The Akashic Records
Bombast and Flitterflop investigate
The fourth in an occasional series of topical investigations with a humorous twist
Introduction
For the benefit of new readers we should add that despite, or perhaps because of their rather silly names, Bombast and Flitterflop are real individuals, well-known to the authors of this website, whose names we have changed to protect their identities. In their fourth investigation, they discuss the modern fad of reading the 'Akashic Records'. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with this expression we should point out that the Akashic Records is not a fringe 'nu metal' music label, but a term invented during the late 19th century to describe the impressions left in the Astral Light of all the thoughts and deeds of mankind; a kind of eternal, etheric astral library if you like. For more information about this and related subjects please see the Further reading list at the end of the sidebar.
Accessing and correctly interpreting these impressions is not as easy as those promoting this fad would have us believe. Nor, as Flitterflop and Bombast discover during their investigation, is the information to be found in the Astral Light necessarily true or accurate. In The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky warns of the dangers of the etheric atmosphere the French occultist Eliphas Levi called "The Great Magical Agent."
The fascination with reading the Akashic Records poses other dangers, disappointments and disillusionments too. For where there is curiosity there is no shortage of fraudsters, eager to tell naïve and often deeply troubled individuals what they want to hear. And if the querant only loses their money they may count themselves lucky, for, as we shall see, the advice given by 'Akashic Readers' is no different to the trite platitudes and flattering fictions trotted out by Tarot readers, crystal gazers and other assorted purveyors of blindingly obvious poppycock. Whilst this may amuse those of us who can see through the charade and recognize the misinformation imparted, the unsuspecting and impressionable individual with serious personal problems can suffer much harm from such readings.
You can find a full list of Bombast and Flitterflop's previous occasional articles on our Homepage, while the complete series of the twelve Astral Conversations they recorded for us is reviewed and described in the sidebar. These unique articles remain perennial favourites with new and old readers alike as you can see from the enthusiastic comments we've received about them over the years.
FLITTERFLOP: (excitedly): "Guess what! I've had my Akashic Records read last week. Isn't that great?!"
BOMBAST: "What speed were they replayed at? 45rpm? 78rpm?"
FLITTERFLOP: "I'm not with you?"
BOMBAST: "That much is chakra-balancing, crystal clear. Don't you know that the replay speed is critical with Akashic Records?"
FLITTERFLOP: "What?"
BOMBAST: "If the delivery is too fast you'll hear mostly gibberish."
FLITTERFLOP: "Really? What if it's too slow?"
BOMBAST: "You'll get complete gibberish."
FLITTERFLOP: "Medium speed?"
BOMBAST: "Double-Dutch."
FLITTERFLOP (annoyed): "You're taking the piss, aren't you? Records are those funny, black vinyl discs sad old fogies like you used to listen to music before streaming came along, aren't they?"
BOMBAST: "Your knowledge of the history of sound reproduction astounds me. It's a pity it doesn't extend to the many ways of parting a fool from his money. It's not me who's taking the piss but the resourceful raconteur who read your Akashic Records. I hope you didn't pay to hear their gibberish."
FLITTERFLOP: "Er...well...um..."
BOMBAST (shaking his head): "Thought so. You've been away with the fairies again, haven't you? And after all we've been through and learnt together. You really are God's gift to snake oil salesmen, aren't you?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Well, it was a woman actually. Rather a young and pretty one according to the photos on her website, and a qualified doctor to boot."
BOMBAST: "A doctor, eh? Let me guess...she has a PhD in Parapsychology."
FLITTERFLOP: "No."
BOMBAST: "Psychotherapy perhaps?"
FLITTERFLOP: "No."
BOMBAST: "Western Esotericism?"
FLITTERFLOP: "You made that up!"
BOMBAST: "I wish I had. Sadly its only too real. It's a full-time three year PhD course offered by the University of Exeter."
FLITTERFLOP: "Well, it's not that either."
BOMBAST: "I give up. Go on, astound me. Just so long as it's not Creative Writing."
FLITTERFLOP: "You're trying to be funny again, aren't you? I've never heard of a PhD in Creative Writing."
BOMBAST: "You should get out more. The University of Kent offers no less than 45 degree courses in this essential subject. You need to get pretty creative to flog a pig in a poke without letting the cat out of the bag, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. Well...maybe not where some punters are concerned."
FLITTERFLOP: "Do you mean me?"
BOMBAST: "Perish the thought!"
FLITTERFLOP (defensively): "Well, you're dead wrong. Dr Kelly M. Dee has a PhD in Health and Wellbeing from the University of East Anglia. And she's a fully certified Soul-Realignment Energizing Practitioner."
BOMBAST: "I never doubted she was fully certified. What we need to establish is whether you are."
FLITTERFLOP: "You will have your little joke."
BOMBAST: "I rather think you're the joker in this scenario."
FLITTERFLOP: "Why?"
BOMBAST: "Kelly M. Dee. Really? Surely you're joking? 'M.D.'? She's not a doctor of medicine too is she? You made the name up. Admit it."
FLITTERFLOP (indignantly): "No I did not! What's wrong with Kelly Dee with or without the middle initial?"
BOMBAST: "Everything's right with it. That's what's wrong with it."
FLITTERFLOP: "What do you mean?"
BOMBAST: "You really must watch fewer YouTube videos and read more books — you know, those papery things with pages bound in a soft or hard cover. Edward Kelly was a 16th century occultist who worked with John Dee and claimed to hold converse with angels using a 'magic' mirror. It's a short step from scrying for spirits to reading Akashic Records for a susceptible simpleton. Of course, it could all be a fortuitous coincidence. So how much does this scrumptious sibyl charge for her astral gibberish — sorry — percipient prognostications?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Um...er...a fair price."
BOMBAST: "I'll be the judge of that. Come on, out with it."
FLITTERFLOP: "Well...er...her two hour...um...reading was...um...a teeny bit pricey."
BOMBAST: "How teeny, exactly?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Six-hundred-and-ninety-five pounds."
BOMBAST (shaking his head): "That explains her doctorate in Health and Wellbeing."
FLITTERFLOP: "Does it? How?"
BOMBAST: "She's clearly an expert in undermining your mental health while improving her financial well-being. Six-hundred-and-ninety-five quid for two hours work! She saw you coming! She probably spent less than an hour on you as she most likely recycles her poppycock multiple times. That's more than solicitors get and they're even bigger crooks. I'm clearly in the wrong business."
FLITTERFLOP: "The cost includes the personal assistance of a whole team of energetic beings — well — spirit guides I guess you'd call them."
BOMBAST: "I preferred 'energetic beings'. I'd feel pretty 'energetic' if I was paid £695 to deliver a pile of poppycock in a warm and confident, sexy, but infinitely caring and deeply respectful voice for two hours."
FLITTERFLOP (astonished): "How do you know what she sounded like?"
BOMBAST (slapping his forehead): "I must be psychic."
FLITTERFLOP: "I'm beginning to doubt whether she was..."
BOMBAST: "Only beginning?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Some of the stuff she told me does seems a bit implausible now I've had time to think about it."
BOMBAST: "Only a bit?"
FLITTERFLOP (irritably): "Oh, all right. Very implausible then."
BOMBAST (chuckling softly): "Let me guess. She told you that you are very loving and giving. You have an open, sincere heart, and you're the kind of person who is open about your feelings with other people. Which, of course means you get hurt a good deal."
FLITTERFLOP (gaping): "How could you possibly know all that?"
BOMBAST: "Oh, I know a lot more. Because you are naturally very empathic you will be prone to sucking up other peoples' pain and difficulties. The result is that your chakras become depleted and you get sick a lot. Part of your soul-training in this life is to learn that not everybody wants to be healed, and that you shouldn't give of yourself to everybody you meet."
FLITTERFLOP: "But how can you know exactly what she said?"
BOMBAST: "Because it's all in Fortune Telling for Dummies."
FLITTERFLOP (typing feverishly on his mobile phone): "There's no such book."
BOMBAST (smirking): "I may have made it up. Look, have you learned nothing from our chats? The stuff she spouted is completely formulaic. Kelly probably uses a standard script and changes a few details for each reading. It wouldn't surprise me to discover there's 'an app for that' somewhere, and hey presto! A new Akashic Record is born! The pig in a poke you bought is a New Age mystical makeover of the same rubbish you could've got from any gypsy whose palm you crossed with a twenty-pound note. The difference is that the average gypsy charges less than your sexy sibyl Kelly did."
FLITTERFLOP: "So I probably didn't spend my formative incarnations in the Alpha Centauri star system?"
BOMBAST: "Nope."
FLITTERFLOP: "You don't think I could've been an alchemist in 14th century Prague?"
BOMBAST: "I doubt it. Although you're mad keen on Czech pilsner I can't really see you making gold, can you? I mean, you struggle to brew a decent cuppa, don't you?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Kelly also said I'd had seven lifetimes as an Australian Aborigine."
BOMBAST: "With your phobia about bugs?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Maybe she misread that bit."
BOMBAST: "I'd say the toothsome soothsayer misread a good deal. But do tell me more about the Alpha Centaurians. They sound fascinating."
FLITTERFLOP: "Kelly says that they are a group of souls that specialise in 'lightness' as an energetic quality and are involved in helping human beings to heal after difficult lifetimes. They started to incarnate on Earth about 1,000 years ago so they could get a taste for the difficulties and challenges we experience here. Lots of them came through during the French Revolution but they do struggle a bit once they're incarnated here."
BOMBAST: "I bet they do. So would I if I had to crochet my way through a pile of woollen culottes while watching another tumbrel load of idle, cake-eating aristoes queuing up for a close encounter with Madame Guillotine. Heady stuff! What else did your pretty prognosticator tell you?"
FLITTERFLOP: "That as a star traveller I'm in a select minority here on Earth, and that I probably feel a little bit different or 'alien' compared to most people."
BOMBAST: "The originality of the woman is breathtaking. Who would have thought clever Kelly would know you're an alien from Nibiru. No wonder you feel a bit spaced out here on Earth."
FLITTERFLOP: "You can be as sarcastic as you like. I do feel different."
BOMBAST: "Anyone who doesn't feel different to other people is a moron."
FLITTERFLOP (testily): "Oh all right. I admit some of the things she said were a little bit hard to swallow."
BOMBAST: "Some? I have to admire your loyalty to the lovely Kelly, but not your astonishing naïveté."
FLITTERFLOP: "It's not that. It's mostly just stubbornness. It's not easy to admit you've been taken for a ride. Especially after all the conversations we've had."
BOMBAST: "So what exactly did she say that made you suspect the slippery seeress was not being entirely honest with you?"
FLITTERFLOP: "She told me I had excellent communication skills which had been honed over many lifetimes spent as a Roman orator."
BOMBAST: "She clearly hadn't read any of our little chats."
FLITTERFLOP: "You don't have to rub it in. When she said that the main reason souls incarnate on Earth is to seize the learning opportunities offered here, I began to question the whole reading. That, and the fact that she kept insisting I have the energy of the Ascended Master Jesus around me and the personal attention of the Archangels Raphael, Michael, Gabriel and Uriel. I mean, even I can spot flannel when it's laid on that thickly with a trowel."
BOMBAST: "You can't lay flannel on with a trowel. You need an iron for that."
FLITTERFLOP: "You know what I meant."
BOMBAST (with feigned innocence): "What's that, then?"
FLITTERFLOP: "I've been taken for a mug again, haven't I?"
BOMBAST: "I'm afraid so. But look on the bright side. You now know why you feel confused, depressed, angry, exhausted and drained of energy much of the time."
FLITTERFLOP: "Because of the unhealthy soul contacts I made in previous lives, you mean? That was Kelly's explanation."
BOMBAST: "Nope. Because in this life you paid a clever charlatan six-hundred-and-ninety-five pounds to learn you're a gullible fopdoodle. I could have told you that for nothing. Still, your money wasn't completely wasted. You're now a fully paid-up expert on the Akashic Records who can tell people all about the 27 soul groups, the 16 areas of soul service, the 14 most common past-life roles, the 35 soul archetypes, the 7 classes of energetic beings, and the 13 intuitive Archangelic gifts it takes to ascend into the fifth, or even the ninety-seventh dimension."
FLITTERFLOP: "You've made that list up."
BOMBAST (wryly): "No I didn't. I nicked it from a website called 'Akashic Soul Empowerment.' Though I admit I added the bit about the ninety-seventh dimension. Actually, there are only 31."
FLITTERFLOP (tentatively): "Are there —really?"
BOMBAST: "No. I made that up too."
FLITTERFLOP: "I read somewhere that it was Madame Blavatsky who started the whole Akashic Records craze."
BOMBAST: "You've been visiting Wikipedia again, haven't you? Didn't I tell you it would rot your brain?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Very droll. So if she didn't start it, who did?"
BOMBAST: "A Theosophist called Charles Webster Leadbeater first used the term in the 19th century. Then another Theosophist, Alice Bailey, took up the term, and described it as 'an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and Earth experiences of our planet'. But unlike Leadbeater she had the good sense to qualify her statement by adding 'Only a trained occultist can distinguish between actual experience and those astral pictures created by imagination and keen desire'. Later on the German occultist Rudolf Steiner wrote and lectured about the Akashic Records. But it wasn't until the American psychic Edgar Cayce popularized the term through the trance readings he gave in the 1920's and 30's that it was adopted by the New Age movement. Since then it has been distorted, misunderstood and trivialised, in the same way that the so-called 'law of attraction' is a distortion and trivialization of different occult teachings."
FLITTERFLOP: "So Blavatsky never mentioned any Akashic Records?"
BOMBAST: "Whilst she never wrote anything about any Akashic Records, she did reveal the great truth that everything that has ever been done, said, or thought on Earth, is indelibly and eternally imprinted upon and within the psychic atmosphere which closely surrounds the physical plane. She called this atmosphere the Astral Light, as did other occultists before her. The 16th century occultist Paracelsus called it the 'Sidereal Light.' Eliphas Levi called it the 'Great Magical Agent'. That's about the only bit the ninnyhammers who started the present craze got right."
FLITTERFLOP: "Ninnyhammers? Is that another of your neologisms for numpties?
BOMBAST: "Au contraire, my young mooncalf. Ninnyhammer was first used in 1592. It has since fallen out of favour, although Tolkien slipped it into The Lord of the Rings. I have loads more insults if you don't like it. How about fopdoodle, fustilarian or rampallian? No? What about booby, nincompoop or poltroon?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Ninnyhammer is better."
BOMBAST: "I'm glad we agree on something."
FLITTERFLOP: "What is the Akasha then?"
BOMBAST: "Something far greater and infinitely more important than the New Age ninnyhammers who bandy it about so blithely realise. The Secret Doctrine defines it as 'the universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it fills all the infinite Space; is Space itself, in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh principles'. So wrote Madame Blavatsky on page 511 of volume two of The Secret Doctrine, in case you want to look it up. In Isis Unveiled, the very first book she wrote, Akasha is defined as the source of all life, the reservoir of all energy, and the motion behind every change of matter."
FLITTERFLOP: "So, this fascination with reading the Akashic Records is another form of channeling, just as channeling was a re-branding of mediumship?"
BOMBAST: "Got it in one. It holds out the same promises and pedals the same delusions. No one summed up the dangers of the Astral Light better than Blavatsky. What she wrote nearly 150 years ago in Isis Unveiled still holds good today. 'It is on the indestructible tablets of the Astral Light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform; and that future events — effects of long-forgotten causes — are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow'. Eliphas Levi called the Astral Light 'the great Serpent and the Dragon from which radiates on Humanity every evil influence'. Quoting this, Blavatsky says: 'This is so; but why not add that the Astral Light gives out nothing but what it has received; that it is the great terrestrial crucible, in which the vile emanations of the Earth (moral and physical) upon which the Astral Light is fed, are all converted into their subtlest essence, and radiated back intensified, thus becoming epidemics — moral, psychic and physical'. In her Collected Writings Blavatsky wrote: 'The Astral Light reflects everything reversed in its treacherous wave (both from the upper planes and from its lower solid plane, the Earth). Hence the confusion of its colours and sounds in the perception and clairaudience of the sensitive who trusts to its records'. And this is the 'Akasha' your silver-tongued sibyl claims to read."
FLITTERFLOP: "But she didn't, did she? What she told me didn't come from the Astral Light or even the Astral gloom. It came out of her own head."
BOMBAST: "Or possibly a very much lower part of her anatomy. Still, there was no great harm done, was there?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Only to my pocket and pride. But there is no shortage of unbalanced types who could be tipped over the edge by some of the stuff Kelly told me. Others who were flattered by what they were supposed to have been or done in previous lives could be driven to pursue all sorts of mad fads or dive down weird rabbit holes."
BOMBAST: "Well said. If we were meant to know the intimate details of our previous lives and every thought we'd ever formulated, we'd have been born with the ability to recollect them. As it is, they are mercifully hidden from all but a very few. Look back over your present life, especially those incidents that were really painful and tell me honestly whether you'd want to recall similar or even worse memories?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Which is why Kelly's reading consisted of a mixture of generalities, some obvious teachings filched from occult and mystical sources and lots of things I wanted to hear. All topped off with a large dollop of flattery."
BOMBAST: "Exactly. Lesson learnt?"
FLITTERFLOP: "Oh I think so. Yes, definitely. But that doesn't mean I won't make a similar mistake in the future."
BOMBAST (enthusiastically): "Our readers are counting on it!"
If Bombast and Flitterflop have encouraged you to think about the conclusions they reached in this investigation, their labours will not have been in vain. Until we hear from them again, we wish you well.
You can find their previous investigations on our Homepage and a complete list of their twelve Astral Conversations, together with some of the comments we have received from readers about these unique articles, in the sidebar.
© Copyright occult-mysteries.org. Article published 13 November 2022.
