentum, even among popular mainstream scientists, such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He puts the odd that we live in a virtual reality at 50-50.

Perhaps the foremost champion of this model is TOM CAMPBELL, a physicist who enjoyed a long career working on hard, nuts-and-bolts science projects in missile defense and statistical risk analysis for NASA. In his exhausting trilogy of bookS titled, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything), Campbell lays out across some 900 pages in excruciating detail — technical, scientific and philosophical — his argument that we live in a virtual reality, a digital universe in which he says, “all reality is data.”

Implicit within Tom Campbell’s model is the existence of what is essentially the Akashic Records. Campbell would say (and has said), “It’s all data, and that data is available to anyone who can learn how to access it.”

So all of this is a long-winded way for me to say that no reader should dismiss MELISSA FEICKs book as just another selection in the popsugar New Age candy store. She’s on solid ground here working in a system that combineS an ancient pedigree with growing support from modern hard science.

But what is her “radical” new approach? I won’t give too much away except to say that Feick models the Akashic Records — or perhaps re-envisions them — away from the standard “cosmic library” motif that has long characterized it. Up until recent times, using a “library metaphor” to describe the Akashic Records has made sense because a library has been the closest physical analog we have to a cosmic storehouse of knowledge.

But we’re in the digital-computer age now and print books, and even libraries, are fast becoming passe. Furthermore, classical physics has given way to quantum physics. Every culture tends to frame transcendent ideas using terms and imagery that reflect what we have now, and what we can understand in terms of framing comparison models today.

So Feick describes for us an Akashic Records that looks more like a combination of cosmic helical DNA model and multidimensional levels that fit togethers in a dynamic, ascending spiral configuration that is fluid and omni-directional and interactional. She suggests that, through a process of meditation and focus of intent, anyone can reach the Akashic Records, find their own “strands” and manipulate them to make corrections that will re-wire or reprogram our entire lives and existence, past, present and future.

Worried about the burden of “bad karma?” No problem, says Melissa Feick. Now karma is erased, rewritten or rendered mute by some simple adjustments in the patterns that represent our own “file” in the Akashic Records. I’m not being glib when I say “simple adjustments.” I’m only echoing the way Feick describes the process. Not only can anyone learn to access their own Akashic file, she says, it’s super easy.

Feick herself is a working intuitive counselor and spiritual guide who uses her gifts and developed abilities to serve clients who want to know more about what’s in their own Akashic files. She holds a degree in psychology and also lists a variety of skill on HER WEBSITE, from Reiki Master to Angel Therapy Practitioner.

This book is well written with a relaxed, easy prose that is easily accessible and engaging for the average reader. She never lectures or talks down to us. She offers lofty ideas without being preachy. The tone is friendly, positive, chatty and informational. Melissa Feick seems a happy warrior eager to share her gifts and life experiences which clearly have been focused on helping other people in big ways and small in the daily game of life.

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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