These days, mainly due to the influence of Theosophy, the word Akasha has been popularized as an adjective, through the use of the term "Akashic records" or "Akashic library", referring to an etheric compendium of all knowledge and history. However, there is growing acceptance of the word Akasha in its original form as a noun, describing the Cosmic field that used to be referred to as the Void.

Traditionally, Akasha was a term for either space or æther, depending on the region of the world and religious background of its people. In Hindustani, Nepali, Bengali, and Tamil it means "sky". In many modern Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages, the corresponding word (often rendered Akash) also retains a generic meaning of "sky". It is instructive, therefore, to picture the Akasha as a field or sphere surrounding the Earth, corresponding with the Stratosphere.

Ervin László in Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (2004), based on ideas by Rudolf Steiner, posits "a field of information" as the substance of the Cosmos, which he calls "Akashic field" or "A-field". Scott Cunningham (1995) uses the term Akasha to refer to "the spiritual force that Earth, Air, Fire, and Water descend from". So, we can see a correspondence with the term Noosphere, which we examined in a previous bulletin, however the Akasha is more pervasive throughout the Cosmos than the Noosphere – it just happens to gather energetically as a sphere around our planet, magnetised by human consciousness.

In Vedantic Hinduism, Akasha means the basis and essence of all things in the material world - the first element created. Hindu philosophy states that Akasha or aether is the fifth physical substance, which is the substratum of the quality of sound. It can be translated as "upper sky" or “space”. It is the One, Eternal, and All-Pervading physical substance, which is imperceptible. First appeared the space, from which appeared air, from that fire or energy, from which the water, and therefrom the earth.

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