Jeffrey - Power vs Truth

POWER VS.

TRUTH Peering Behind the Teachings of

David R. Hawkins

Scott Jeffrey

Creative Crayon Publishers

Copyright © 2013 by Scott Jeffrey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Creative Crayon Publishers 230 Kings Mall Court, Suite 142 Kingston, New York 12401 ISBN: 978-1-938557-02-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920467

Manufactured in the United States of America on recycled paper.

For those with the courage and willingness to peer behind the curtain …

Do not believe in what you have heard; do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations; do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken of by many; do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe merely in the authority of your teachers and elders. After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

– Kalama Sutta

Contents

Preface ................................................................................................... 1

PART I Hawkins’ System ............................................................... 11

ONE Power vs. Force ........................................................................ 15

Hawkins’ Credentials and His Dissertation .................................. 16 Celebrity Endorsements ................................................................... 21 Mysticism and the New Physics ...................................................... 23 Hawkins’ Authoritative Voice ......................................................... 26

TWO Calibration Method ............................................................... 29

In Search of Calibration Accuracy ................................................... 30 Calibration Discrepancies ................................................................. 33 A Simple Experiment ........................................................................ 37 Hawkins and Kinesiology ................................................................ 39 Claims and Assumptions of the Method ....................................... 42 Hawkins’ “New Science” ................................................................. 46

THREE Map of Consciousness ...................................................... 52

How the Map of Consciousness Was Conceived .......................... 53 Is the Map’s Structure Meaningful? ................................................ 56 The Map’s Missing Pieces ................................................................ 63 Perils Below 200 ................................................................................. 65 Exploring Other Maps of the Terrain ............................................. 68

PART II Hawkins in a Postmodern World .................................. 69

FOUR Postmodernism: A Closer Look ......................................... 71

A Brief History of Postmodernism .................................................. 72 Hawkins’ View of Postmodernism ................................................. 79

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FIVE The Ego and Human Development ..................................... 85

What Is the Ego? ................................................................................. 86 Multiple Lines of Human Development ......................................... 92 Stages of Development versus States of Consciousness .............. 95 Stages of Ego Development .............................................................. 97

SIX The Absolutist Stage of Development ................................ 100

The Absolutist ................................................................................... 102 The Absolute versus Absolutism ................................................... 110

SEVEN Beyond Absolutism ......................................................... 112

Departing from Convention ........................................................... 112 The Healthy Side of Relativism ...................................................... 117 Beyond Absolutism and Relativism ............................................... 125

PART III Hawkins’ Dissociation ................................................. 131

EIGHT The Avatar, the Shadow, and the Dissociated ............ 135

Hawkins’ Level of Consciousness ................................................. 137 Hawkins’ Personal Shadow ............................................................ 142 Dissociation versus Integration: Beware of Level 600 ................ 150

NINE Hawkins’ Biography: A Different Perspective .............. 157

Hitting Bottom .................................................................................. 158 The Ultimate Trip: A Psychedelic Experience ............................ 160 The Search Continues ...................................................................... 164 A Reclusive Life? .............................................................................. 167 Fortifying Power vs. Force ................................................................ 170 Foremost Teacher of Enlightenment ............................................. 171

PART IV Hawkins’ Legacy ........................................................... 175

TEN The Spoiled Fruits of Absolutism ...................................... 177

Hawkins Fundamentalism ............................................................. 178 The Church of Calibrations ............................................................ 185

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ELEVEN The Cult of Hawkins .................................................... 193

Is Hawkins’ Community a Cult? ................................................... 193 The Destructive Side of the Devotional Nonduality Cult ......... 197 Joining Hawkins’ Cult: The Role of the Student ......................... 202 Hawkins’ Pseudoscience ................................................................ 207 The Business of Enlightenment ..................................................... 210

TWELVE The Winding Road Ahead .......................................... 217

The Case of David R. Hawkins ...................................................... 220 Exiting the House of Mirrors ......................................................... 226

Epilogue ............................................................................................ 232

APPENDICES .................................................................................. 237

Appendix A Stages of Human Development ............................ 239

Appendix B Integrity and Willpower ......................................... 240

Appendix C Integration ................................................................. 252

Appendix D Nonduality ............................................................... 280

Appendix E Additional Insights .................................................. 291

Notes ................................................................................................. 301

Bibliography .................................................................................... 323

About the Author ............................................................................ 333

Preface

We are all searching for meaning. In the throes of angst or confusion, when something comes along that resembles meaning, we tend to latch on. When I discovered Dr. David R. Hawkins’ work in 2001, I was seeking higher truth. For various reasons, his work resonated with me deeply—it helped me find meaning—and I devoted myself to it for a decade.

More than an ardent student of his work, I revered Hawkins as my spiritual teacher. I was devoted to serving him in whatever capacity I could, and felt privileged for the opportunity.

After my initial encounter with Hawkins, I was spiritually inspired: meditating with greater intensity, reading spiritual literature with fervor and greater comprehension, and engaging in contemplation on a more consistent basis. All of these activities have continued to this day, and for that I will always be grateful.

Hawkins received the honor of making the 2012 Watkin’s Mind Body Spirit magazine list of “One Hundred Most Spiritually Influential Living People” (coming in at #61). Nothing found in this book should necessarily challenge that. There are many beautiful and uplifting aspects of his teachings that have attracted so many of us to his work.

For ten years, I believed this teacher had a bulletproof method for discerning “absolute truth” about anything, and he claimed as much. Hawkins has declared that his muscle test for truth is “the most important discovery in mankind's history.”1 Thousands of students worldwide, like myself, have bought his books and attended his lectures on their own quests for truth.

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Upon closer examination of his Map of Consciousness and his calibration method for truth, however, a different story is revealed. I found abundant evidence that his claims about his calibration method are unsubstantiated; his map was not “discovered” through rigorous muscle-testing protocols, as he claims it was. I found that for some adherents, his pseudoscience breeds pathology, disrupts family and work life, and leads to life repression. His teachings give students a false sense of security, leading them to suppress the ambiguity inherent in adult life and robbing them of the psychological growth that comes from accepting ambiguities and paradoxes. (Hawkins claims to have resolved all of the paradoxes and ancient riddles of mankind, but as we’ll see, his revelations are highly suspect.)

Hawkins’ teachings lead many of his students, who are told to surrender all judgments to God, to become highly judgmental under the influence of Hawkins’ absolute truths. And perhaps most notably, his system forces his students to place authority in Hawkins as their teacher, who claims such absolute authority by virtue of his enlightenment and his alignment with the “presence of God.”

I was a devoted student of Hawkins’ work for ten years, five of those dedicated to studying and memorializing his life. I conducted over two dozen interviews with him and his colleagues. To verify and chronologically tell the story of his life, I carefully examined his school transcripts, four unpublished manuscripts, and hundreds of letters, photos, and other documents generously made available by Hawkins. I carefully listened to dozens of archival lectures and radio interviews he gave prior to the publication of Power vs. Force. I studied a great deal of what Hawkins studied—hundreds of books and papers. I also studied and participated in many of the training programs he engaged in during the 1970s and 1980s in his “exploratory phase.”

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I learned about Hawkins from Wayne Dyer in his New York City lecture in September 2001, a few weeks after 9/11. The title of the lecture, based on Dyer’s new book, was There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. Everyone, especially in NYC, was seeking a way to understand the meaningless terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I was very interested in hearing Dyer’s take on a “spiritual solution” to 9/11. Dyer invested more than a third of his three-hour talk in discussing the work of an author named David Hawkins and his book Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior.

Dyer spoke passionately and convincingly about Hawkins’ research on energy fields and his discovery of a technique for measuring energy or consciousness. I was instantly convinced and purchased a copy of the black-and-white-covered book from the back of the room.

Tearing the cellophane off this self-published work, I devoured it within two days. I became a true believer in Hawkins’ system instantly. I was so struck by the Map of Consciousness presented in Power vs. Force that I purchased dozens of copies for friends and colleagues, confident that this work held the answers to humankind’s problems.

Like many of his students, I became what we’ll call a Hawkins fundamentalist, believing David R. Hawkins was the ultimate teacher—the Arbiter of Truth—and that his teachings were the conclusive teachings on enlightenment. To fundamentalists like me, Hawkins had the final word on all matters because he was enlightened and because he confirms what he says by testing his statements for truth. That is, he “calibrates” his statements (using his muscle test) to confirm them as true, absolute, and beyond reproach. In the opinion of Hawkins fundamentalists, people who disagree with his calibration results “just don’t get it,” most likely on account of their own lower calibrations. This translates to: “If

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you disagree with Hawkins, you probably don’t have integrity, or you’re stuck in the ‘linear’ (Reason).”

In 2005, I launched consciousnessproject.org as a resource to support Hawkins’ growing community, and the website quickly attracted thousands of monthly visitors. Hawkins himself promoted the website in his lectures. I wrote over a dozen articles based on his work. I’ve manually compiled comprehensive indexes for four of his books. I crafted Creativity Revealed: Discovering the Source of Inspiration as a kind of homage to Hawkins, citing his work as an authority on the nature of consciousness. I prepared two quote books, published by Hay House, from a database of over 1,500 passages from Hawkins’ writings that I had cataloged by hand. I even laboriously defended Hawkins against attacks from independent contributors on Wikipedia and other websites. And, most recently, I invested over five years in researching and writing the life story of Dr. David R. Hawkins, published as Doctor of Truth (2012).

Things began to shift for me, however, in the later stages of writing his biography, as my beliefs about Hawkins, his enlightened condition, and his teachings were deeply challenged by a series of startling revelations I discovered through my research.

As my fundamentalism unraveled, I was forced to face an overwhelming number of discrepancies in his calibrations, his teachings, and his life story—all of which had been present from the beginning, but which I had been unable to fully see and accept.

When I began uncovering the truth behind his teachings, I was shocked, demoralized, and saddened to learn that not a single claim relating to his calibration method holds true. To those within Hawkins’ community, this confession is shocking, if not blasphemous. For those well-informed outsiders who have been critical of Hawkins’ claims, I’ve just corroborated their suspicions.

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Hawkins’ presentation includes enticing ingredients: levels of consciousness, calibrations, a framework and test to discern the truth about anything, a stairway to God and enlightenment, references to the new physics, a doctoral dissertation, nine volumes of teachings on his system, and over a hundred lectures to teach students looking for the Way. Hawkins reveals a pantheon of possibility, shrouded under the guise of both science and God. The implication is that anyone seeking answers—anyone searching for greater truth—needs to look no further. I don’t wonder why people like myself became so entranced by his teachings—they are well-suited to those seeking answers to life’s mysteries. Instead, I wonder how others with the same intention saw through them so quickly.

If you had told me a few years ago that I would write a book exposing the errors in Hawkins’ teachings, I would have thought you insane. After all, since 2002 I’ve been a staunch supporter of the man—one of his most devoted and loyal students.

Although you don’t need to read Doctor of Truth to follow this discussion, Power vs. Truth can be seen as an extended set of appendices to the biography. While the biography was written in a somewhat soft tone, here the reader will notice more scrutiny, formality, and distance, signified by my use of “Hawkins” instead of “David” (as I referred to him in the biography). Despite my polemic tone in several places, I do not believe that Hawkins is consciously aware of his work’s limitations.

Much of the information contained herein will be shocking and, frankly, disappointing for avid Hawkins students. It was to me, too. Those of us attracted to Hawkins’ work were searching for something: answers to the meaning of life and our existence, the cessation of suffering, a better understanding of ourselves and the world, and a connection to a higher source. We wanted answers. We wanted to know the truth. Deep in our hearts we

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believed there was such a thing as absolute truth in this world, and when we discovered Hawkins’ system, we were overjoyed, comforted by a sense of peace and gratitude for finally finding what we long had sought. Many of us came to this work with deep psychological wounds and in need of spiritual nourishment and healing. Hawkins’ work was surrounded by a community of like-minded people, all searching for the Path in order to walk it.

I believed Hawkins had uncovered the answers to human-kind’s problems—a way out of the ego’s house of mirrors, as he often expresses it. Eventually, I had to face the fact that Hawkins had been dishonest about numerous things, including how he created his map—dishonesty that extended even to his fabricating endorsements for his book Power vs. Force. When I learned that he had also exaggerated and dramatized the effects of his spiritual experiences, I felt devastated and overwhelmed.

As the cloud lifted, I began to clearly see how his teachings had created psychological problems for many of his students, including me, primarily because of the dissociation his teachings foster in the name of “transcending the ego” (addressed in Chapter Eight). Here, the floor fell out from beneath me. I had been so entrenched in Hawkins’ ideologies, so fortified by my belief in his absolute truths, and so in love with my teacher and his “stairway to enlightenment” that I had ignored all the evidence.

After months of reviewing the facts, I had to accept the realization that Hawkins states his personal beliefs as absolute truth. I also had to accept that his teachings—if followed to the letter—bring about pathologies, including dissociation, anxiety, life repression, and delusion. I do not make this statement flippantly. The discourse that follows will hopefully illuminate why I now believe much of Hawkins’ work can be psychologically harmful.

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In the introduction to my collection of Hawkins’ quotes (a book called Along the Path to Enlightenment), I wrote that Hawkins’ teachings are “in accord with the greatest mystics throughout history.”2 I now believe I was incorrect and will explain why throughout this book. Instead of being in accord with the mystics, his teachings are predominantly in accord with Christian ideology. We’ll see the same problematic issues that exist in Christian ideology pop up in Hawkins’ work—issues identical to those that countless scholars, philosophers, and psychologists have illuminated over the past century. Additionally, we’ll see how much of Hawkins’ teachings are in discord with major themes of Eastern traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism—as well as the works of two Indian teachers to whom Hawkins frequently refers, Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj.

My extensive research into Hawkins and his life give me no reason to believe he has ill intentions of any kind. I sense he wholeheartedly believes in his claims, his calibrations, and the absoluteness of his teachings. His intentions, to me, appear honest and genuine. If he has ulterior motives, I believe they lie outside of his conscious awareness. I believe Hawkins has lived a rich, full life, and I stand by everything I wrote in his biography, Doctor of Truth. He excelled in multiple areas of his life and he contributed to the lives of many. Nothing in this book detracts from those facts.

Keep in mind that honest skepticism is healthy and necessary for psychological and spiritual development. Being intellectually honest and applying a critical eye to Hawkins’ work isn’t “restricted to the linear 400s” (Reason) or “below 200” (lacking integrity), as some students will surely label this discussion (using terms from Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness). Hawkins questioned everything in his life. When someone claimed something was true,

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he tested it for himself. He called himself “a slightly hopeful skeptic.” Should we not hold ourselves to the same standard?

I appreciate that it’s all too easy to be a critic, and as a writer, it’s not a role I’m comfortable playing. Most criticism from “outsiders” directed at Hawkins demonstrates a lack of under-standing of his work, so perhaps this book is unique in that regard.

The following pages will explore questions that evaluate Hawkins’ teachings. The majority of my criticisms are directed at his teaching system, not at his mystical experiences. It is important to distinguish between his experiences of higher states of conscious-ness and his interpretations of these. His interpretations, like anyone else’s, are filtered through an amalgamation of factors that include worldviews, values, and cultural beliefs—factors that differ from individual to individual.

It could be said that this book offers a one-sided look at Hawkins and his teachings. Because of the large ground we have to cover, I’ll be focusing on what I believe are problematic issues found in his work. The drawback to this approach is that it limits our ability to credit the many beautiful passages that have inspired and attracted us to his teachings.

Due to space constraints, this book does not discuss in great detail all the topics and concerns it identifies. Many of these are complex and require a great deal of background context to make sense. Interested readers will find additional context and commentary in footnotes as well as the Notes section. Although by no means exhaustive on the subject of Hawkins’ teachings, hopefully this book provides a stimulating starting point for thoughtful inquiry into the work of this teacher.

Along with many other writers and thinkers referenced in the pages ahead, I’ll be citing the ideas of integral philosopher and theorist Ken Wilber. This is not because I believe he’s “more enlightened” than Hawkins or other teachers, and I do not intend to promote his Integral Model over Hawkins’ Map of

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Consciousness.* Rather, Wilber’s scholarship and his profound understanding of Eastern mysticism and Western psychology and philosophy provide context and perspective useful in examining Hawkins’ ideas.

Anticipating the uproar this book may cause within the Hawkins community, I considered not publishing it. If I didn’t truly believe, based on an overwhelming body of evidence, that aspects of Hawkins’ work are not only distorted but also psychologically harmful, I would not be shining the light on this information. I am all too aware of the tensions and anxieties many students in his community are experiencing due to his teachings. I shared these same tensions and anxieties and spoke with many students privately about the subject over the years. Having observed the liberating effects of the information presented here—both on a few early readers as well as on myself—I feel an obligation to make this information available to others. Had Hawkins not made absolute claims about muscle testing, his consciousness research, his Map of Consciousness, and the absolute-ness of his teachings, this book would not have been written.

Having become more comfortable with leaving the mysteries of life as mysteries, I find little need to make any statements with absolute certainty anymore. After evaluating the information with an open mind, please take what is of value to you and discard the rest. If you are a long-time student of Hawkins’ work, this book will challenge many deeply rooted beliefs you have about reality. Please be patient with yourself, and with me, as you review this information carefully. Question everything presented here, and above all else, think for yourself.

Hawkins says we share with others what we’ve learned and found to be of benefit. It is in this spirit that I share what follows.

* I do, however, firmly believe that Wilber’s cartography of consciousness and his Integral Model is far more comprehensive and accurate—spanning the full spectrum of human development, East and West—than Hawkins’ map.

PART I Hawkins’ System

Hawkins’ teaching system is comprised of his Map of Conscious-ness, his calibration method for discerning truth, his resulting calibrations, and their related interpretations. He began giving informal talks, lectures, seminars, and interviews on his system in the mid-1980s. He’s been expounding on the Map of Conscious-ness in his writings since the mid-1990s, first in Power vs. Force and his related dissertation, then in seven subsequent volumes.

The centerpiece of Hawkins’ system is his Map of Conscious-ness, which he hails as one of the most important discoveries in mankind’s history.1 The Map of Consciousness, comprised of seventeen levels of consciousness, is represented numerically on a scale from 1 to 1,000. Level 1 represents the lowest expression of consciousness (bacteria, according to Hawkins) and Level 1,000 represents the highest level of consciousness in human form. Level 1,000 is the highest level of enlightenment, at which Hawkins calibrates Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Krishna.

The numbers on his scale are associated with what Hawkins considers levels of consciousness: 20–Shame, 30–Guilt, 50–Apathy, 75–Grief, 100–Fear, 125–Desire, 150–Anger, 175–Pride, 200–Courage, 250–Neutrality, 310–Willingness, 350–Acceptance, 400–Reason, 500–Love, 540–Joy, 600–Peace, and 700 through 1,000–Enlightenment.

Hawkins claims to have developed his map using a technique he discovered—a derivative of what is commonly called muscle testing, more correctly termed Applied Kinesiology. In one form of AK, subjects hold their arm parallel to the ground while a tester either makes a statement or holds a substance (such as a bottle of supplements) next to the subject’s body. The tester, with his or her hand, applies downward pressure to the subject’s arm. If the arm

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remains strong, staying parallel to the floor, it denotes that the statement holds true or that the substance is useful or life-supporting for the individual in that moment. The inferred meaning of the subject’s arm going weak is that the subject’s body is in dissonance with the statement or is not in alignment with the substance. Various forms of muscle testing are used in a multitude of healing arts disciplines, allowing practitioners (often chiropractors) to diagnose and treat the local conditions of their patients.

For Hawkins, muscle testing goes far beyond the confines of local conditions. He believes the technique enables the tester to test nonlocal conditions. In other words, Hawkins thinks he can use muscle testing, as described above, to discern universal or absolute truth. Any statement made can be tested for truth, according to Hawkins, and using his Map of Consciousness, the level of truth can be “calibrated.” Further, he believes the level of truth can be calibrated not just for any statement, but for any object or person. In other words, he claims a person’s level of consciousness can be calibrated, using a number from 1 to 1,000 relative to his scale. According to Hawkins, everything on the planet, past or present, can be calibrated and assigned a number representing its level of consciousness. Everything fits somewhere on his map.

Level 200 (Courage) represents the dividing line between truth and falsehood. Anything above 200 results in your arm staying strong with the muscle test; anything below 200 makes your arm go weak. Everything in life, then, according to Hawkins, is definitively life-affirming or life-destroying, as everything interacts with your energy meridians, making you go weak or stay strong when tested with AK.

Hawkins claims that if you reference his Map of Conscious-ness and use his calibration method under the guidelines he provides, you’ll get the same or similar responses as he does. That is, you’ll achieve the same numerical measurement of

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consciousness as anyone else, making his system replicable and scientifically verifiable. (The caveat is, of course, that you and your testing partner meet all of the criteria Hawkins outlines, which are discussed in Chapter Two.)

To Hawkins, his system represents a new science, and an evidenced-based science at that. We’ll explore his system from different perspectives to determine if his calibration method for discerning truth and measuring levels of consciousness repre-sents a new, evidenced-based science or not.

Calibration method, as the term is used here, refers to calibrating a specific, alleged level of consciousness using Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, or calibrating a statement (using his map) to discern its truth. (For readers unfamiliar with this system, see Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, or his appendix “How to Calibrate the Levels of Consciousness,” which can be found in any of his later works.)

To summarize, the fundamental premise of Hawkins’ calibration method is that muscles in the body respond to truth via a nonlocal phenomenon—implying the existence of a universal “truth reflex.” The implication is that by using his calibration method, you can learn the truth about anything in the world—ideas, places, people, and things. You can know if any statement is true or not, and discern its measured level of consciousness according to his map.

ONE Power vs. Force

Before we examine Hawkins’ calibration method, let us turn our attention to the work that popularized his method: his book Power vs. Force. Over 500,000 copies have been sold in the United States alone, and the book has been translated into seventeen languages. I became a Hawkins fundamentalist upon reading that book—before ever meeting Hawkins or reading any of his other work. Perhaps this is the case for some other students as well. Although I take full responsibility for my adopted fundamentalism, I can identify five factors related to Power vs. Force that seduce students into believing Hawkins’ teachings:

(1) Hawkins has credentials: an M.D. and a Ph.D.—not to

mention knighthood, conferred on him by the Sovereign Order of Hospitaliers of St. John of Jerusalem in the Americas for the work presented in the book.

(2) Power vs. Force has impressive endorsements from Lee Iacocca, Sam Walton, and Mother Teresa.

(3) Hawkins presents his ideas as “scientific,” weaving concepts from quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and other fields into his explanation of consciousness and his system.

(4) Hawkins writes with the tone of authority. His descriptions of the Map of Consciousness appear authoritative, as does its application to all areas of life.

(5) Hawkins offers a spiritual autobiography at the end of the book that strikes many readers as captivating and inspiring.


In this chapter, we’ll consider each of these factors in turn, except for point #5, to which we’ll give special attention in Chapter Nine.

Hawkins’ Credentials and His Dissertation

Hawkins was a physician—a medical doctor (M.D.) with a degree from Marquette School of Medicine.1 He was well known within his field of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. But Hawkins wanted his teachings to be convincing. “One reason I got a Ph.D. was to give greater firepower to the truth of what I was saying,” he states. “I figured, an ‘M.D.’ says this, but an ‘M.D., Ph.D.’ may make it seem even truer.”2

Hawkins tried to add more “firepower” by enrolling at Col-umbia Pacific University, an unaccredited online university that lost its approval to operate in the state of California within two years of Hawkins’ having received his degree. CPU has been called a “diploma mill” because it had insufficient academic standards.*

Hawkins enrolled in CPU on March 21, 1991 and received his degree on September 30, 1995. Virtually all of his courses, however, are dated June/July 1992, with three courses dated 1993. On average, earning a Ph.D. from an accredited institution takes five years. (CPU was not accredited.) Since he already had a medical degree, it’s possible for this time period to be shortened. (Eleven prior academic credits were transferred to CPU.)

His course titles on his transcript include “Wholism: The Concept, Its Origins and Implications,” “Advanced Professionalism in Health and Human Services,” “Advanced Human Experience and * See “Site visits and CPU's response: 1994-1995” on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Columbia_Pacific_University. (9/5/11). At least nine students received Ph.D. degrees after only twenty months of study, for example. Four faculty members who didn’t speak Spanish approved one dissertation written in Spanish.

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Behavior,” and the ambiguous “Independent Study: The Versatile Independent Scholar.” Outside of two courses on statistics, one might wonder if CPU’s students were able to dream up all of their own course titles and structure.

Typically, an author includes his post-graduate education in his biographical summary, but Hawkins never does. Although Hawkins never cites CPU in his books or lectures, his Ph.D. is listed everywhere his name is printed.

Hawkins’ Dissertation

Having received his diploma from CPU brings the credibility of Hawkins’ dissertation into serious question. Presented to CPU’s faculty, his dissertation documents the alleged research upon which Power vs. Force is based. The dissertation was titled Muscle Strength and Emotionally Charged Stimuli before being changed to the more prosaic, but scientific-sounding, Qualitative and Quan-titative Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness (available for $29.95 through Veritas Publishing).

Hawkins says that his dissertation was presented to a “university faculty where it met all of the strict requirements of a Ph.D. doctoral dissertation … first presented to the most skeptical academic community.”3 This statement is misleading. CPU is a defunct online university that offered two-year Ph.D. programs. The CPU faculty did not represent the “most skeptical academic community.”

I personally do not believe Hawkins’ dissertation would pass any legitimate peer-reviewed academic criteria. As a physician, Hawkins appears to have been a proficient clinician, but he was not an effective researcher and continuously had difficulty getting his work published in peer-reviewed journals.4 Almost all of the papers he published were in journals he either edited or co-


founded, and none of his “consciousness research” has ever been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The presentation of Hawkins’ dissertation is incomplete, filled with multiple unstated assumptions. Hawkins presents an array of charts related to the muscle testing response that seem to validate Hawkins’ claims of a physical nonlocal response to truth; in fact, these charts validate John Diamond’s findings rather than Hawkins’. He presents charts illustrating that multiple groups of people test strong to love, Abraham Lincoln, and organic vitamin C and weak to hate, Hitler, and an image of a swastika. Then he jumps right into his calibration method of testing for truth—without any explanation or discussion around his hypothesis that the method offers a universal or nonlocal response to truth. A person’s muscles may go weak from physical negative stimuli (which is Diamond’s discovery), but that does not imply a statement can be made and tested for universal truth using AK.

As Hawkins shares in his Office Series, Drug Addiction and Alcoholism, he constructed his map not with paid and unpaid subjects as he states in his dissertation ten years later, but with one person—his girlfriend at the time, Glorian Ross—in or around 1984.5 Having the map in mind, Hawkins confirmed his results with other test subjects nearly a decade after the map was constructed with Ross. (As we’ll discuss in Chapter Two, the calibration method appears to yield repeatable results in my experience when you know the results you expect to see.) Hawkins’ dissertation is misleading: he makes it appear as if he “uncovered” the map’s levels of consciousness through a rigorous testing methodology instead of the reality: he referred to the Sedona Method’s levels of emotions and other sources (discussed in Chapter Three) and used a random sample of one (n=1), which holds no statistical validity.

Numerous unstated assumptions are found in his dissert-ation. Hawkins writes, for example, “It was decided for practical


purposes, to build the relative value scale in which Log (10) 1,000 would be the top so that the logs of relative values would fall between 1 and 1,000.”6 Hawkins does not offer any perspective or sufficient reasons for why a scale from 1 to 1,000 is being used. Next, after presenting the levels of consciousness, he presents the completed Map of Consciousness without ever explaining how he arrives at the other columns: view of God, view of world and life, emotion, and process.

Referring to his dissertation, Hawkins misleadingly states that it “scientifically validated the viability of the kinesiologic method.”7 Has a community of researchers verified his hypothesis? Can you call something “scientifically validated” if you don’t have objective testing and verification from multiple sources? (We’ll explore this issue more deeply in Chapter Two.)

Knighthood and More Firepower

Hawkins wrote on the final page of Power vs. Force, “The author was knighted for this work by the Danish Crown.”8 This is untrue and a deliberate distortion of the facts. Hawkins was knighted for submitting a paper on low-cost mental health clinics to Fernando Flores for entry into the order—not for his “consciousness research.” Second, the order that knighted him, the Sovereign Order of Hospitaliers of St. John of Jerusalem in the Americas, is not a legitimate order, but a self-styled order with questionable intentions.9 Hawkins is aware of the credibility issues within this order, but still keeps it in his author biography, in his books, and on his website.* Additionally, it was a gross exaggeration for Hawkins to say that he was knighted “by the Danish Crown.”10

* Also, both the past and present “grand masters” of this order—Fernando Flores and Charles “Raz” Ingrasci—had prior affiliations with Est founder Werner Erhart, who is often labeled a cult leader. See http://www.rickross.com/reference/est/estpt13.html (6/27/12).


Hawkins says he was “a consultant to Episcopal and Catholic Dioceses, monastic orders, and the Zen Monastery.”11 He did consult to these institutions in the 1970s as a counselor for addiction, but not as a spiritual advisor.

The biographical summary found on the back cover of his books says, “His background is detailed in Who’s Who in the World.” Marquis’ Who’s Who database touts over 1.4 million entries. Submissions to the database are made via Marquis’ website and fax. Anyone can submit his or her own entry, and according to a Forbes article, virtually anyone can get a listing, as there’s no fact checking conducted by Marquis’ organization.12 Hawkins’ inclusion in Who’s Who is not an achievement; he submitted his own entry and then paid for a copy of the book (which is how the Marquis business makes its money). Marquis’ listing is a promotional tool that Hawkins and many others have used to inflate their credentials.*

Now, let’s consider the Templeton Prize nomination. Offered by the John Templeton Foundation, the prize “honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.”13 The winner of the prize receives a monetary reward equivalent to over $1.7 million. Hawkins prepared his own nomination (over one hundred pages) and submitted it for this award for roughly nine consecutive years. Why would he do this? Why would a spiritual teacher try to inflate his credentials? Why would a spiritually advanced person who represents himself as someone interested in serving God alone be interested in winning a prize or a reward? Why would his teachings need more “firepower”? * It’s curious that in Hawkins’ 1995 Who’s Who listing, his daughters, Lynn Johnson and Barbara Catherine Hawkins, are listed as progeny, but in his 2004 listing, Johnson is omitted. In his 2010 listing, neither of his daughters is acknowledged; only his wife Susan’s daughter, Sarah Humphrey, is listed. Similarly, his only surviving daughter, Lynn Johnson, is not even mentioned in Hawkins’ obituary. (Barbara Catherine Hawkins committed suicide in 1995.)


When I was compiling the quote books of Hawkins for Hay House, Hawkins demanded that his degrees be included in every instance where his name appeared in the books, including in the actual titles of the books, which is not standard practice. I was surprised a spiritual teacher would be adamant about having “M.D., Ph.D.” behind his name every time it appears in print.14 Doesn’t Hawkins teach that the findings stand on their own merit? Hawkins maintains people are attracted to his teachings simply by virtue of Power vs. Force’s high calibration (which ranges from 750 to 850, depending on which of his calibrations you accept). Why the relentless attempt at more credentials to validate the work (especially if, as he says, he doesn’t care if it’s scientifically verifiable15)?

Celebrity Endorsements

As Hawkins’ biographer, I found the following one of my most unsettling discoveries: Hawkins never requested endorsements from Walton, Iacocca, or Mother Teresa. He simply sent them the book manuscript to review. For example, in his cover letter to Walton dated January 11, 1991, Hawkins wrote, “Before the book goes to the printers, I wonder if you have any comments or suggestions on what I've written about Walmart or any corrections for any inaccuracies.” Walton, Iacocca, and Mother Teresa replied to having received the manuscript—they did not offer endorsements of it.

On the back of Power vs. Force, Lee Iacocca is quoted as making the following endorsement of the book: “… particularly timely … a significant contribution to understanding and dealing with the problems we face today.” Iacocca responded to the receipt of Hawkins’ manuscript for his review (from a letter dated January 29, 1991): “Thank you for your letter and for sending me the manuscript of your forthcoming book, Power vs. Force. It’s a


particular timely topic considering what’s happening today in the world around us. I will put it on my ‘read’ pile.”16

Hawkins grossly distorted Iacocca’s reply. While publishers might edit certain parts of an endorsement due to space, they do not change the meaning of endorsements. Iacocca hadn’t read the manuscript and never endorsed Hawkins’ book. Hawkins, in self-publishing Power vs. Force, twisted Iacocca’s words to make them appear to be an endorsement.

Mother Teresa’s brief reply upon receiving Hawkins’ manuscript did not indicate she had read the book or that she endorsed it. Mother Teresa simply replied cordially to having received the manuscript.*

In Hawkins initial correspondence to Sam Walton (founder of Walmart), he directed him to the exact chapter and page number where Walmart is mentioned. Walton’s reply did not endorse Power vs. Force.†

Sheldon Deal, the final endorser, is listed as “President, International College of Applied Kinesiology.” Deal, who was Hawkins’ mentor at Columbia Pacific University, was the president of ICAK from 1978 to 1983, but not when the book was published in 1995. The current president of ICAK, Eric Pierotti, is highly critical of Hawkins and strongly feels he is doing a great disservice to the field of AK.17

* In Mother Teresa’s letter, dated August 23, 1991, she wrote, “Thank you very much for the book. Continue to use your beautiful gift of writing to the full, so that people may read the good news and glorify the Father, spread joy, love and compassion through what you write. The fruit of these three is peace as you know—the peace that comes from loving and caring and respecting every person as a child of God—my brother—my sister.” (Correspond-ence between Hawkins and Mother Teresa provided by Veritas Publishing.) † In Sam Walton’s letter, dated January 28, 1991, he wrote, “Thanks for writing and giving me a chance to review your forthcoming book, The Nature of Power. I especially appreciate your research and presentation on the attractor patterns of business and the basic principle of service with a heart. Attitudes are so important and, at Wal-Mart, we are trying to develop the concept of caring as well as creating the desire to seek opportunities of exceeding our customers’ expectations with quality service and reliable products. Thank you, my friend, for using our company as a role model in retailing. Best wishes for your continued success.” (Correspondence between Hawkins and Sam Walton provided by Veritas Publishing.)


Hawkins twisted the replies of Walton, Iacocca, and Mother Teresa to make them appear to be endorsements. From a publishing perspective—and from the perspective of socially condoned moral behavior—this was untruthful and unethical.

Mysticism and the New Physics

Like many New Age writers, Hawkins draws parallels between the new physics and consciousness using concepts from quantum physics and chaos theory to support and explain his system.18 This has been done frequently since Capra’s Tao of Physics and Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters. While the parallels between science and consciousness are appealing to anyone looking to validate the existence of God and the spiritual realm, there are problems with this tactic. Wilber points out in Eye to Eye and Quantum Questions that using quantum physics to illuminate spirituality is a category error in violation of the Great Chain of Being. Let’s see what that means.

The Great Chain of Being is a philosophical concept that began with the Greeks. It posits that everything in existence has its defined place in a hierarchy (on a ladder or chain, so to speak). Minerals are at the bottom, with plants above minerals, animals above plants, humans above animals, and so on moving upwards. On this chain, matter is beneath spirit.

In terms of human potential, the Great Chain of Being suggests that raising one’s level of consciousness means progressing from body to mind to soul to spirit, or from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit. We understand matter through physics, life through biology, mind through psychology, soul through theology, and mysticism through spirit. Each level of the Great Chain transcends and includes the level beneath, so that life transcends and includes matter, mind transcends and includes


life, and so on. Another way to say it, as Wilber explains, is that the lesser is contained within the greater, but not vice versa.

Saying that physics (a science of nature)—of the quantum or any other variety—can inform spirit violates the very tenets of the Great Chain to which Hawkins subscribes.19 Incidentally, Wilber illustrates how none of the founders of quantum mechanics and relativity theory believed their fields said anything about spiritual reality, and yet all of these founders were mystically inclined. They understood that “physics deals with the world of form, and mysticism deals with the formless. Both are important, but they cannot be equated. Physics can be learned by the study of facts and mathematics, but mysticism can only be learned by a profound change in consciousness. To confuse these two is to misunderstand and distort both science and spirituality.”20

Even though Hawkins lists the calibration of the new physics in the mid-400s (Reason), he still uses its concepts to support his theory of consciousness, which confuses the issue. Discussing how new-physics-and-mysticism writers merge these two fields, Wilber writes: “They generally take certain mathematical formalisms (especially the Schroedinger wave equation and its collapse upon measurement) and give them a very wide interpretation (despite the fact that physicists themselves are sharply divided over how to interpret the formalisms), and they then wed this very loose and generous interpretation with their often equally loose interpretation of mystical spirituality, and the result is something like, the new physics supports or even proves a mystical worldview.”21 If we refer to Hawkins’ February 2003 lecture titled Integration of Spirituality and Personal Life, we find that his explanation of the kinesiologic response to consciousness sounds a lot like Wilber’s description of what many writers erroneously do.22


We must also point out that Hawkins is not a physicist. Nor, as he admits, does he understand the mathematics of differential calculus or nonlinear dynamics. When he speaks of these fields, he’ll generally say something like, “It has to do with quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger equation.” If we read Power vs. Force carefully and listen carefully in his lectures, Hawkins uses terms like quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and nonlinear dynamics as a form of name dropping, making his own “research” sound more erudite. In reality, these fields likely have little to do with muscle testing or his theory of consciousness.

Drawing conclusions about consciousness through the new physics as Hawkins does liberally in Power vs. Force positions this book as New-Age literature. In an attempt to lend credence to his method, Hawkins says, “The test for truth is very simple. The mathematics of why it works depends on advanced quantum mechanics. And the best explanation is in the new book by Henry Stapp, The Mindful Universe, who explains it in much greater detail than I do.”23 Incidentally, Stapp does not support Hawkins’ claims about his calibration method in the slightest: “I suspect that his method of evaluation via arm strength would not prove objectively reliable if tested on many subjects of diverse backgrounds and opinions under scientific conditions (no possibility of cues or clues).”24

With Hawkins resting his explanation of his “consciousness research” on quantum reality,25 what happens when the quantum explanation becomes obsolete? “If I were an Eastern mystic,” particle physicist Jeremy Bernstein notes, “the last thing in the world I would want would be a reconciliation with modern science, [because] to hitch a religious philosophy to a contemporary science is a sure route to its obsolescence.”26

The existence and capacity of a universal truth reflex, Hawkins believes, is “an inherent responsive quality innate to biological life.”27 Biology cannot discern truth—this discernment


is a function of mind or spirit, which lie beyond the physical realm. We progress through learning—whether of the mind or spirit. Mind and spirit, if you will, transcend but include biology, so that pinning a universal-truth reflex to biology does indeed seem like a “sure route to obsolescence.”*

Hawkins’ Authoritative Voice

Hawkins’ wrote Power vs. Force with an authoritative and persuasive tone that raised immediate red flags for some and created conviction in the truth of his system for others. (We’ll address why that is so in Parts Two and Three). I was deeply swayed by Hawkins’ presentation—almost instantly. I read the book over and over again—six times in fact—until I felt like I had a firm grasp of the material. (I wanted the full thirty-five-point increase in consciousness Hawkins said students would receive upon a “thorough absorption of the material.”28) I then read most of the books Hawkins referenced in his bibliography, which for me at the time seemed to further corroborate his presentation.

As Hawkins’ biographer, I began noticing his tendency to exaggerate, like many of us do. There were mainly minor things at first. For example, he often says he received straight As in

* As an aside, in the February 2002 lecture, Hawkins says (with certainty) that Wilber is famous for writing The Holographic Universe. He’s not. Michael Talbot wrote The Holographic Universe. Wilber edited The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes, which is hardly a work he’s best known for. More importantly, Hawkins says that Wilber calibrates in the high 400s partly because he understands the holographic paradigm of reality, which to Hawkins means Wilber is “very advanced.”

This is unsettling for several reasons. First, Wilber does not support Bohm’s holographic model of consciousness. In The Holographic Paradigm, he was opposing it for some of the reasons we’re addressing in the text. But that’s not what’s most troubling. Hawkins cites Wilber’s work liberally in Power vs. Force and references his work in his other books, but based on a careful reading of Wilber, I’m left with the conclusion that Hawkins likely hasn’t read Wilber’s work at all. Perhaps he skimmed it, at best. Wilber’s work, which is significantly more grounded in available research, conflicts extensively with Hawkins’ views.

Based on all this, when considering the torrent of references Hawkins includes in his books (especially Truth vs. Falsehood and Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man), we naturally find ourselves wondering whether Hawkins actually read the books he cites or if he cites them only to try to lend validity to his own teachings.


school and in his theology courses in college.29 His school transcripts revealed otherwise (B/B+ average in high school; in his theology courses at Marquette, he maintained a B average). He says he started reading the Great Books Collection around age ten from his parents’ library, as they received one new edition each month. Yet this Encyclopedia Britannica series didn’t become available until 1952, when Hawkins was twenty-five.

In one lecture, Hawkins said he ended up in Townes Hospital eight times; in other lectures, it was three times.30 Recalling his experience of addiction, Hawkins says, “When I finally hit bottom, there was no area of life that wasn’t destroyed: finances, reputation, relationships, physical health … there wasn’t anything that wasn’t knocked to pieces in this life.”31 Yet, during this period, Hawkins was successfully building his clinic and private practice. When I asked him about this statement in a private interview, he admitted that it was an exaggeration.

In the opening statement of Chapter Two in Power vs. Force, Hawkins writes, “The basis of this work is research done over a twenty-year period, involving millions of calibrations on thousands of test subjects of all ages …”32 Yet, in his February 2002 Sedona lecture, he publicly muscle tested that he conducted less than 300,000 calibrations—and that was eight years after the publication of Power vs. Force.

Hawkins tends to speak with an authoritative tone on any topic he takes an interest in—whether it’s scorpions, emotions, the male psyche, success, self-healing, or enlightenment—regardless of his level of expertise. A former colleague of Hawkins, for example, was dumbfounded by the gross oversimplifications and personal beliefs Hawkins offered in a radio interview regarding physical illness.33

“The state of enlightenment,” Hawkins writes, “is expressed in a style that is concordant with the condition itself. Thus, statements are often declarative in form rather than semi-


conditional or propositional … Without understanding this state, some statements made by a sage could be misidentified as being dogmatic or authoritarian, which they are not.”34 Yet, enlighten-ment in no way implies infallibility regarding life or a person’s understanding of his or her state of consciousness. Where, then, is the line between a mystic speaking with authority and a man dogmatically voicing his opinions?

When Hawkins became passionate about a technique or teaching system (such as Orthomolecular Psychiatry, A Course in Miracles, the Sedona Method, the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj, or his Map of Consciousness, at various stages in his life), he developed a persuasive presentation to share the concept with others. And when Hawkins got behind a system, he gave it his all, sometimes bending the truth to persuade people. For example, he attributed certain healings and miraculous events to specific techniques; further digging revealed these events took place years before he learned the technique. For instance, when he was promoting the Sedona Method, he tells how he “attracted” an ideal apartment on Fifth Avenue—merely by releasing his desire for it. Yet he learned the Sedona Method after finding the apartment.

It’s not surprising that Hawkins’ presentation in Power vs. Force was so persuasive and far-reaching: his passion for certain ideas is an infectious and endearing quality. But enthusiasm is not an indicator of truth.

TWO Calibration Method

Hawkins’ entire system rests on his calibration method. It is the tool he uses to demonstrate to his audience whether something is true or not. It is the tool by which he attempts to measure the level of consciousness of anything.

But does the tool work? Anyone who has honestly explored the calibration method has noticed inconsistencies. Most students with whom I’ve spoken have abandoned the method entirely because they can’t achieve any semblance of consistency or meaningful results. The issues people have with calibrating are discussed at length in Hawkins-related forums and Facebook groups across the Internet.

What can be said about Hawkins’ own use of his method? Hawkins’ calibrations are often inconsistent. Many experts assert he lacks sufficient training and skill in Applied Kinesiology (commonly known as muscle testing)—the very technique his calibration method is built on.

Hawkins has conditioned his students to believe that his work is “nonlinear,” a term he uses to mean “beyond reason and logic.” In so doing, he divorces his system from science, instead classifying his work as “spiritual.” Nonlinear implies that something is non-sequential, not beyond reason or beyond humans’ capacity of to understand it. Hawkins, however, expanded the meaning of nonlinear for his students as “beyond reason.” This is not the definition of nonlinear to anyone outside of Hawkins’ community.


Although Hawkins positions his work as beyond the confines of science, in Power vs. Force as well as his lectures, he calls his work a “new science”—even a “science of consciousness”1—claiming that his method is scientifically valid. In this chapter, we will explore these assertions. We’ll also examine Hawkins’ training in muscle testing, the applications of his calibration method, its criteria for use, and the issues of accuracy with the method itself.

In Search of Calibration Accuracy

I personally invested significant time over many years experi-menting with Hawkins’ technique. While my general results pointed to it being viable (beyond random chance), using various protocols, I began to notice how I could influence my subject’s arm at will (without the subject’s awareness). I started to suspect this was exactly what I had been unconsciously doing. I received relatively consistent responses when I could consciously approximate the result of what I was testing, but my test results became unreliable when testing things of an unknown nature. The response proved no better than random chance when used under double-blind protocols (described below). Being able to validate your assumptions is, of course, neither the aim nor claim of the method.

I observed the same pattern when working with Hawkins: When I requested calibrations from him on subject matters that intuitively fit within a particular level of consciousness on his map, his calibrations were reasonably consistent. If, however, it wasn’t abundantly clear where something might calibrate, his calibrations, over time, were wildly inconsistent. For example, he’ll achieve relatively consistent calibration results with people like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, but if you ask him to calibrate a book he hasn’t read, his results become erratic from calibration to calibration, especially if he can’t remember his

30 | Calibration Method

previous calibration result. Numerous students have brought this to Hawkins’ attention in the question-and-answer portion of his lectures. Hawkins and his wife always have a barrage of explanations for these deviations.

Hawkins says that people below the critical level of integrity (below 200) cannot use his calibration method, representing roughly 78 to 85 percent of the world’s population, according to his calibrations.2 The problem, however, is that most of Hawkins’ students, who collectively calibrate in the 400s according to Hawkins’ public calibrations of his audience, cannot accurately use the technique either. I personally can’t name a single individual who achieves reasonable accuracy.

There are, of course, students in the community who believe wholeheartedly in the method and their abilities to generate accurate results. I counted myself among this group and even conducted “research” with my colleague Andrew Colyer, a trained kinesiologist with almost two decades of clinical experience. Hawkins cites our “research” repeatedly in Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man (without ever corroborating our results). Desperately, I wanted the method to be valid, and correlating accuracy with a testing team’s calibrated level of consciousness seemed necessary. If you needed to calibrate “high” (say in the 500s) to get accurate results, it would explain why the majority of students were struggling to use the method proficiently, since only a small percentage of people are said to calibrate in these higher levels. I saw no other way to justify the fact that everyone I was aware of was struggling with the method and why Hawkins alone seemed to be able to utilize the technique effectively.*

* This “research” was conducted prior to our double-blind tests, which proved ineffective, nullifying our earlier results and eventually leading me to begin deeply questioning the method.


When people first read Power vs. Force and become inspired by the material, they typically experience an immediate sense of excitement, an exuberance about the possibility of being able to calibrate anything and everything. In the beginning, students often begin calibrating everything that comes to mind until they realize they’re getting inconsistent or conflicting testing results, which generally leads to feelings of frustration. After talking to other students who have had similar experiences, I’ve observed that most people simply abandon muscle testing, leaving the calibrating to Hawkins (an issue we’ll address in Chapters Eleven and Twelve).

When students experiment with the calibration method and fail to get consistent results, the assumption is that it’s their fault—they assume they are doing it incorrectly, their level of consciousness isn’t sufficiently high, they don’t have the right testing partner, they lack objectivity, or they are among the 10 percent of people who have some kind of “reversed polarity” that inhibits accurate testing.* The thought that the method itself might be flawed doesn’t necessarily come to mind—and for good reason, it seems. The presentation in Power vs. Force is compelling, laying out the framework for an intricate system that derives credibility from multiple fields and uses concepts from the new physics for explanations. Hawkins’ strong belief in the method is, for some, convincing enough. And, Hawkins has been developing his system for over three decades, so who are we, as his students, to question it?

Since he began offering public lectures in 2002, Hawkins has received a litany of questions about how to use muscle testing via his calibration method, to the point where he often becomes frustrated on stage. In 2005, after a colleague and I launched consciousnessproject.org to provide an online community for

* In his 1996 Power vs. Force demonstration video, Hawkins states that 2.4 percent of the population can’t use the technique for energetic reasons, but years later he mysteriously changes the figure to 10 percent.


Hawkins’ students, we quickly realized that we had to prohibit discussion about calibrations. The posted calibrations from students were outrageous, making fruitful discussion difficult. Similar guidelines were set on other established Hawkins-related groups on Yahoo.com and Google.com. Interestingly, we’ve had hundreds of students sign up for consciousnessproject.org’s social network, specifically because they want to learn how to muscle test accurately.

Calibration Discrepancies

I’ve encountered many students of Hawkins’ work who believe Hawkins is infallible, holding his calibrations as the final word (even though Hawkins doesn’t claim infallibility). An astute reader who devours Hawkins’ eight volumes and frequently listens to his lectures will notice discrepancies. I noticed them early on, but it wasn’t until Hawkins requested that I compile a reference book of calibrations based on both his long-form notes and his books (over 7,000 calibrations in total) that I began to see a vast number of discrepancies.* In the course of interviewing Hawkins for his biography, I recorded inconsistent calibrations that he conducted in my presence. Sometimes these calibrations were off by hundreds of points between visits. What follows is just a taste of the calibration discrepancies found in his work.† * Although Hawkins references repeatedly a “database” of consciousness calibra-tions (for example, in Truth vs. Falsehood, pages 88 and 104), when I inquired about it, Hawkins said no such database exists. I compiled his calibration dictionary after Truth vs. Falsehood was published (2006) and submitted it to Hawkins. To my knowledge, Veritas Publishing never publically released this document. † What follows is a series of discrepancies contrasting calibrations from Hawkins’ long-form notes, his books, and his lectures. Since the reader does not have access to Hawkins’ calibrations that I prepared for him from his personal notes, I’m not including citations for these discrepancies: The mantra aum is listed in several of his books at 65 and 160, as well as being calibrated in Hawkins’ lectures at 250, 300, and at a half-dozen other calibration levels. Om as a mantra is listed at 740 and 1,000. The Bill of Rights is listed at 265 and 640. Rene Descartes is listed at 465, 490, and 499. Koko (the trained gorilla) is listed at 250 and 405. Hatha Yoga is listed at 260 and 390. The concept of Intelligent Design is listed at 200, 450, and 480. The Koran is listed at 570 and 700. The Torah is listed at 550 and 770. The Ten Commandments are listed at


Power vs. Force as a book is listed as calibrating at three different levels in three different places: 750, 810, 850. The Eye of the I (Hawkins’ second book) is also listed at three different levels on the back cover of three different books: 950 on Eye of the I; 980 on I: Reality & Subjectivity (his third book); and 998 on Truth vs. Falsehood (his fourth book).

On page 75 of I: Reality and Subjectivity, Hawkins states, “The Constitution of the United States calibrates as the highest of any nation and stands at 705… If the word ‘God’ were removed from the Constitution, its calibration level would drop from 705 (Truth) to 485 (Intelligence and Reason).”3 In fact, there is not a single instance of reference to “God” or “Divinity” in the Constitution of the United States.

In Truth vs. Falsehood, philosopher Edmund Husserl is listed at 499 and 195—and elsewhere at 450. In the same book, solipsism is listed at 300 and again at 410 (on the same page). In Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, Hawkins lists atheism at 165 in one chart and 190 in another. In his February 2002 lecture, he calibrated the Great Books of the Western World collection at the precise level of 496, and yet he calibrates this same collection at 460 to 465 in his writings and in later lectures.4

Contrasting some of the calibrations Hawkins generated while demonstrating his method in the Power vs. Force video with his published work is revealing: The Bhagavad-Gita was calibrated at 740 in his video and at 910 in Hawkins’ book, Transcending the 595 and 1,000 The Gnostic Gospels are listed at 400 and 535. Zoroaster is listed at 860 and 1,000. Yahweh is listed at 460 and 510. Gregorian chant is listed at 485 and 595. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is listed at 505 and 550. The teachings of Abraham (biblical) are listed at 505, 850, and 985. Plotinus as a person (not his writings) is listed at 510 and 730. Nelson Mandela is listed at 435, 505, and 550. Billy Graham is listed at 460 and 570. Nonlinear dynamics is listed at 460 and 510+. The United States Constitution is listed at 705 and 765. Roman Coliseum is listed at 80 and 350. Shakespeare’s works are listed at 465 and 500. Edinburgh Castle is listed at 445 and 495. Hitler, when he wrote Mein Kampf, calibrated at 250 and 430. The principle of causality calibrates at 426, 440, 450, and 460.

(The average variation in percentages for each item listed above is 63.2 percent. The median percentage change is 30.1 percent. These figures represent unacceptable percent errors in any form of science.)


Levels of Consciousness (page 306). The subject’s arm went weak for the Rolling Stones (the band) in the video (meaning below 200) and calibrates at 340 in his Truth vs. Falsehood (page 97). Huang Po calibrated at 740 in the video, 790 in a 2000 lecture, 750 in a March 2002 lecture, and at 850 in Hawkins’ Transcending the Levels of Consciousness (page 306).

Hawkins rarely calibrates something that can be verified with external data; however, in his January 2008 lecture, he calibrated that at least 2,000 people (but less than 3,000) die in traffic accidents in America each week, translating to between 104,000 and 156,000 deaths each year.5 According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the actual number is estimated to be approximately 40,000.6

Finally, Hawkins maintains that 15 to 22 percent of the world’s population calibrates at above 200, but he further calibrates that 8 percent are at Reason (400s) and 4 percent are over 500 (Love).7 This leaves only 3 percent for the 200s and 300s. For the map to have internal consistency, there would necessarily be fewer and fewer people at each of the higher levels. That is, Hawkins’ calibrated percentages represent a mathematical impossibility.*

Why Are There So Many Discrepancies?

There are many, many more discrepancies. Some of these discrepancies may merely be typographical errors; others may simply be human error in his testing. What seems undeniable is that Hawkins, as a tester, is not infallible or immune to influences that affect his test results. But there is serious reason to question the validity and accuracy of his method as well as the results he cites in his dissertation, Qualitative and Quantitative

* His calibrations are also inconsistent with his graphic representation of the distri-butions of consciousness presented in his lectures and in Truth vs. Falsehood, page 89.


Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness. (The calibration results he cites in his dissertation suggest an uncom-promisingly high degree of accuracy.)

Other explanations Hawkins offers for inaccurate testing are legion: The statement being tested must come from a place of integrity, as must both the tester and the subject. The statement must be held clearly in mind. There mustn’t be any external distractions, such as music or loud noise. The tense and the wording of the statement must be precise. The tester must be conscious of the perceptual modality being used when calibrating (for example, holding a visual image in mind of what’s being tested versus focusing on the feeling that the image evokes in you). Atheists cannot use the technique, since they deny the truth of God and, according to Hawkins, the technique is a gift of Divinity. (We must assume, then, that Buddha, Sigmund Freud, and physicist Stephen Hawking would be unable to use the method.)

More recently, Hawkins has stated that by the very act of his calibrating someone continuously over time (even a dead person), the person’s calibration can change—even shifting from below 200 to above 200.8 This “discovery” conflicts with his statement that “the response has proven cross-culturally valid in any population and consistent through time.”9 Either the calibration of a dead person can change over time or is consistent through time—he can’t have it both ways.

Regardless, there are enough inconsistencies to make ignoring them difficult. Hawkins says, “Calibrating things is very useful; it’s useful as a research tool.”10 How useful is a tool if it doesn’t yield consistent results? How useful would a calculator be if 2 + 2 equaled 4 sometimes, 6 other times, and 110 on still other occasions?


A Simple Experiment

I requested four different testing teams to calibrate quantum theorist Henry Stapp. The results of these tests all ranged between 460-485 (a high level of Reason), which at first glance seemed encouraging. But where else would we expect a prominent physicist to calibrate? This example illustrates the difficulty in trying to validate the efficacy of Hawkins’ technique using the Map of Consciousness as a reference point: it’s easy to anticipate where something might calibrate and then simply confirm our guess with muscle testing. So we need to find another means of testing the method itself.

Hawkins states, “The calibrated number is obtained by means of a blind, impersonal technique resulting in biological-based physiological responses that occur independently of personal opinion.”11 Hawkins further states that “in double-blind studies—and in mass demonstrations involving entire lecture audiences—subjects universally tested weak in response to unmarked envelopes containing artificial sweetener, and strong to identical placebo envelopes.”12 In order for a valid test to be conducted double-blindly and impersonally, the tester and the subject must be blind to what is being tested. If the test only appears to work if the tester is conscious of what’s being tested, Hawkins’ claims are invalid. So I’d like to offer a simple experiment inspired by Hawkins.

Now, because this experiment is double-blind by nature, I’ll start by addressing a common concern: it is understood by Hawkins’ students that the intention of the test group is of paramount importance and that the intention to disprove the method nullifies its efficacy. Therefore, this experiment is only suggested for devoted students of Hawkins’ work who either believe in the calibration method or are at least sympathetic to the notion. This test can be conducted in the spirit of self-


exploration, curiosity, healthy due diligence, and personal responsibility—all positive, life-affirming intentions.

Start by collecting six photos of different people Hawkins has calibrated as above 200 (people like Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and Jesus Christ), as well as photos of people below 200 (such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Joseph Stalin). One by one, hold each image over a subject’s solar plexus, and test it. You may discover that the subject’s arm stays strong for Lincoln, Teresa, and Christ while going weak for bin Laden, Hussein, and Stalin. (If not, you’ll need to end the experiment here.)

Now, out of view of both you (the tester) and the subject, have a third party place all six images in six identical opaque envelopes. Have the subject shuffle the envelopes and return them to you. Test again, putting all “strongs” in one pile and all “weaks” in the other. Open the envelopes and record your results. Repeat these same steps at least three times.

The above double-blind experiment is very simple. Hawkins demonstrates something similar on a child in his Power vs. Force video. Assuming you had 100-percent accuracy with your first set of tests, and you’re not subconsciously influencing the subject’s arm, you should achieve the same results with the opaque envelopes.

As an alternative test, a qualified testing team can have a third party select a phrase in any book. Then, find the page with muscle testing. For example, the tester might say, “The phrase in question is located somewhere between pages 1 and 100. Resist. Between pages 101 and 200. Resist.” And so on. If Hawkins’ claims are valid, the testing team should be able to locate the specific page of the phrase without opening the book.

“The reason spiritual reality always works for me,” Hawkins says, “is because I always put it to the test. Either it is or it isn’t.”13 Test out this experimental instruction for yourself. If, after several


repeated trials, you find the technique to be statistically viable (well beyond random chance), further research is encouraged. (These experiments still don’t test Hawkins assumptions of a nonlocal response to consciousness, but they do assess other foundational claims he makes about muscle testing.) If, however, your findings point to random chance, then it seems prudent to seriously question the claim that muscle testing is a valid way to discern truth and that the technique is accessing a nonlocal response to consciousness.

Hawkins and Kinesiology

When Hawkins wrote Power vs. Force, he was unaware that Applied Kinesiology (or muscle testing) was a controversial practice. A decade after the book’s release, Hawkins became the subject of harsh criticism on numerous websites.14 A critic wanting to discredit Hawkins as a spiritual teacher or to position him in the New Age market needed to look no further than his connection to AK. Part of the problem was that Hawkins made statements like, “Kinesology is now a well-established science,”15 which it is not. To help reduce this criticism, Hawkins stopped using “Applied Kinesiology” in his work, replacing it with terms like the “physiologic response,” “consciousness calibration research technique,” “calibration method,” and so on, all terms referencing AK.

Many critics have attempted to invalidate all of Hawkins’ work because it uses AK. I personally don’t believe this attack is valid. There are dozens of alternative health systems—from BodyTalk to Neuro-Emotional Technique—that appear to utilize AK effectively. Chiropractors have used the technique for decades. The personalized application of AK on individual patients by its practitioners makes it difficult to establish the control groups that are necessary for scientific testing. It is possible that the placebo


effect or an unconscious process in the tester is responsible for the therapeutic value attributed to the technique.

It should be noted that kinesiologists assume that muscles respond to local conditions—in other words, that the body’s muscles react to what is good and bad for a specific person’s body in that moment by staying strong or going weak. This principle has been demonstrated in the work of psychiatrist John Diamond. Hawkins, on the other hand, claims that muscles respond to nonlocal conditions, making the body’s muscle response a determiner of what is life affirming or destructive, and true or false, across all time and space. This is what we must rigorously challenge.

Although Hawkins clearly states at his public lectures that he’s not a teacher of muscle testing or a kinesiologist,16 he demonstrates how to do the technique and positions it as something anyone can do, describing it as “simple, rapid, and relatively foolproof.”17 This statement is disingenuous to those trained in AK. AK is a craft that takes years to master. Although AK may be simple in design, it is far from easy to perform accurately, as the vast majority of honest students within Hawkins’ community have realized. No one picks up a paintbrush for the first time and expects to create a work of art.

Hawkins states, “When I first saw it, I got it in an instant, so I tend to be impatient with people that don’t get it.”18 Again, can you “get” how to paint by watching someone paint for a few minutes—or a few years?

“It took me about eighteen seconds to get how to do kinesiology,” Hawkins recalls. “I watched Dr. Diamond. True … False … what more is there to know?”19 Much more, according to Eric Pierotti, President of the International College of Applied Kinesiology. Pierotti states, “It is unfortunate that Hawkins repeatedly uses the term applied kinesiology to describe his methodology because this could not be further from the truth …


His assertion that what he does is AK is akin to suggesting that lancing boils is total medical practice. This type of testing is not part of any ‘approved AK material,’ which can only be taught by our certified teaching diplomats to aspiring applied kinesiologists who must hold licensure to diagnose before embarking on a rigorous hundred-hour postgraduate course.”20

There are many subtleties to the basic muscle-testing technique itself, and AK practitioners adhere to the rules and guidelines of the test’s limitations. Hawkins does not. After attending a single one-day lecture hosted by John Diamond in the ‘70s, Hawkins felt he had learned everything he needed to begin testing for truth.

Trained kinesiologists are often appalled by Hawkin’s use of AK, not only when he oversimplifies it, but also when he demonstrates it on stage, as according to them, his technique is poor. The fact that his students are learning how to muscle test by watching his technique is further disconcerting. The technique requires great skill to master. The demonstration of AK by Hawkins and his wife (Susan) lacks proficiency, not to mention mastery.* Using a technique continuously (over 290,000 times according to a statement by Hawkins at a February 2002 lecture) doesn’t lead to mastery when your initial form is flawed and you lack proper guidance and instruction. Much like bad habits in learning to play the guitar become an obstacle to proficiency if not corrected by a teacher, bad muscle-testing technique performed repeatedly cannot be expected to yield reliable results.

* AK requires the application of consistent pressure on the subject’s arm in a rapid manner. As an example of Hawkins’ poor technique, see the Power vs. Force video demonstration available through Veritas Publishing. For a specific example, go to 19:30 in the demonstration on Disc 1, where Hawkins tests a Nigerian money scam. Watch how he uses inconsistent pressure to get the results he expects. At 16:30 on Disc 2, he tests Ramana Maharshi: the woman’s arm goes strong at 700; strong at 720; weak at 730; strong at 740; and weak at 750. This illustrates completely inconsistent results.


It’s curious that Hawkins never underwent ICAK’s formal training. Wouldn’t someone who’s creating an entire system for discerning truth want to obtain comprehensive training in the technique he’s deploying to substantiate his system? Wouldn’t he be interested in learning the subtleties of the technique he’s going to be using and demonstrating to diagnose and teach others? It seems a natural prerequisite—or at least a precautionary measure. How would he otherwise confirm that he’s performing the technique correctly?

Claims and Assumptions of the Method

Hawkins states that a tester will get an accurate response from his calibration method regardless of opinion: “This phenomenon occurs independently of the test subject’s own opinion or knowledge of the topic.”21 He further states that total objectivity is needed—that you must be interested in the truth and not in confirming your belief systems.22 Wouldn’t this conflict with the notion that your opinion doesn’t matter? As Hawkins acknowledges, everyone has biases and beliefs; thus, by his mandate of total objectivity, it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to use the calibration method with consistent accuracy. Your opinions, as well as your unconscious attitudes and beliefs, affect your testing results, explaining why errors and inconsistencies are likely.23

Let’s consider Hawkins’ claim that he witnessed muscle testing in Diamond’s seminar as a universal, nonlocal response—not restricted to the localized response assumed by AK practitioners. Hawkins calls this a “major discovery,” allowing him to “test for truth.” It is the core hypothesis of his bestseller, Power vs. Force.

The applications for this “truth reflex” seem boundless. According to Hawkins, you can use his technique to: solve crimes,


find assailants in a crowd to protect the President of the United States, locate moles in United States intelligence agencies, and enhance military intelligence by locating enemy weapons and motives for use. You can use it to determine the location of archaeological sites, confirm or refute scientific theories, appraise art, research the paranormal, communicate with astronauts, and much more.24 These are significant claims. Have you heard of anyone using this technique for any of the above? If his method were valid, wouldn’t someone other than Hawkins be making startling discoveries?

In a simple demonstration in his instructional video (also titled Power vs. Force), Hawkins uses his technique to locate a gun hidden in a bag of potato chips tucked beneath a seat cushion. It seems apparent that Hawkins hid the gun himself, but he neither confirms nor denies this in the demonstration. His claim is that you can muscle test to find anything that’s lost, which would be immensely useful for finding your missing car keys. This is an easy experimental instruction to test: have a third party hide your keys and then use muscle testing to find them. (I don’t recommend doing this if you’re in a rush!)

I asked Susan Hawkins about this, and she admitted that she and Hawkins had stopped using the method for finding things due to its ineffectiveness. And if the technique cannot be used effectively to find your lost car keys, is it reasonable for Hawkins to claim you can locate a terrorist? (Hawkins says he was able to track Osama Bin Laden’s movement on a map by calibrating his location.25)

The most profound global claim related to Hawkins’ discovery, of course, is that since he believes muscle testing provides a nonlocal response to consciousness, you can tell the truth about anything. That is, you can distinguish, in a matter of seconds, what’s true and what’s not. Further, you can uncover the answers to everything—past and present (not the future,


however). Truly, such a technique would propel humankind to ever-new heights at an accelerating rate.

Hawkins makes several significant leaps of faith to substan-tiate his claims about muscle testing. Diamond found that when noxious substances like pesticides and artificial sweeteners were placed on the solar plexuses of test subjects, the subjects went weak.26 But this is a localized response. Hawkins claims that people who do the workbook of A Course in Miracles no longer go weak to these noxious substances after Lesson 90. Even if this were true, it does not validate the claim that he’s testing for universal truth via a nonlocal response. (And if we’re being honest, there’s no evidence to suggest that Hawkins’ claim about ACIM is true.*) Likewise, saying that positive thoughts and feelings (love) make your body go strong and negative thoughts and feelings (anger) make your body go weak—a discovery from Diamond’s work—is a very different statement than saying we can “discern truth” via a muscular response.

An Extremely Informational Tool?

Since the publication of Power vs. Force, Hawkins has exclusively conducted his calibration tests with his wife, Susan.27 He created the Map of Consciousness with a former girlfriend.† This represents a random sample of one (n=1). Hawkins has published thousands of calibrations in his work—all with a random sample of one. This offers no scientific validity; thus, to an honest observer, asserting the scientific accuracy of calibrations can be regarded as irresponsible. No scientist would accept a statement made in any published work that was made based on a single * This is something we can all test for ourselves, but in his lecture Giving Up Illness Through A Course in Miracles, Hawkins tests a woman with an artificial sweetener who goes weak. The woman then informs Hawkins that she was on Lesson 161. † Hawkins states that he calibrated the entire map with Glorian Ross, his friend and colleague, in his Drug Addiction and Alcoholism lecture (track 2). Ross was his girlfriend.


experiment. It can be likened to rolling a die, getting a three, and then claiming you get a three every time you roll a die.

For all of his calibrated results, there are no significant testing protocols outlined or advocated or cross testing performed—and there’s rarely (if ever) any third-party verification (since it’s difficult for him to find anyone else who can calibrate accurately).

In any field of study, honest skepticism is required until communal confirmation has consistently occurred. Has Hawkins personally experienced the reality of a universal truth reflex that’s consistent over time? Or must he constantly postulate excuses for why other people’s test results are inaccurate?

Hawkins, responding to a question about the accuracy of his method, said, “You see, I don’t care if it’s so or not. People ask the question, ‘How do you know that what you’re doing is scientifically accurate?’ I don’t frankly care. [laugh] … Nor do I care if people are unable to do it or disbelieve it. It’s just a tool … An extremely informational tool.”28 Statements like these make it difficult for his students to openly question the validity of his method. Hawkins doesn’t care if his method is accurate, and yet he finds the tool extremely informational. And if Hawkins doesn’t care if his method is scientifically accurate, why go through all the trouble of putting together a dissertation? Why claim that the technique is “evidenced-based”? Why attempt to support claims by referencing chaos theory and quantum mechanics? And most importantly, if he doesn’t care if what he’s doing is accurate, why present his calibrations as definitive—as if they are accurate?

I have found no evidence that Hawkins’ claims from his dissertation have ever been tested and replicated by anyone (and we’ll consider his dissertation in the following chapter). Again, at present, is there justifiable evidence to substantiate the claim that anyone’s arm (assuming the testing team meets the prerequisites for the technique) can accurately discern truth from


falsehood? Has this claim been tested, verified, and documented by a community of competent researchers? Or are Hawkins and others using the calibration method on blind faith alone?

Hawkins’ “New Science”

Is the calibration method a valid measurement device of truth and consciousness, as Hawkins claims? Before we can answer this question, let’s consider how valid knowledge is attained. Integral philosopher and theorist Ken Wilber suggests all forms of knowledge have three aspects or stages: experimental instruction, illumination, and communal confirmation.29 That sounds a little weighty, but let’s take a look at these, because they will be useful referents in examining Hawkins’ system.

An experimental instruction (or injunction) is the aspect of knowledge that’s based on experimentation, or doing something. It basically says, “To know this, do such-and-such.” If you want to create chicken marsala, learn how to cook and follow the recipe. If you want to play Eric Clapton’s guitar solo from “Sunshine of Your Love,” learn to play the guitar and learn the chord progressions. If you want to confirm the Pythagorean theorem, learn Euclidean geometry and check the theorem’s many proofs. This first strand of knowledge is experiential; it can’t be had simply by thinking about something. Rather, you have to do something.

Illumination is the second strand of knowledge attainment, according to Wilber. Illumination means the immediate experience of the experimental instruction. We might call this the “Aha!” moment: seeing the marsala sauce glazing over the chicken; hearing the sounds of “Sunshine of Your Love” as you play; solving a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. With illumination, you know something by the direct experience of it.


Communal confirmation is the stage of knowing that follows illumination—we check with others who have followed the same experimental instructions to see if they experienced the same thing (illumination) that we did. Does your culinary creation actually taste like chicken marsala? Does your rendition of Clapton’s solo resemble Clapton’s? Have you accurately solved the Pythagorean proof?

Wilber’s three stages or strands of knowledge closely correspond to the rigorous standards for truth demanded by the scientific method. We will refer to them as we proceed with our assessment of Hawkins’ system. We’ll also be using these terms—experimental instruction, illumination, and communal confirmation—in the sense of how they are defined above, to refer to aspects of knowledge.

Scientific Requirements

Hawkins calls his calibration method a “new science.”30 He notes, “Scientific validity depends on replicability.”31 His test for truth, then, should be replicable—again and again—and provide communal confirmation. In fact, in Power vs. Force he writes, “The test itself is simple, rapid, and relatively foolproof. A positive muscle reaction occurs in response to a statement that is objectively true; a negative response occurs if the test subject is presented with a false statement ... The test results thus fulfill the scientific requirement of replication and, therefore, reliable verification by any investigator.”32

To confirm that Hawkins’ findings represent valid knowledge, we need a community of qualified individuals who have successfully followed Hawkins’ experimental instructions, had an illumination (validating Hawkins’ findings), and then confirmed the findings with others who have also followed the experimental instructions.


If you haven’t followed Hawkins’ experimental instructions—with all their minute details—then you’re not in a position to critique his method; this is why most of Hawkins’ critics are not in a position to evaluate his work. Hawkins’ students—those who are living their lives based on an understanding of Hawkins’ work and his calibrations, and who believe in muscle testing as a tool for discerning truth—are in a position to test out Hawkins’ experi-mental instructions under appropriate parameters to determine their validity.

Has his community performed the experimental instructions in a way that substantiates Hawkins’ claims? It seems many in his community accepted Hawkins’ claims on faith alone. If members of this community have not been able to validate Hawkins’ claims, it is their responsibility to deeply question them. If we can’t validate the experimental instructions (Hawkins’ calibration method), and yet we live by the results of these instructions (his calibrations), are we walking an authentically spiritual path?

A Hypothesis of Consciousness

A hypothesis is an untested proposition that makes a specific prediction about a set of circumstances. Here’s an example of a hypothesis: If I make a statement with your arm out and apply pressure, your arm will either stay extended or drop. If your arm stays extended, it means the answer is universally true. If it drops, it means the answer is universally untrue.

A hypothesis is a speculative guess that has not been tested; it’s the starting point for an investigation. A theory is a principle that has been demonstrated through repeated testing and observation. (A theory is what a hypothesis turns into once it has been tested continuously with similar results). If a theory looks like it will never be disproved, we call it a law (for example, the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics).


At present, it appears Hawkins’ calibration method is a hypothesis—one that hasn’t been accountable to scrutiny. Hawkins has made numerous empirical claims about muscle testing and his calibration method. A community of researchers following specific experimental parameters must test these claims repeatedly before anyone can call Hawkins’ calibration method more than a hypothesis. It’s troubling that we’ve seen no documented evidence (or even anecdotal evidence) that Hawkins’ claims have been rigorously tested. (We do have his dissertation, but as we saw in Chapter One, this is not a valid source of information.)

If it is found that the three strands of knowledge attainment—experimental instructions, illumination, and communal confirm-ation—cannot be met for Hawkins’ calibration method, then how can we accept the “truth reflex” (the reaction he claims the body’s muscles have to universal truth) as an actual phenomenon?

What’s Really Happening When You Muscle Test?

I have not observed any conscious deception in Hawkins. He calibrates with his wife in the privacy of their home in the same manner as he does in his lectures. It seems he fundamentally believes he’s calibrating the truth when he uses his calibration method (and we’ll explore why this is so in Chapter Six). Hawkins believes that his calibrations are necessarily unbiased because he doesn’t verbalize what he’s testing to his wife (the test subject). Anyone who has experimented with the technique with any frequency, however, knows how easy it is to manipulate your subject’s arm, even when testing silently. The unspoken assumptions seem to be that because Hawkins is “enlightened,” he (1) can’t be manipulating his wife’s arm; (2) is completely void of opinions, positions, and beliefs; and (3) possesses 100 percent objectivity.


If the technique only appears to work if the tester is conscious of what he or she is testing, might it be a way of accessing intuition or perhaps the wisdom of the body? Could the ideomotor effect, a psychological response where a subject makes movements unconsciously, be at play here? Hawkins says that the ideomotor effect isn’t a plausible explanation because he tests nonverbally; however, the ideomotor response would take place in his arm, not his subject’s. Describing what happens when he performs his muscle test for truth, Hawkins says, “Almost as I go over to ask, a knowingness comes on and the answer’s there. In fact, I can feel it run down my arm as I ask it.”33 The tester’s arm could be sending cues to the test subject’s arm, generating the subconscious desired response from the subject. Alternatively, the subject could be responding to nonverbal cues of the tester.

Are We Missing the Forest?

At his public lectures, Hawkins often says that readers who write him emails about calibration discrepancies are “missing the forest for the trees.” The implication is that if you focus too diligently on the details, you’ll miss the bigger picture of what he’s presenting. At what point, however, do these discrepancies and inconsistencies become a major concern that challenges the validity of his work? Not addressing these issues is a grave error, as they become suppressed in the minds of Hawkins’ students. These concerns can be tucked away for only so long before leading to disillusionment.

Is it time for us to take a hard look at whether there’s any accuracy to Hawkins’ method? If there’s no accuracy, under what conditions could Hawkins or anyone else claim the method valid? And if it’s not valid, on what grounds should we put any stock in his calibrations, his map, or his interpretations? If there


isn’t any available evidence to support the validity of Hawkins’ method, could we be placing our hopes in a fanciful dream? Could we be building our model of reality based on one man’s beliefs?

I’ve been immersed in Hawkins’ work for a decade. I’ve listened to every lecture at least twice, and many of them over a half-dozen times. I’ve recorded thousands of calibrations Hawkins has performed both publicly and privately. It’s become painfully apparent to me that Hawkins’ calibration method is not accurate, valid, or meaningful.

Is Hawkins’ consciousness-calibration method an authentic new science that unveils the true nature of reality or simply another “tulip craze” driven solely by belief? I once would have thought such a question blasphemous. History will decide. As the following pages suggest, history has perhaps already decided.

THREE Map of Consciousness

There was a time when I believed the Map of Consciousness held the answers to everything—it was the ultimate decoder that contextualized every aspect of life, from human behavior to spiritual development.

We don’t ever want to mistake the map for the territory; as Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “The most accurate map is yet only paper.” But an accurate map can be a significant and helpful tool. If we were world travelers interested in experiencing the world’s full richness and diversity, what would happen if we used a map that had lakes, mountains, or oceans mislabeled, called roads and interstates by the wrong names, or was missing cities and towns? No matter how well-intentioned it is, an ill-conceived map will hinder our ability to see, explore, experience, and understand the terrain.

Hawkins, by whatever method, has produced a map. A map is always subject to revision as the terrain becomes better known and civilization evolves. “A good map,” Wilber notes, “becomes a model, and a model that is never disputed becomes a law.”1 Will Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness become a model of consciousness? Is it currently humanity’s best map for understanding reality? Is it accurate? Is it complete? Is it valid? These are important questions. Basing our lives on a distorted, confused, or incomplete map of reality creates many problems—most notably in our personal and psychological development, our relationships, our work, and our spiritual growth. If you

52 | Map of Consciousness

expect to rely heavily on your map to navigate the world, it’s prudent to constantly evaluate its validity and reliability.

Although it is generally believed that Hawkins conceived of his Map of Consciousness using muscle testing under rigorous scientific standards, evidence suggests otherwise. In this chapter, we’ll review the sources upon which the Map of Consciousness is based, taking a close look at how Hawkins actually con-structed his map. Next, we’ll examine a series of concerns with the structure of the map itself. We’ll also review important levels or stages of consciousness development that aren’t addressed in Hawkins’ map at all. Finally, we’ll address the “below 200” concept.

How the Map of Consciousness Was Conceived

When I began research for writing Hawkins’ biography, I was keenly interested in learning how the Map of Consciousness—a major revelation by a psychiatrist-mystic—came to be, so I could document its development for posterity. While Hawkins provided a few philosophic clues by referencing the Perennial Philosophy and the Great Chain of Being, other than his dissertation, I had little to go on. He did, however, make a reference to me in private about seeing a scale in the late ‘70s, but he couldn’t recall the name or author of this scale.

As the Map of Consciousness forms the cornerstone of Hawkins’ system, it seems important to understand how the map was constructed. Hawkins had to have a basic framework in mind in order to test the levels or states with kinesiology in the first place. From my research for his biography, I discovered that Hawkins’ Map was mainly influenced by three sources: the


Sedona Method’s list of emotions, the “Levels of Soul Evolvement” chart of unknown origins, and Vern Black’s Integrity Tone Scale.*

Hawkins became engrossed in Lester Levenson’s teachings and his Sedona Method in 1976.2 The nine emotional states used in the method are apathy, grief, fear, lust, anger, pride (AGFLAP), and courageousness, acceptance, and peace (CAP). If you change “lust” to “desire,” you have nine of the seventeen levels of con-sciousness from Hawkins’ map—verbatim and in the same order.

Next, Hawkins was introduced to the “Levels of Soul Evolvement”—a relative scale from 1 to 800—ranging from minimum comprehension, to logic and reason, to spiritual mastership.3 Hawkins’ long-time friend and former housemate Randy Richmond shared with me a copy of this scale, which included descriptions of seventeen distinct levels and a breakdown of the percentages of the population that reside at each level. The levels were situated as degrees on a semi-circle. (It looks like a protractor.) Richmond told me that in the early ’80s Hawkins would “dowse” or “calibrate” anything and everything on this scale with a pendulum.4

Finally, Hawkins was introduced to Vern Black’s Integrity Tone Scale. This included sixteen distinct “States of Integrity” as well as columns indicating the related Emotion, Attitude, and Point of View.5 The structure of Black’s scale has striking similarities to Hawkins’ map, even though the names of Black’s states are different.

* Although Hawkins refers to his prior training in Adaptional Psychodynamics, a derivative of Freudian analysis developed by Sandor Rado, as a source for his map, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rado’s model does divide emotions into two categories: emergency emotions and welfare emotions. But the emergency emotions, according to Rado, are a response to danger, while the welfare emotions are based on pleasure or the expectation of pleasure. That is, Rado’s model bears no resemblance to Hawkins’s levels of consciousness or even the column of emotions on Hawkins’ map. My sense is that Hawkins refers to AP because he doesn’t want to reference the Sedona Method. He parted with Levenson and the Sedona Method group on poor terms. I was told by numerous sources that Levenson was highly litigious and Hawkins was likely trying to avoid a lawsuit.


Hawkins likely constructed his map by combining the emotional levels from the Sedona Method, the numbering scale from the Levels of Soul Evolvement, and the structure of Black’s Integrity Tone Scale, which he then “confirmed” by calibrating the levels with his then-girlfriend, Glorian Ross, using muscle testing.

In his dissertation, Hawkins writes, “By trial and error the kinesiologic response indicated that the dividing line at which negative emotions and attitudes differentiated from the positive was at the level of ‘courage’.”6 This dividing line (between below 200 and above 200) was already illustrated in the Sedona Method, where there’s a jump from AGFLAP to CAP—courage being the first positive emotion.

By 1985, Hawkins had completed his map (he began giving lectures about it at the Sedona Villa in 1984), but he didn’t conduct the research for his dissertation until 1994. Any test subjects used for the research in his dissertation—paid or unpaid subjects—could only have been used to “confirm” the map Hawkins had conceived a decade prior. This timeline differs from Hawkins’ description in his dissertation of how he constructed his map, where he implies a methodical discovery process using muscle testing. In other words, Hawkins’ dissertation was misleading about how the map was conceived.

Before Hawkins constructed his map, he made a significant assumption: a calibratable scale of predetermined (and unch-anging) levels of human consciousness exists and can be measured with kinesiology. Hawkins says, “The scale came about empi-rically. We said if existence is 1 on a logarithmic scale, what would be the highest number that has been achieved by any living being? And it said 1,000. I said, ‘That’s pretty neat: 1 to 1,000. God’s very cooperative.’”7 But it doesn’t appear that the scale came about empirically. Rather, it appears Hawkins had a theoretical scale in mind, borrowed from the above sources, and then used his own form of muscle testing to corroborate his beliefs.


Is the Map’s Structure Meaningful?

The Map of Consciousness is divided into six columns: God-View, Life-View, Level, Log, Emotion, and Process. In all of his work—including Power vs. Force—Hawkins never actually defines any of these headings with the exception of “Level,” which for him denotes levels of energy or consciousness. Let’s review each column designation and evaluate its meaning in the context of the overall map.

God-View

Life-View

Level Log Emotion Process

Figure 1. Top-line heading of the Map of Consciousness. Both the Level and Emotion column represent emotions. The

Levels, again, are Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride, Courage, Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, Love, Joy, Peace, and Enlightenment. Hawkins even classifies these Levels as “emotional states” in his dissertation.8 But then we have yet another column labeled Emotion. Listing them in corresponding order to the Levels listed above, the words in this column are humiliation, blame, despair, regret, anxiety, craving, hate, scorn, affirmation, trust, optimism, forgiveness, reverence, serenity, bliss, and ineffable.

It can be confusing to have two columns for emotions on the map. For example, level 150 is Anger and the dominant emotion at this level is hate. Yet anger and hate don’t always co-exist as emotional experiences. Can’t you experience one without the other? It can also be said that affirmation, trust, optimism, forgiveness, reverence, serenity, bliss, and ineffable aren’t emotional states; rather, they are attitudes and/or descriptions of subjective experience.


The dominant emotion at level 350 (Acceptance) is forgive-ness, which seems to conflict with Hawkins’ calibration of forgiveness in the 500s (Love). Perhaps Hawkins is indicating that the emotion of forgiveness differs from the level of consciousness of forgiveness? At the least, the disparity raises questions about how to interpret the map.

As we saw above, the Levels column highlights emotional states as classified by the Sedona Method. First, what reason do we have to assume that these emotional states represent levels of consciousness (where one state of consciousness is higher or lower than another)? Second, at present, is there any evidence that suggests that the Sedona Method’s hierarchal ordering of emotions is universally valid?*

Next, we come to “Life-View.” In Hawkins’ original trilogy (Power vs. Force, Eye of the I, and I), he labeled this column “Life-View.” In his five later works, he mysteriously changed the heading to “Self-View” without any mention or explanation. All systems should be open for revision, so I don’t see any problem with Hawkins’ changing the title, although in my opinion, it is both sloppy and irresponsible that he didn’t offer an explanation. But that’s not the core issue. Hawkins changed the column heading but not the content of the columns. This is confusing. Is one’s view of life necessarily the same as one’s view of oneself? For example, according to the map, people supposedly calibrated at 200 (Courage) see life as “feasible.” Does that necessarily mean they see themselves as feasible? It doesn’t seem to make sense.

The “God-View” column on Hawkins’ map implies that a particular level of consciousness maintains a particular view of * Systems and techniques offered by organizations like the Sedona Method and Scientology and authors like Hawkins and Louise Hay seem to excel at promoting and packaging their ideas. They also excel at generating massive revenue. They are less effective, however, at demonstrating the efficacy of their techniques, never conducting sufficient research to substantiate the claims these organizations and authors make. See “The Business of Enlightenment” in Chapter Eleven for further discussion.


God. The God-View of Reason (400s), for example, is “wise.” Many people who Hawkins calibrates in the 400s, such as Sigmund Freud (499) and Stephen Hawking (499), categorically rejected a God of any kind. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are atheists (they don’t believe in God) and many others are agnostic (uncertain about the existence of God). Yet, every level of consciousness on Hawkins’ map has a God-View that assumes a belief in God—even the ones below 200.

The “Log” column, which is short for logarithm, is the column Hawkins uses for his numbering system of calibrations from 1 to 1,000. Mathematically, however, this is an error. Logarithmic functions do not operate in a manner that would make Hawkins’ numbering system meaningful.*

Presumably, what Hawkins means by the final column, “Process,” is the means by which people process information at each level of consciousness. For example, at Reason, the process is “abstraction.” But abstraction is only one form of reasoning. Jean Piaget’s findings on cognition suggest that the use of abstraction is but one form of reasoning (and Piaget’s model has been cross-culturally verified).† Most of the other processes listed appear nonsensical (at least, to me). For example, at Willingness the process is “intention” and at Acceptance the process is “transcendence.” It’s uncertain whether or not these designations make logical sense.

Hawkins states that the columns on his map were constructed from a “trial-and-error sorting process to roughly categorize human behaviors that are representative of the various levels of consciousness.”9 When viewed critically, however, it seems unlikely

* How he arrived at the notion of logarithm is unclear. In his dissertation, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, he simply jumps into the discussion using log values on page 78, giving no mention to how or why logarithms were being used in Power vs. Force. Understandably, this led to an onslaught of criticisms about the work. † Abstract reasoning is associated with what Piaget called the formal operational stage of cognitive development, not the concrete operational stage.


that the columns on the map accurately correspond with their related “level of consciousness” in a consistent or meaningful way.*

Since in his writings and lectures Hawkins never addresses these additional columns, instead focusing exclusively on the Levels, why are these columns even on his map? Hawkins developed his map after parting ways with Lester Levenson and the Sedona Method organization. Hawkins and Levenson had a falling out over a real estate deal and Hawkins came to believe that Levenson was solely interested in financial gain. He needed to differentiate his map from the Sedona Method’s AGFLAP CAP. It seems likely that he added the columns mainly to avoid a lawsuit from the Sedona Method’s organization.†

Do the Levels of Consciousness Actually Determine Behavior?

This brings us to a core issue fundamental to our evaluation of the validity of Hawkins’ system. His system rests on the assumption that there are prevailing energy fields that determine patterns of human behavior. That is, each of Hawkins’ levels of consciousness is supposed to govern a particular set of human behaviors. The 400s, for example, are supposedly governed by Reason. “These fields,” Hawkins writes, “dominate behavior, so that definable patterns are consistent across cultures and time throughout human history.”10 But do we have any reason to believe that Hawkins is correct? That is, can there actually be a single energy field—call it a “level of consciousness” or anything else—that determines all of a person’s behavior? This * This confusion may have arisen because the structure of Hawkins’ map was largely based on Black’s Integrity Tone Scale. Black also made the error of assuming that a particular “Point of View” was associated with a specific level of integrity even though current research suggests otherwise. Hawkins decided to break this column into “God-View” and “Life-View,” but the same error intrinsic to Black’s scale found its way onto Hawkins’ map. † We’ll address the issue of copyrighted material and the actions Veritas Publishing takes to protect its material in Chapter Eleven, “The Business of Enlightenment.”


is the fundamental assertion of Hawkins’ work, highlighted in Power vs. Force, and referenced in every one of his books and lectures thereafter.

Hawkins assumes that people’s levels of consciousness determine their behavior. So let’s consider that. What calibrated level of consciousness might you expect of a person who says, “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion”?11 Most students of Hawkins’ work would say “below 200,” but this quote is from Winston Churchill, and Hawkins calibrates him at 515, the level of “Love” on his scale.

I’m an admirer of Churchill; the entire planet owes him our gratitude. History, however, shows him to have been not only a hero, but also a racist and an imperialist. Consider this quote by Churchill addressing the Council of the West Essex Unionist Association in reference to Mahatma Gandhi: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor … The truth is that Gandhiism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.”12

God-View

Life-View

Level Log Emotion Process

Loving Benign Love 500 Reverence Revelation

Figure 2. Cross-section of the Map of Consciousness at level 500.

Industrialist Henry Ford (calibration level 380) with his strong anti-Semitism is another example. Humans can excel in certain areas but demonstrate developmental arrest in others (as in the cases of Churchill and Ford demonstrating ethnocentric world-views and under-developed value structures). Such discrepancies


cannot be explained by Hawkins’ map, but they are easily explained by developmental psychology (the subject of Part II).

Take another example: Hawkins claims that Hitler dropped in consciousness from the 400s (Reason) before World War II, to 125 (Desire) during the war, and to 40 (Guilt/Apathy) following it. Yet the same demeanor, prejudices, and ideologies can be observed in Hitler even in his youth. Hitler was intelligent before and after the war; he was morally retarded before and after the war. A drop in consciousness is an insufficient explanation. Hawkins’ system pegs all explanations of behavior in the form of a calibrated number on his map, which doesn’t sufficiently explain the complexities of human behavior.

The levels of consciousness, according to Hawkins, represent the fundamental determinants of all manifestation and behavior in life. When we only have his map as our guide and use it as a lens for interpreting all reality, we’re at risk of forming a limited, myopic view of the world. For as Abraham Maslow said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”13 To fully decipher the “determinants of human behavior,” you need a lens with a broader view than Hawkins’ map allows.

The Power of Misdirection

Now, like many readers, I was an avid student of Hawkins’ work for many years and a big supporter of his map. Why didn’t we see the lack of logic and cohesion in the map’s structure? One answer, I believe, is found in an understanding of a popular tool used by magicians called misdirection. Magicians use misdirection to focus (or direct) their audience’s attention on one thing and away from something else. I don’t mean to imply that Hawkins is a magician or that he consciously misdirects his readers. My sense is that he firmly believes in his “consciousness research.”


I’m merely going to attempt to highlight one of the mechanisms by which some of his students were persuaded by the presentation of his map in Power vs. Force.

First, let’s keep in mind who is in the audience—who is reading Power vs. Force. For the most part, it’s not scientists, scholars, or professors, but everyday people like you and me seeking answers to life’s questions. Knowing the audience is important for this magic trick, because Hawkins’ form of misdirection hasn’t worked on scientists, scholars, or professors (again, for the most part).

If you have a copy of Power vs. Force, you can turn to it, but that isn’t necessary to follow this discussion. In the ten brief pages of the first chapter, “Critical Advances in Knowledge,” readers are bombarded with terminology including chaos theory, attractor patterns, stellar astronomy, fractal geometry, fluid mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, psychopharmacology, strange attractors, advanced theoretical physics, causality, neural networks, pure awareness, logical progression, morphogenetic fields, critical factor analysis, implicate and explicate order, neurophysiologic modeling, left-brain/right-brain, and the law of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

I commend you if you even made it through the above paragraph! Of course, none of these terms are sufficiently described in his book—how could they be in a mere ten pages?

Remember that in misdirection, the magician gets you to focus your attention on one thing and away from another. The lay reader, in a trance from the barrage of terms in his first chapter, turns to the second chapter, “History and Methodology,” where we are given a brief history of Applied Kinesiology. Although Hawkins never provides a sound argument for how AK is related to the terms he referenced, he doesn’t have to: our attention has been directed elsewhere. We’re dizzy trying to follow many new concepts simultaneously. Plus,


we’re impressed with Hawkins’ knowledge, which leaves many of us feeling inferior to him intellectually. Our feeling of inferiority leads us to believe Hawkins is an expert of some kind, so we trust everything he says at face value.

To complete the illusion, Hawkins presents his Map of Consciousness in his third chapter, “Test Results and Inter-pretation.” He only offers five pages of interpretation, none of which defines or explains the structure or columns of the map itself. But that doesn’t matter. His presentation has persuaded us to believe that the Map of Consciousness is indeed a great discovery and an advance in science. Even though Hawkins divorces his system from science (by calibrating his method at 605—Enlightenment—and labeling it “nonlinear”), he uses the veil of science to persuade his audience of his “spiritual” ideas.

The Map’s Missing Pieces

Based on other maps of consciousness offered by transpersonal psychology, there are states and levels of development that other theorists, philosophers, and sages discuss that aren’t represented by Hawkins’ levels. A notable example is an “existential level” of consciousness, as explored by existential philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, who inspired the field of humanistic psychology (pioneered by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers).

The existential levels as described by these philosophers are remarkably similar to the “existential angst” Hawkins experienced prior to his 1965 spiritual conversion.14 What makes Hawkins’ case particularly convoluted is that he was simultaneously battling an alcohol and drug addiction while he was experiencing his “black despair,” and it’s difficult to separate the hopeless experience of addiction from the hopelessness of existential despair.

The existential level of human development requires a death-and-rebirth experience to ascend to transpersonal levels,


which is exactly what Hawkins describes as having happened to him.15

Hawkins’ interpretation of his 1965 “descent into hell” is that it took him to the “bottom of the box,” indicating a drop in his level of consciousness.* But is that actually so? This type of existential depression, isolation, and anxiety—an experience common for those grappling with a prevailing meaninglessness of existence—is a common “pathology” that occurs at the existential level.16 This period of severe difficulty, described as the dark night of the soul, Zen sickness, or a descent into hell, is acknowledged in virtually every spiritual tradition.17 According to the great traditions and modern psychology, Hawkins’ map doesn’t accurately portray the existential journey.

As author Phil Nuernberger explains, “There are necessarily different models or explanations of mystical experience. The fundamentalist, whether a scientist or religionist, argues that there is only one truth, that one of these models must be right and the others wrong. It is true that only one eternal reality exists, whether we choose to call it God, Cosmic Consciousness, the Tao, or something else. However, it is also true that all experiences, even mystical experiences which transcend the mind, are filtered through individual minds conditioned by personal history, learning, and culture. While the experience of Consciousness is irrefutable, and is its own validity, how that experience is communicated is quite another matter. There are as many models and descriptions as there are different minds.”18

Hawkins’ map, describing his existential journey as he understood it and interpreted it, is fundamentalist in nature. And it seems to assume his framework is absolute truth,

* In fact, in Consciousness: The Way Out of Alcoholism and Addiction, a lecture he gave at the Sedona Villa in the mid-1980s, Hawkins says he used dowsing to access the level of consciousness of his experience of hell at “negative 100” on his map. In later lectures, he says his experience calibrated at the lower levels of his map (presumably from 1 to 199).


excluding the potentiality for different levels of experience and states of consciousness.

Consider that Hawkins categorizes Nietzsche at hopelessness, the level 50 (Apathy).19 Nietzsche is the philosopher who, echoing Hegel and Martin Luther, made the famous statement, “God is dead.” Hawkins assumes that Nietzsche’s existential despair is simply hopelessness. Both Freud and Jung were greatly influenced by Nietzsche; Freud believed Nietzsche to be the most self-aware person who ever lived. The experience of existential angst arises in those who have, in some ways, transcended primarily worldly concerns to address a very real crisis of meaning and significance. There are many different experiences or contexts for hopelessness, anxiety, fear, and depression—none of which Hawkins or his map explore. Are we sure we want to condemn Nietzsche’s level of consciousness to the “bottom of the box” because he lived with existential angst?

The Map of Consciousness and its explanation seem to be a map of his experience and his interpretation of that experience based on his limited understanding—not a universal map applicable to all as the result of “consciousness calibration research.”

Perils Below 200

Hawkins asserts, “All levels below 200 are destructive of life in both the individual and society at large.”20 But if “All truth is only so within a certain level of consciousness,”21 as he also maintains, then wouldn’t something below 200 necessarily be true within its own level of consciousness? How could it be both ways? Let’s examine some of the inherent problems with Hawkins’ interpretations of things below 200.

Hawkins went to numerous psychics during his life, yet he calibrates Tarot cards at 180 and recommends avoiding them.


Carl Jung and a host of other psychologists and researchers found the symbolism of Tarot cards instructive and useful. Categorizing Tarot as below 200, as false or destructive, causes fearful reactions and closes our minds instead of encouraging learning and discovery. Classifying forms of divination like Tarot as below 200 ensures our ignorance about such tools and fosters anxiety about their use. We tend to fear what we don’t understand, and when we are afraid, we project our own hidden fears onto other people, places, and things.22

There’s a great psychological danger for those who avoid things that Hawkins calibrates below 200 just because he says so. Jung found that psychological health and an expansion of consciousness comes from assimilating the unfamiliar, not avoiding it.23 The field of humanistic psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that we grow by challenging our old assumptions—by exploring what is unknown to us—not by following the rules established by outside authority. How can we assimilate the unfamiliar if we believe in Hawkins’ calibrations and follow his advice to avoid what he says is destructive?

Consider Hawkins’ calibration of Karl Marx’s work at 130. Hawkins says it was a mistake that his work (and Engels’) were included in the Great Books of the Western World.* Because of this, most students of Hawkins’ work tend to recoil if Marx is mentioned, without ever reading Marx’s work or evaluating him for themselves. Marx explored the social forces (mainly oppression) that play a role in a particular level of development and evolution. Class systems exert pressure on individuals, and Marx tackled that head-on. He wrote about the exploiter and the exploited. Can we deny that certain individuals, groups, institutions, and governments exploit their people? Can we not * Hawkins is clearly not a fan of the social sciences. He calibrates popular sociology as well as most terms that have “social” in them below 200.


observe this phenomenon throughout numerous cultures and levels of society? Hawkins suggests that the observation of the exploiter and the exploited is an egoistic position rather than a fundamental reality that needs to be examined and considered.

Now, I’m not advocating socialism or communism. Marx interpreted all behavior in terms of economic motivations, a highly limited notion. But it doesn’t seem reasonable to categorically condemn his work. You don’t have to be a Marxist, a Communist, or a Socialist to appreciate the mechanism of oppression, just as you don’t need to be a Freudian to value the sex drive. Freud reduced all behavior to psycho-sexual impulses, an equally limited assumption. Yet Hawkins calibrates Freud at 499—the level of genius. Both pioneers—Freud and Marx—provided profound insights about particular dimensions of reality, but then made the error of assuming their area of study was the area of study.

It’s important to understand that calibrating a concept—any concept—creates problems of interpretation and meaning that potentially result in repression, dissociation, and other pathologies. (If you’re unfamiliar with these terms, fear not. We’ll examine them through illustration throughout this book.) Believing in the concept of a categorical falsehood (below 200) prohibits learning, exploration, and discovery. Doing so closes us off to aspects of reality, thereby repressing aspects of ourselves. Repressing aspects of ourselves encourages our own dark side to grow strong, rebel, and subconsciously dominate our lives.

It’s one thing to say that someone’s work contains errors and limitations; it’s quite another to say that it’s destructive and categorically false. The former statement informs; the latter reinforces ignorance. And since the validity of the calibration method doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, it’s prudent to question its application and use.


Exploring Other Maps of the Terrain

Upon deeper reflection and reading, we can conclude that the Map of Consciousness—the central feature of Hawkins’ system—is an honorable attempt at explaining reality, albeit an inaccurate and incomplete one.

A primary problem arises when we assume Hawkins’ map is the map—the only map—or even the best and most compre-hensive map available to help us understand reality. All of those beliefs can easily be challenged. The question becomes: is Hawkins’ map the most accurate representation of the nature of reality that we, humankind, has available to us? Each student must grapple with this question privately, and history will eventually resolve the issue. Serious students seek what is true for them personally rather than seeking the truth as experienced by some teacher, no matter how enlightened that teacher might seem.

By virtue of the map’s absoluteness, Hawkins seems to claim that his map is the lens through which to view the world if you want to realize enlightenment. I’m not suggesting that Hawkins’ system—specifically the Map of Consciousness—does not have merit. But the evidence does not support the map’s far-reaching implications, nor does the map seem to be an accurate, complete model of reality. Clearly, the map and the calibrations are an interpretation of Hawkins’ version of truth as he experiences and understands it rather than the truth (universal truth).

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Notes (for chapters One - Three)

Preface

1 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. 2 Jeffrey (ed.), xi.

Part I: Hawkins’ System

1 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000.

Chapter One: Power vs. Force

1 Marquette School of Medicine separated from Marquette University in 1970 and is now part of University of Wisconsin Medical College. 2 Dialogues, 78. 3 Radical Subjectivity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. [Disc 5; Track 3, 2 minutes] [my ital.] 4 See the feedback offered to Hawkins by the American Journal of Psychiatry, reprinted in Jeffrey, Doctor of Truth, 153-154. 5 Office Series, Drug Addiction and Alcoholism lecture. [Track 2] 6 Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness, 79. 7 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. 8 304. Also, the back cover of Eye of the I states: “He has been knighted and honored in the East with the title ‘Tae Ryoung Sun Kak Tosa’ (Foremost Teacher of the Way to Enlightenment).” This title was awarded to him by a group of South Koreans; he was, then, “honored in the East.” But his knighthood has no relation to his “honor in the East,” making this

70 | Notes for Chapters One - Three

statement very misleading, as it suggests that his knighthood was related to his honor as a teacher of enlightenment. 9 See http://www.christusrex.org/www1/gtl/smom/selfstyled.htm (10/11/11) as well as Sainty, Guy Stair, “The Self-Styled Orders of Saint John,” 1991, located at http://www.chivalricorders.org/orders/self-styled/selfsty1.htm (10/11/11). I confirmed this with Admiral Andrew Gough of the Order of St. John via email correspondence on June 4, 2007 and Jonathan Riley-Smith on June, 8, 2007. 10 This self-styled order is associated with the United States, not Denmark. See http://www.orderstjohn.org/selfstyle/osjgml.htm (9/22/12). 11 Eye of the I, 332. 12 Carlson, Tucker. “The Hall of Lame.” Forbes.com, March 8, 1999. http://www.forbes.com/forbes-life-magazine/1999/0308/063.html (9/24/12). 13 http://www.templetonprize.org/abouttheprize.html (7/5/12). 14 For instance, Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self: Contemplations from the Teachings of David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. 15 Radical Subjectivity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. 16 [my ital.] Correspondence between Hawkins and Lee Iacocca provided by Veritas Publishing. 17 Pierotti’s actual statements were presented in Chapter One. They can also be found here: http://www.search.com/reference/David_R._Hawkins (11/23/11). Confirmed with Eric Pierotti via email, November 23, 2011. 18 As I did as well in Creativity Revealed, following Hawkins’ lead. 19 Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, 45. 20 Wilber, Quantum Questions, ix. 21 Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 741. 22 The title of the slide is “Quantum Mechanics and the Kinesiologic Response.” See also “Appendix D: Quantum Mechanics” in Hawkins, I, 431. 23 Spirituality: Reason and Faith lecture, January 26, 2008. [Disc 1; Track 1] 24 Email correspondence with Henry Stapp, March 6, 2008. Attempting to understand the mechanism behind Hawkins’ method, I wrote a brief paper titled, “A Quantum Explanation on the Physiological Response,” based largely on Henry Stapp’s explanations, committing the same errors Wilber describes. 25 Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, 69. See also, I, “Appendix D: Quantum Mechanics,” pages 431-436. 26 As quoted in Wilber, Quantum Questions, xi. 27 Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, 73.


28 Power vs. Force, 237. 29 Dialogues on Consciousness and Spirituality, 2. 30 Consciousness: The Way Out of Alcoholism and Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 1984-1988 (exact date unknown). 31 Consciousness: The Contextual Transformation of Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 1984-1988 (exact date unknown). 32 [my ital.] 33 Charles Kapotes, phone interview with the author, March 23, 2010. 34 Discovery of the Presence of God, 176.

Chapter Two: Calibration Method

1 Truth vs. Falsehood, 14. 2 Ibid., 90. 3 75. 4 460 in Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, 187; 465 in Truth vs. Falsehood, 265. Both of these calibrations include books by Marx and Engel, the two writers that Hawkins calibrates at lower levels than the rest. 5 Spirituality: Reason and Faith lecture, January 26, 2008. [Disc 2; Track 4] 6 Farmer, C. “Temporal factors in motor vehicle crash deaths.” 7 I, 211. 8 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. 9 Power vs. Force, 8. [my ital.] Also, if this were so and only some calibrations changed over time and others didn’t, how useful would the technique be? 10 Radical Subjectivity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. 11 Reality, Spiritual, and Modern Man, 73. [my ital.] 12 Power vs. Force, 5. [my ital.] 13 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. 14 At present, Hawkins’ page on Wikipedia is not available. Wikipedia is a non-profit run by a team of volunteers. When Veritas Publishing (Hawkins’ publishing company) threatened to take legal action against Wikimedia (Wikipedia’s parent company) for statements on the website that Hawkins didn’t like, Wikipedia pulled Hawkins’ page to avoid further legal entanglement. 15 Power vs. Force, 7.

72 | Notes for Chapters One - Three

16 Causality: The Ego’s Foundation, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, January 2002. 17 Power vs. Force, 8. 18 Radical Subjectivity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. 19 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. 20 http://www.search.com/reference/David_R._Hawkins (11/23/11). Confirmed with Eric Pierotti via email, November 23, 2011. 21 Power vs. Force, 8. 22 Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man, 375. 23 Private discussion with Hawkins. 24 See Power vs. Force demonstration video for a comprehensive list of suggested applications. 25 Private interview with Hawkins. He has also stated this in numerous public lectures. 26 Your Body Doesn’t Lie, 171. 27 Private interview with Hawkins. 28 Radical Subjectivity, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, February 2002. [my ital.] 29 Eye to Eye, 29. 30 Causality: The Ego’s Foundation lecture, January 2002. 31 Power vs. Force, 247. 32 8. [my ital.] 33 Ibid.

Chapter Three: Map of Consciousness

1 Eye to Eye, 160. 2 See, for example, “The Sedona Method” interview with Robert Scott, hosted by Michael Toms, on New Dimension Radio, December 1980. 3 I was unable to track down the original source of this scale. Richmond believes it to be part of the system of theosophy. 4 Randy Richmond, in-person interview, August 25, 2009. 5 Black, Handbook for the Integrity Tone Scale. 6 Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness, 77.


7 Undoing the Barriers to Spiritual Progress, compact discs of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona, AZ, December 2000. Incidentally, this description conflicts with the one Hawkins offers in his dissertation, where he says, “It was discovered that the positive numbers increased at such an enormous rate that using whole numbers would eventually run as high as 1,000 digits. It was decided therefore for practice purposes to build the relative value scale in which Log (10) 1,000 would be the top so that the logs of relative values would fall between 1 and 1,000” (79). 8 Qualitative and Quantitative, 80. 9 Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, 82. 10 Power vs. Force, 37. 11 Toye, Churchill’s Empire; excerpted in Hari, “The Two Churchills,” New York Times, 2010. 12 Williams, Eric. British Historians and the West Indies, 150. 13 The Psychology of Science, Chapter 2. 14 Jeffrey, Doctor of Truth, 92-93. 15 Wilber, Eye of Spirit, 161. Interestingly, subsequent to the existential level in Wilber’s model is the psychic level, where the siddhis, or psychic powers, often arise. And it was after Hawkins’ 1965 spiritual conversion that he reports experiencing siddhi phenomena. (Jeffrey, Doctor of Truth, 97-102.) Although Hawkins doesn’t have a designated level for “psychic,” he says that psychic phenomena generally occur at calibration level 540 to 570 [joy]. 16 Transformations of Consciousness, 118. 17 Washburn, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, 171. 18 “The Structure of Mind and Its Resources,” 97, in Miller and Cook-Greuter’s Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood. [my ital.] Nuernberger is explaining a post-conventional understanding of conscious-ness that will be highlighted in Part II. 19 Consciousness: The Way out of Alcoholism and Addiction, compact disc of lecture by David R. Hawkins, Sedona Villa, 1984-1988 (exact date unknown). [Disc 2, Track 9.] 20 Power vs. Force, 59-60. 21 Eye, 145. 22 For those interested in reading about an empirical basis for methods of divination, see Marie-Louise von Franz’s On Divination and Synchronicity. 23 Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower, 84.

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