The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the Akashic Record
Preliminary Remarks

[ 1 ] Through ordinary history, man can only learn about a small part of what mankind experienced in prehistoric times. Historical evidence only sheds light on a few millennia. And even what antiquity, palaeontology and geology can teach us is very limited. And this limitation is compounded by the unreliability of everything that is based on external evidence. Just consider how the image of this or that event or people that happened not so long ago has changed when new historical evidence has been found. Just compare the descriptions given by different historians about one and the same thing, and you will soon realize what uncertain ground you are standing on. Everything that belongs to the external world of the senses is subject to time. And time also destroys what has been created in time. But external history is dependent on what has been preserved in time. No one can say whether what has been preserved is also what is essential if he stops at the external evidence. - But everything that arises in time has its origin in the eternal. But the eternal is not accessible to sensory perception. But the paths to perceiving the eternal are open to man. He can develop the dormant powers within him in such a way that he is able to recognize this eternal. In the essays on the question: "How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?", which appear in this journal, reference is made to this training. In their course, these essays will also show that man, at a certain high level of his cognitive faculty, can also penetrate to the eternal origins of temporally transient things. If man expands his cognitive faculty in this way, then he is no longer dependent on external evidence for knowledge of the past. Then he is able to see what cannot be sensually perceived in the events, what no time can destroy from them. From the transient history he advances to an imperishable one. However, this history is written in different letters than the usual one. In Gnosis and Theosophy it is called the "Akashic Chronicle". Only a faint idea of this chronicle can be given in our language. For our language is calculated for the world of the senses. And what we call it immediately takes on the character of this sense world. It is therefore easy to give the uninitiated, who cannot yet convince themselves of the reality of a particular spiritual world through their own experience, the impression of a fantasist, if not an even worse one. - He who has acquired the ability to perceive in the spiritual world recognizes the eternal character of past events. They do not stand before him like the dead testimonies of history, but in full life. What has happened is played out before him in a certain way. - Those who are initiated into the reading of such living writing can look back into a far more distant past than that which external history represents; and they can also - from direct spiritual perception - describe the things of which history reports in a far more reliable way than is possible for it. In order to prevent a possible error, it should be said right away that spiritual perception is not inherently infallible either. This view can also be mistaken, can see inaccurately, crookedly, wrongly. No man is free from error in this field either, no matter how high he may be. That is why we should not be offended if information that comes from such spiritual sources does not always agree completely. But the reliability of observation is far greater here than in the external world of the senses. And what different initiates can tell us about history and prehistory will be in essential agreement. In fact, such history and prehistory exist in all secret schools. And here there has been such complete agreement for thousands of years that the agreement that exists between the external historians of even one century cannot be compared with it. The initiates describe the same essentials at all times and in all places.

[ 2 ] After these preliminary remarks, several chapters from the Akashic Records will be reproduced here. The beginning shall be made with descriptions of those facts which took place when the so-called Atlantic mainland still existed between America and Europe. There was once land on this part of the earth's surface. Today, the bottom of this land forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Plato still tells of the last remnant of land, the island of Poseidonis, which lay to the west of Europe and Africa. That the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean was once dry land, that for about a million years it was the scene of a civilization which, however, was very different from ours today: this, as well as the fact that the last remnants of this dry land perished in the tenth millennium B.C., the reader can read in the booklet "Atlantis, according to occult sources, by W. Scott-Elliot". Here, information is given about this ancient civilization, which supplements what is said in that book. While there the outward side, the external processes of our Atlantean ancestors are described, here a few things will be recorded about their mental character and about the inner nature of the conditions under which they lived. The reader must, therefore, take himself back in thought to an age which lies almost ten thousand years behind us and which lasted for many millennia. What is described here, however, did not only take place on the mainland flooded by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, but also in the neighboring areas of today's Asia, Africa, Europe and America. And what took place in these areas later developed out of that earlier culture. - I am today still obliged to observe silence about the sources of the information to be given here. Anyone who knows anything at all about such sources will understand why this must be so. But events may occur which will soon make it possible to speak in this direction. How much of the knowledge that lies hidden in the bosom of the theosophical current may gradually be communicated depends entirely on the behavior of our contemporaries. - and now shall follow the first of the writings that can be recorded here.

Now follows the first of the writings which can be given here.