Is there a memory larger than our own, and what might it mean for those of us who work in the regression room?
Open your phone and tap a photo folder. A picture from ten years ago is on the screen in under a second.
Where was it?
It wasn’t inside the phone. The phone is a few grams of glass, metal and silicon. The picture lives somewhere else, on a server we’ll never see, in a layer we casually call “the cloud”. The phone only reaches out and fetches it.
We use this every day without a second thought. But it raises a question that’s hard to shake once it gets into your head.
If a handful of silicon can have a cloud for its memory — can consciousness have one too?
Every thought we’ve had. Every feeling that rose in the body and passed. Does it simply dissolve? Or is it stored somewhere?
Hold that question for a while. Before we can answer it, we need three old words. Akash. Memory. Chitta.
Akash: not empty, but full
For most of us, space means emptiness. The gap between things. The dark between stars.
Indian philosophy saw it differently.
Of the five elements (earth, water, fire, air and Akash), Akash is the subtlest. Earth can be touched. Water can be felt. Fire can be seen. Even air makes itself known on the skin. Akash can’t be held at all.
Yet everything else happens inside it.
The Sanskrit word ākāśa is traced to the root kāś, which means to shine, to become visible. Strange, isn’t it? The word we translate as “empty space” has appearing at its root.
So Akash isn’t the empty room. It’s closer to the fabric the room is made of.
To be clear, this isn’t physics. It’s how Indian thought read Akash: as a field that holds information. That’s the lens I’m using here.
And if Akash is the field where everything appears, one more question follows naturally. Does that field forget?
Memory: does anything really go?
Think of a smell from your childhood. Wet earth after the first rain. Something cooking in your mother’s kitchen.
For years, it was gone. Then one evening a breeze brought it back — and with it a whole afternoon, a whole house, a whole stretch of your life.
Where was it all that time?
Neuroscience says it was in the brain, in the connections between neurons. That’s a sound answer, and it deserves respect. But step outside the skull and look at nature, and memory seems to be everywhere.
A seed has no brain, yet it “knows” it must become a banyan and not a rose. We call that DNA, which is really millions of years of memory written in a four-letter script. A migratory bird has no map, yet generation after generation it flies the same thousands of kilometres. Water freezes into the same six-sided crystal it has formed for billions of years, and nobody taught it.
Nature saves. Repeats. Carries forward.
Memory, it seems, is less something we do and more a way that things exist.
So could there be a memory larger than our own?
Chitta: the lake beneath the mind
Yoga describes the inner instrument, the antahkarana, in four parts. There’s manas, the restless mind that runs after the senses. There’s buddhi, which weighs and decides. There’s ahamkara, the sense of “I”. And there’s chitta.
Chitta is the lake of memory. It’s deep, still water. Every experience falls into it like a pebble, makes a ripple, and settles quietly at the bottom.
The tradition takes one more step, and it’s a bold one. Your chitta isn’t a closed pond. It’s a wave on a much larger ocean: Mahat, the universal mind. The wave has its own shape and its own name, but the water belongs to the ocean.
Now put the two side by side.
Akash is where everything appears.
Chitta is where everything is recorded.
What if they’re two names for the same thing?
The cloud of consciousness
Let’s go back to the question we started with.
Picture a vast Akash that is also a vast chitta. It would be a living field where every event, every thought and every vibration has appeared — and been recorded.
This idea travelled from Indian thought through the Theosophical movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the modern world gave it a name: the Akashic Records.
The original cloud storage.
That brings the phone back into the picture. The phone is a terminal connected to the cloud. So what is the brain connected to?
Factory or antenna?
The mainstream scientific view is that the brain produces consciousness, the way the liver produces bile. It’s a reasonable position, and most neuroscience works from it.
It hasn’t been the only view, though. In 1898, William James suggested that the brain might transmit and filter consciousness rather than generate it. Decades later, Karl Pribram explored a holographic model of the brain. Science still treats the question as open. I find the antenna picture a useful one to think with.
Think of a radio tuned to 98.3 FM. The song isn’t being made inside the box. The radio is catching a signal that’s already in the room.
When we’re caught up in the daily rush of deadlines, worry and getting by, the mind runs mostly in beta, and the antenna works in a narrow band. It picks up what’s urgent and little else. In meditation, in deep relaxation, in trance, the tuning changes and the band widens.
In the regression room
Anyone who has sat through PLRT sessions, as therapist or as client, knows this shift.
The client slows down. The breath deepens. The busy mind steps back. Then material comes up that doesn’t seem to belong to anything in this life: an image, a place, an emotion with no visible source.
What is it? A past-life memory? The subconscious speaking in symbols? A brush with some larger field? Among practitioners there’s no single answer, and perhaps there doesn’t need to be.
The Akashic picture offers one way to hold it. The client’s mind may not be only a storehouse. It may also be a receiver.
For me, that carries a quiet lesson for the therapist. What surfaces in a session isn’t ours. It belongs to the client’s deeper consciousness. Our work is to help keep the antenna still and steady — and then step out of the way.
If every thought is being recorded somewhere, what did you add to that library today?
And to fellow practitioners: have you seen clients reach material that seemed to come from beyond their own memory? How did you read it? I’d be glad to hear.
kheer- takes me back to my Dadi’s kitchen. The smell of Rain (in india) and so many other things!
thank you for writing so beautifully and more importantly simply 
not to be discussed (Yet)!!!