New Realities recorded on February 13, 2021
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews Dr. David Hawkins about the nature of consciousness, his personal spiritual journey, and the evolution of human awareness. Dr. Hawkins shares profound experiences from his life, including early realizations, a period of atheism, and a deep spiritual awakening that shifted his perspective on existence. They discuss the limitations of the ego and intellect, the calibration of consciousness levels, and the ultimate path toward spiritual realization and understanding the sacredness of all life.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. I’m Alan Steinfeld. This is an interview from the archives that I did with Dr. David Hawkins around 2003, the author of Power versus Force, The Eye of the Eye, and many deeper spiritual texts. It’s one of my most watched YouTube videos, but I thought I’d present it here on BBS, so enjoy it. Thank you for listening.
Alan Steinfeld
Are we rolling?
Dr. David Hawkins
Well, we were having a good time. Shall we stop and get serious?
Alan Steinfeld
No, no. Shall we include the audience?
Dr. David Hawkins
Let’s include the audience and bring them up to speed.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m talking to Dr. David Hawkins. He’s an MD, PhD.
Dr. David Hawkins
MD, PhD. And he’s been knighted, don’t forget sir.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, you’ve been knighted?
Dr. David Hawkins
Well, my real title in the East, they call me Sir Doctor Doctor.
Alan Steinfeld
Sir Doctor Doctor?
Dr. David Hawkins
Because I was knighted by the Danish crown.
Alan Steinfeld
You were?
Dr. David Hawkins
Plus I have two doctorates. So in the East they call me Sir Doctor Doctor.
Alan Steinfeld
Sir Doctor Doctor. Okay.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s the first Sir Doctor Doctor you’ve interviewed.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, well, you probably haven’t met any Sir Doctor Doctors before. Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld, and on this program, I’d like to talk about consciousness, the evolution of spirituality, and who we are as an evolving race of human beings looking for enlightenment, I would say. Looking for an expansion of their own personal consciousness into a greater mind. Tonight’s guest is someone who’s investigated these fields, who’s written three books and more on the subject. He’s Dr. David Hawkins, MD, PhD, knighted doctor, and authority on consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s what they say.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s what they would say. He’s the author of Power vs. Force, which really put him on the map, and then there was The Eye of the Eye, and his latest is I: Reality and Subjectivity. Thank you, Dr. Hawkins.
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s fun to be here, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
Your investigations go into the field of what is consciousness and the measurements of consciousness. But how do you define consciousness to begin with?
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s the infinite field that is the matrix out of which all experience arises. The very basis of subjectivity. The only reason we know that we’re here talking is because subjectively we’re aware of it. And we’re aware of it subjectively because we’re conscious and we share access to a field of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but then it becomes individualized as the ‘I,’ this field of consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
Each of us thinks it’s uniquely ourself, uniquely ourself.
Alan Steinfeld
But because it’s filtered through this little vessel of a perception, right?
Dr. David Hawkins
Then we call that ‘me.’ ‘I,’ personal self. So the book is how to transcend it. The realization that it’s not just personal, that it’s the ultimate infinite source of all existence frankly.
Alan Steinfeld
This little ‘me’ is the ultimate source of all existence.
Dr. David Hawkins
Well, the illusion that you’re limited. That you’re a little ‘I.’ Whereas actually the awareness of your little ‘I’ is coming from the Big ‘I,’ which includes the subjectivity of all of mankind, of all of life.
Alan Steinfeld
But in your books and lectures you talk about how the mind then intercepts that little ‘I’ and thinks it’s in control.
Dr. David Hawkins
Yes, it gives it content and form and then we label it ‘me.’
Alan Steinfeld
The mind we label ‘me,’ but the mind in some people’s, that I’ve met say, the mind is the illusion of the ‘me.’
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s limited to a personalization. Whereas actually we just personalized the general, and then call the personalized section ‘me.’
Alan Steinfeld
And the mind though is, and in your lecture you said, only 1% of the totality of this consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s true. The mind is 99% silent. Only 1% is talking. And that 1% has hypnotized the…
Alan Steinfeld
We call that ‘me.’
Dr. David Hawkins
So there’s really no difference between me and you.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I have a personalized section of it and you have a personalized section of it. That part is unique. But the generality, the reason we understand each other is because we share a commonality called consciousness. Otherwise, there’d be no understanding between us.
Alan Steinfeld
And you’ve also talked about how we’ve demonized the ego into being something to reject and push away, but it’s really part of our conscious evolution back to this great mind.
Dr. David Hawkins
If you track the evolution of consciousness on this planet, it started millennia ago, and yesterday we gave a lecture on this subject. We pointed out how it started out really with the bacteria were the first conscious entities on this planet. And then on up through the animal kingdom to hominids, Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man.
Alan Steinfeld
And each level is an expansion of this consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
Greater and greater awareness.
Alan Steinfeld
Back to the awareness of where it began, would you say?
Dr. David Hawkins
I track where it originated so that we get to understand what the ego is and how we should positionalize ourselves about it, how we should look at it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, how should we look at it? I mean, it’s not something to reject because people who haven’t a strong ego development never get to dissolve the ego, that’s my understanding.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s one theory, that you have to first develop an ego in order to get rid of it.
Alan Steinfeld
Exactly. Is that not true?
Dr. David Hawkins
In a way it’s true, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
But in your own process, you talked about your experience, there was a point where you were an atheist. You had some revelations younger, and then you were an atheist, and then you come full circle. What exactly happened? What was the thing that ignited that conscious awareness that you were not this limited being but something greater?
Dr. David Hawkins
Since I was three years old, there was a focus and almost an obsession about discerning what is truth and what is the nature of truth. It started out with rather major spiritual realizations and confrontations. That led me into a drivenness to discover what is the core or the essence of truth.
Alan Steinfeld
What were the spiritual revelations that happened?
Dr. David Hawkins
At age three, that was a rather astonishing one. As I said, prior to age three, there was nothing but oblivion. And then suddenly at age three, it was as somebody turned on the klieg lights, you’re in the dark. All of a sudden these lights come on and I suddenly realized I exist.
Alan Steinfeld
As a self-referential being.
Dr. David Hawkins
There was not even a personal self. There was just an awareness of existence as a stunning reality. Prior to which there was no awareness of existence. So suddenly I’m confronted with existence as such, which was not pleasing.
Alan Steinfeld
It wasn’t.
Dr. David Hawkins
No, because with non-existence you have, frankly, nothing to worry about. With existence, instantly, the first fear came up: If you exist, the possibility would have been that you might not have come into existence. This was all nonverbal. At age three I had no such words. But there was a complete awareness that I exist, consequently, it could have come about that I would not have come into existence. So the first confrontation was, is the ultimate reality existence or non-existence? Did the Buddha…
Alan Steinfeld
But the fact that you did exist proved existence in a sense. Things are what they are, and the idea of hypothesizing that they could have been is also the creation of the mind.
Dr. David Hawkins
That was the immediate contrary, the polarity of existence versus non-existence. And of course, everybody fears that in the form of death. They think that if I die, I will no longer exist because they identify with the body as who they are. So everybody lives with the fear of death.
Alan Steinfeld
Instead of identifying with consciousness, which is infinite.
Dr. David Hawkins
Which is beyond death, right, but unless one goes through certain experiences that is not apparent at all.
Alan Steinfeld
As you progress from three with that kind of revelation, what was the next phase?
Dr. David Hawkins
Then the sense of self would tend to disappear from an individual personal self into a sort of universality. I would be in third grade, and I would be sitting in the chair and I would remind myself that I am David and I am sitting in this chair. That I’m just a me, because the self would just become universal.
Alan Steinfeld
If you didn’t remind yourself, what would happen?
Dr. David Hawkins
I would preoccupy myself with reminding myself that I’m an individual person and my name is David and I’m sitting here in this chair and I’m doing spelling.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, I often have to remind myself of my name because it’s just a label of identification for response.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s why your consciousness is moving beyond the ordinary.
Alan Steinfeld
I hope so. So you’d keep reminding yourself you’re David and you’re sitting in the chair.
Dr. David Hawkins
I was doing this in grade school, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
And then there was a place where you rejected it all when you got into science.
Dr. David Hawkins
Before that, when I was a paperboy in Wisconsin out in the blizzard, to get out of the blizzard, out for dark, I climbed into a snowbank to get away from the terrible wind, 10 below zero. Pitch black. I was out in the country, no lights, no houses, you’re by yourself in a blizzard. The only concern was getting away from the wind. So I dug a hole in this snowbank and sat out of the wind. All of a sudden, the most exquisite feeling, you were melted by an infinite love of infinite power, you’re dissolved and outside of time and space. Just this infinite presence. The presence was not different than the core and essence of that which I am. It was also beyond time. I realized that that which I am existed before all universes and will continue on after all universes have gone. This condition was beyond time. You actually experience it through the eons. You’re already beyond all time and space. All that’s nonverbal, but it’s stunningly aware. That was the first experience of what spiritually is called the Self with a capital S.
Alan Steinfeld
The transcendence of the ego.
Dr. David Hawkins
The transcendence. At the time I’d never heard of it.
Alan Steinfeld
How old were you?
Dr. David Hawkins
12, 13, 14.
Alan Steinfeld
And that experience never left you? How could it?
Dr. David Hawkins
It leaves a profound imprint, a profound knowingness. Anything less than that is not of the same rank.
Alan Steinfeld
But then you progressed to be a doctor and studied, and stuffed your consciousness back into your body.
Dr. David Hawkins
Then I researched the nature of the unconscious. In others, and then in myself in four years of psychoanalysis. A professor, training analyst from Columbia University, so Freud is really my great-grandfather. Freud analyzed Kardiner, who analyzed Ovesey, who analyzed me. So my great-grandfather is Freud.
Alan Steinfeld
Freud was a great genius, but he stopped his theories when it got beyond the personal self. He couldn’t go into the place Jung went.
Dr. David Hawkins
No, he didn’t go where Jung went. But he discovered the profound importance of the unconscious, and of course, we now all accept that. It was a novel idea at the turn of the century, but now everybody accepts that we have an unconscious, and it plays a big part in our life.
Alan Steinfeld
The unconscious is now, evolutionary-wise, going into this spiritual awareness. So the unconscious and the spirit are merging.
Dr. David Hawkins
Yes, so Jung went further than Freud. Freud calibrated 499, and Jung calibrated at 520.
Alan Steinfeld
I don’t think people will know what calibration is, but…
Dr. David Hawkins
Well, that’s just between you and I, we won’t tell them anything.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. As far as your process, once you had that experience at 12, then you tried to understand the unconscious, but you started to close down.
Dr. David Hawkins
I was brought up very religiously. I was an Episcopalian, High Episcopalian, and I was a boy soprano, and an acolyte. I was quite religious, in fact scrupulous. One time I was out in the woods by myself, which I forgot to talk about in the lecture. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, came a comprehension of the totality of the suffering of all of mankind throughout all of time. I wasn’t thinking about it, I was just walking through the woods, and suddenly, I saw the totality of all the suffering of all of mankind through all the time.
Alan Steinfeld
And you felt that, as well.
Dr. David Hawkins
A realization, and in that instant I became an atheist.
Alan Steinfeld
Really?
Dr. David Hawkins
I couldn’t, because God in that time, was considered to be the creator of everything. When I saw the totality of the suffering of mankind, I said, I cannot believe in a God that would have created that. I instantly became an atheist. Now I became an intense atheist, to the same degree I’d been an intense religionist. I became a militant atheist. Then later went onto a Jesuit University where I’m getting straight A’s in theology and metaphysics.
Alan Steinfeld
Because you couldn’t believe God would create that much suffering.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s right. That’s not an uncommon misconception. Many an atheist becomes an atheist because he holds God responsible for the suffering of mankind.
Alan Steinfeld
So how would you get beyond that then? What was the trigger?
Dr. David Hawkins
Many people don’t. Many years I was a very intense atheist, probably 20 years.
Alan Steinfeld
It also makes them miserable to think those thoughts.
Dr. David Hawkins
No, it was great to get rid of religion, because sin and guilt went with it. Goodbye sin and guilt, I was a free agent.
Alan Steinfeld
You said there’s so much suffering, I don’t want to take on the responsibility, and God could never have created this world full of that. How did you resolve it? What was your next step?
Dr. David Hawkins
I became an atheist. I was angry at God, because if there was a God, he created all this suffering. I didn’t want to do with him, so I disconnected from him, and became an atheist. I said, there isn’t any God. So then I was an intense atheist for many years, and then continued a search into the truth of reality, and by then I had been psychoanalyzed, so I was looking within for the source of the sense of existence itself. I dove into the unconscious, and it was like Dante’s hell. I went in deeper and deeper levels, and eventually felt complete abandonment. I really ended up in the depths of hell. I went down out of how Dante understood hell.
Alan Steinfeld
Alone, and isolated, and shut off?
Dr. David Hawkins
The top level of hell is torture and people being dismembered. What usually people think of as hell. Which is child’s play, for openers, that’s just torture and horror. Then it begins to get bad.
Alan Steinfeld
What is that?
Dr. David Hawkins
What horror really means, all of a sudden you become almost that out of which horror rises. Then you enter the level of despair, and then you start going into the lower depths of hell, which are not really describable. Although I think Dante understood it because there’s an absolute aloneness that is forever. It’s the foreverness, and the agony of absolute aloneness, you’re cut off from God completely, and there’s a knowingness as you go to the lower depths of hell, it’s almost like a sign that says, abandon all hope ye who enter here. I don’t know how Dante knew that, but there’s a sign there. A knowingness beyond this, there is no hope ever, and now you understand what eternity means. That you’re hopeless through all eternity and there is no recourse possible. It’s dread, and it’s timeless. Just like the highest levels are timeless, the lowest levels are timeless. And the timelessness of forever dread, a voice within said, if there is a God I ask him to help me. And then came oblivion. After the oblivion cleared, I don’t know how long I was there, an hour or a day.
Alan Steinfeld
But there was a surrender into that place?
Dr. David Hawkins
No, no surrender. It wasn’t a fight. It was just an acceptance. It’s hopelessness. There is nothing with which to fight. Hope is abandoned. There’s neither hope nor will there ever be any relief from endless agony forever. Forever agony, with no hope ever. Anyway, a voice within said, if there is a God I ask him for help. And then everything went blank. Then came an awakening, a return of consciousness, and the mind had become silent. This instant, the mind is still silent. It was replaced by a brilliant revelation of the divinity of all that exists.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you describe divinity in that way?
Dr. David Hawkins
The totality, the allness of that which is reveals itself as a oneness but with a radiance. It’s like you can see green, but with LSD, the green now shines forth. It was a shining forth of the obvious divinity of all that exists. It was stunning and incapacitating, and therefore, not long after, I left the world. At that time I had the largest psychiatric practice in the United States, had 50 people working for me, and research laboratories. A very elegant lifestyle, about as elegant as you can get, frankly. I walked away from it all and spent some years in solitude as to how to refunction in the world.
Alan Steinfeld
Because this was a continuous feeling, this divinity, or was it momentary?
Dr. David Hawkins
The overwhelm of the revelation slowly calmed down to the point that you could function. But it took some years, and even now it’s not perfectly adjusted, especially where the body is in space and things.
Alan Steinfeld
But you don’t want it to, I mean, isn’t the idea of existence to live in that world of divine revelation with a foot in this world as well?
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s an intellectual concept, subjectively it doesn’t happen, no it isn’t that way. Subjectively, there’s no interest in the body, eating, all the bodily functions start to cease, or either that or you lose your awareness of them. There’s a certain degree of learning how to be in the world again frankly.
Alan Steinfeld
And this is where you are now.
Dr. David Hawkins
Now I’ve really learned how to be in the world to a fairly good degree. When you’re no longer the body, you see people talking to this body and you wonder who are they talking to. I’m not there. You can see, oh they all think that you’re that. So then you have to reconnect in a way that’s really hard to describe.
Alan Steinfeld
I’ve had senses of that. So you feel like you’re not this, you’re this awareness that encompasses both and all.
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s not even that. It’s none of that. It’s because you’re none of that, that’s the difficulty. I understand you’re trying to get a description of what it was like. We’re trying to describe a phenomena that’s rather rare in history, and has been described periodically, and it’s only described with some difficulty. You can only get an approximation to it.
Alan Steinfeld
And it still doesn’t give people the experience of it. To the uninitiated, it wouldn’t mean anything really, right?
Dr. David Hawkins
People are curious about it, so they ask about it because of curiosity.
Alan Steinfeld
What’s the implication for them, that’s the real importance. It plants a seed probably that they might go through or realize at some point that will match this.
Dr. David Hawkins
The process is called the progressive relinquishment of the ego. The termination of identifying oneself as the mind and its intellectual functioning. At that point you’re no longer the body, and you’re no longer the mind. Nor are you limited in time or space. Which is hard to describe.
Alan Steinfeld
Also you talk about in these books, the fact that the mind creates continuity, that these thoughts have a continuous sequence, and you’re saying that’s also an illusion, because each thing arises separately.
Dr. David Hawkins
The world looks to the average human mind like a world of causality. A Newtonian paradigm, where there’s a this that causes a that. As we try to explain, it doesn’t really work that way. What happens is that a potentiality becomes an actuality, and that is witnessed sequentially, and therefore you think there’s causality in the world. Causality is in the mind. The most important thing I try to teach in transcending identification with the ego and the mind is the difference between what Descartes calls res interna, that of the mind, and res externa, that of the world. The illusion is that one thinks that what one sees in the mind, then they project it on the world, and they think that that’s in the world. They think it’s real. Causality makes sense to the mind. So the mind presumes therefore that it’s out there. It’s a presumption. The out there has no concepts. So causality couldn’t be out there, because that’s only a concept which only can exist in your head.
Alan Steinfeld
But there is something out here, right? There is a world that we are interacting with.
Dr. David Hawkins
There very definitely is, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
But what is that world? There’s no way to know it?
Dr. David Hawkins
We don’t really know it except by our subjective experience of its phenomena. We are processing sequences of phenomena, that’s what our mind is doing all the time.
Alan Steinfeld
And what’s the point of that, if that’s an illusion, what is the point of it?
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s not necessarily an illusion because the subjective reality is a subjective reality, and there’s an external reality that’s also an external reality.
Alan Steinfeld
But it seems like the subjective reality is the illusion, the fact that there’s a me and a you, a personal.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s a presumption. So what we try to do is transcend the presumptions of the mind, and the presumptions of the mind come about because of the structure of the ego. We try to do is go back in time and see how did the ego arise. We see that the field of consciousness itself is infinitely powerful, and when it interacted with matter on this planet, out of that arose life. So life arose out of the infinite field of consciousness itself, which alone has sufficient power.
Alan Steinfeld
You could say infinite field of consciousness, you can also say God. I like infinite field better, but people have said God, right?
Dr. David Hawkins
Because God is, for the same reason the Buddha said it’s better not to mention God, because people have all kinds of conceptions about God. Consciousness sounds a little safer to discuss.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay.
Dr. David Hawkins
Then you see the evolution of consciousness up through the animal kingdom, in fact you can calibrate the energy, the calibrated levels of consciousness throughout the animal kingdom.
Alan Steinfeld
So the infinite awareness, and it comes up as man.
Dr. David Hawkins
And then we eventually come up to man.
Alan Steinfeld
And as we head back to the infinite consciousness, man is the bridge from the spark of life back to the infinite consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
He becomes the bridge. Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
So it comes full circle then.
Dr. David Hawkins
He has this protoplasm and a body, and he has an animal brain and animal instincts, and that’s the basis of the structure of the ego.
Alan Steinfeld
Is the animal side.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s the beginning of it. We share many things with the animal, territoriality, food and surviving. Then on top of being an animal, we develop a prefrontal cortex. Uh-oh. We were doing okay until we got a prefrontal cortex. Now…
Alan Steinfeld
What did that do for us?
Dr. David Hawkins
Now, up here, you have the capacity of the angelic, the awareness of spiritual reality. And in the back of the brain you’re still an animal. So man has the unenviable position of having the instincts of the animal and the forebrain of the angel, and so his life is very, very difficult. The task of the human being is to evolve from being dominated by the instinctual animal, and then the thinkingness of the prefrontal cortex, and then moving on to spiritual awareness. So it’s quite a project.
Alan Steinfeld
So the frontal cortex is where the consciousness itself can be realized.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s where we process things. You see when the prefrontal cortex was put there, the old animal brain was not removed. Then we wouldn’t have any problem. The animal brain is there, and now you have the prefrontal cortex. To make it up to consciousness level 200 or so, you just have the physical prefrontal cortex. As you start to become spiritually awakened, there’s the release of what traditionally has been called the kundalini energy, the spiritual energy. Now changes the way the brain functions and you develop besides a protoplasmic physical brain, an energy brain called the etheric brain. The etheric brain is more like an energy field. Now the spiritualized person actually processes things differently, their brain processes things differently. They see things differently, they experience them differently.
Alan Steinfeld
Because they can tap into something beyond the physical with this etheric brain.
Dr. David Hawkins
The etheric brain does it for them. So a person that calibrates below 200 on a scale of consciousness and a person who calibrates above will have two different experiences of the same phenomena. She’ll say wasn’t that awful, and he’ll say, gee that was pretty nice wasn’t it. It was the same experience but subjectively to one it was awful, to the other it was entertaining.
Alan Steinfeld
We should talk about how you’ve mapped consciousness from the bacteria up into the mind.
Dr. David Hawkins
That was the thrust of the first book, Power vs. Force. We discovered how to calibrate the levels of consciousness. For the first time in human history we knew the difference between truth and falsehood.
Alan Steinfeld
And how did we know this? What was the impact of the work?
Dr. David Hawkins
Man is because of the structure of the ego, man has never had the capacity to discern truth from falsehood. Then we discovered through a certain easy to learn technique called kinesiology that the field of consciousness instantly recognizes truth from falsehood.
Alan Steinfeld
But kinesiology has been proven not to be 100% accurate. With people doing the testing, the muscle testing, right? It’s influenced by the tester and the testee.
Dr. David Hawkins
If people don’t know how to do it. Now, if you do it correctly, then you have no personal interest in the matter, you have no personal position, you’re just using it like litmus paper. Red is acid, blue is base alkaline.
Alan Steinfeld
So through this technique, you were able to map truth.
Dr. David Hawkins
What we did is we created a scale of 1 to 1000, relative degrees of truth. That which is more or less above 200 is true, and that which is under 200 is not true.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you define true?
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s what the whole book’s about. Man’s never been able to define what is truth. Because truth is content, but it’s only true within a certain context. One reason truth has never been agreed upon, is because it’s not possible to discern truth unless you state in what context. We define truth really differently than it’s ever been, because truth is content within a certain context, within an overall context of the field of consciousness itself. The technique we use is tapping an absolute. The field of consciousness itself is an absolute, it is not a variable.
Alan Steinfeld
So what would the absolute be?
Dr. David Hawkins
The absolute would be the field of consciousness itself, which innately has the capacity to discern truth from falsehood. Much like an electrostatic condenser. An electrostatic condenser just stands there. It does nothing. It has a potential. When you bring an opposite charge up to it, it crackles. It recognizes it. When you take it away, it disappears. You might say this field is the absolute. It does nothing except be, and then it will only respond to what is presented to it, to the degree of the intensity of the stimulus.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s what consciousness is, it’s responding to the stimulus of creation.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s what it does, yes. It’s a clean field, clear field.
Alan Steinfeld
So you mapped the whole scale of consciousness.
Dr. David Hawkins
All possibility within this domain.
Alan Steinfeld
And then you found that the most realized beings registered at a thousand like Jesus, Buddha. And most of human society is below 200?
Dr. David Hawkins
In America it’s 50-50. The calibrated level of consciousness in America calibrates at 421. It’s extremely high. It’s the highest country in the world.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that because people have gone beyond survival here and they have achieved a level of spiritual pursuit?
Dr. David Hawkins
The 400s, calibrated levels of the 400s are the intellect. What we consider normal, our normal world is rational. Rational, sensible, logical. It follows the rules of logic. It’s educated, it’s really quite sophisticated.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s our world, but from 0 to 100, we just are basically animal nature survival.
Dr. David Hawkins
That would be very rudimentary, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
And then from 100 to 200 is the more energy. So the increase of energy as you go up.
Dr. David Hawkins
Below 200 we call it force because force has an opposite. From 200 up, it is power.
Alan Steinfeld
So power doesn’t have an opposite, right? Like you said, like life, it doesn’t…
Dr. David Hawkins
Power doesn’t have an opposite. As the consciousness field goes up, the power goes up logarithmically. In the world overall, 15% calibrate from 200 and up, and 85% 200 and down.
Alan Steinfeld
So those are mostly survivalist people who are looking for ways to survive basically, they just don’t have enough to eat.
Dr. David Hawkins
Yes. The reason the world doesn’t self-destruct is because the 15%, the power is so enormous that they totally counterbalance the 85%.
Alan Steinfeld
So how would one raise their level of consciousness?
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s what all spiritual work is about. To choose to forgive rather than to condemn, to understand rather than to vilify. To be compassionate towards all of life. And eventually if you’re compassionate towards all of life, one day as you’re not expecting it, suddenly you see the sacredness of all of life. Below consciousness level 200, sacredness of all of life doesn’t make any sense at all. In the 400s it would be a concept. But as you move to consciousness levels 500 and up, it becomes a radiant obviousness. Life is sacred.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s why there’s been so much war on this planet because people haven’t recognized the sacredness of life, they’ve been below this level.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s true. Interestingly, in all of human history, the world has been at peace only 7% of the time. 93% of the time we’ve been at war. 93% of human history, somewhere on the planet there’s been a war.
Alan Steinfeld
Why do we live in this strata of consciousness? Why can’t we all live in this peaceful, or must there be a purpose for existence creating this large venue of interactions?
Dr. David Hawkins
We see it as a stratified level of evolution. The evolution of consciousness takes us right from through the insect world and up through the animal world up through the average human up to the enlightened human, angels, and saints.
Alan Steinfeld
Will it always be that stratified? Will we ever start to live in a world that’s in peace? Or is the purpose of existence to live in this strata?
Dr. David Hawkins
There’s the celestial realms and then there’s the earthly realms. This is not the celestial realm.
Alan Steinfeld
But it could be. It’s possible for us to live…
Dr. David Hawkins
7% of the time at least.
Alan Steinfeld
But we’re evolving as a conscious race.
Dr. David Hawkins
That seems to be the purpose, is sort of a karmic evolution of consciousness. As the Buddha said, actually all religions say that this is an evolutionary phase, and what you choose will decide what the fate is after you leave the body.
Alan Steinfeld
But that goes against what you were saying about things arising spontaneously, this karmic evolutionary…
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s only what you witness as phenomena within the material world. All of life is really evolutionary. How we witness it depends on the degree to which we’ve transcended the ego. How we interpret it. We say, the animal kills. The animal doesn’t kill. The animal just eats. We interpret it from a human viewpoint, bad lion kills poor rabbit. But with consciousness research we ask, does the lion actually want to kill the rabbit, we get no. What does the lion want? The lion wants to eat lunch. And that’s the only way he knows how to eat lunch. Because he doesn’t have enough energy, he has to get energy out there.
Alan Steinfeld
What is the overall purpose of existence if we’re evolving back to the consciousness that created life? What was the point of it all to begin with?
Dr. David Hawkins
That is beyond comprehension.
Alan Steinfeld
But do you have a sense? Do you have any feeling?
Dr. David Hawkins
The sense is that consciousness was impersonal. Didn’t have any kind of program. And it spontaneously evolves over the eons to higher and higher transcendence until it finally realizes the reality of its own source. It spontaneously does that. Just like water seeks its own level.
Alan Steinfeld
And then we’re back at that oneness where we began.
Dr. David Hawkins
Then you transcend the identification with limitation.
Alan Steinfeld
But the illusion is so pleasurable and the reality is, you don’t think so?
Dr. David Hawkins
A great deal of the time it is, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
There must be a way of keeping that expanded consciousness and the individuality with the awareness that we’re not that. There’s a way of walking in two worlds.
Dr. David Hawkins
That is a relatively advanced level of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
And this is where you are hanging…
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s true, we’re all doing that. Many people are very attached to their personas. And the body. And the mind. And thinking, I personally love thinking. I get pleasure from thinking. But it’s also part of that illusion.
Dr. David Hawkins
You should get pleasure out of everything, that’s fine. Some people get pleasure out of misery. Love it. They got endless misery. You could have let that go 30 years ago.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you let it go, and why don’t they?
Dr. David Hawkins
When you let go of wanting to hang on to it, because the ego gets satisfaction out of it. When you are willing to relinquish the satisfaction you get out of rehashing something that happened 30 years ago. Then you disappear it. But as long as you’re getting juice out of it, living off of it.
Alan Steinfeld
You’ve made a great bridge from the psychological to the divine, you have spanned those worlds, but how does the world make that bridge? Because people are locked into their psychology and don’t see this other level.
Dr. David Hawkins
I think all the people that are interested in spiritual work all have the same intention. To transcend the identification with the mind or the body, to realize the universal self. They’re all united in that they’re all trying to move to the awareness of divinity.
Alan Steinfeld
But that didn’t happen to Freud. It doesn’t happen until you have a revelation.
Dr. David Hawkins
In this lifetime Freud moved up to consciousness level 499. As did Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton. That’s pushing the intellect to see how far can you go with the intellect as a tool in understanding absolute reality.
Alan Steinfeld
So you can only go so far.
Dr. David Hawkins
The intellect, if you calibrate it, is the 400s. At 499 you move to 500, and 500 is love. Then you enter the realm of love as the ultimate important reality. Now you’re in a different paradigm. The yardstick is the degree to which something is loving, nurturing, beautiful, sacred. Now you have a whole different yardstick.
Alan Steinfeld
But there’s a huge jump from 499 to 500. You just have to jump.
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s a jump to the subjective. In the 400s you’re concerned with what’s out-thereness. At 500 suddenly you realize, I don’t live out there, I live within my own subjective awareness. Now the quality of subjective awareness transcends the importance of what’s out there. What’s out there is relatively important, except to the degree that it reflects or enhances the subjective exquisiteness of life. Going through Central Park was beautiful because you see the value of the aesthetic, and I thought if there were children playing there, without Central Park they would not have access to the aesthetics of their surroundings, the love of nature, the appreciation of beauty, and flowers and joy.
Alan Steinfeld
We bring that all in to modify the illusion to uplift the level of consciousness. We bring this aesthetics in, so we can…
Dr. David Hawkins
We increase our awareness of it. For a while you only experience it within certain settings, certain music, certain settings of nature. As the consciousness awareness progresses, you begin to experience it everywhere, all the time. You pick up anything, people say, that’s a nasty old weed, and you see the incredible beauty, it’s like a beautiful piece of sculpture, because now you see the beauty of everything that exists.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s where you’re living in that place.
Dr. David Hawkins
Then you have to learn how to live in the world again, and how the world sees everything. So it’s an adjustment.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s a place we’re all heading towards.
Dr. David Hawkins
That’s what they say. Then what use would the world be?
Alan Steinfeld
I don’t know, we’d all be in the celestial realm.
Dr. David Hawkins
Yes. So we wouldn’t be running through this earth life anymore.
Alan Steinfeld
Did things happen in your body as well with that revelation? The Kundalini, the energy.
Dr. David Hawkins
That was quite intense, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
What happened in that?
Dr. David Hawkins
Unasked, this exquisite sensation would start running up my spine. It was like a flow, up the spine and up the back. It went on for five or six years. It would flow up into the brain, actually. The pleasure of it was exquisite. Sometimes the energy would flow down and radiate out into various things happening within the world. Like around a bend a car had just turned over, a crash. And this energy just flowed with this exquisite intensity right into the car, obviously people were praying.
Alan Steinfeld
Out of you into the car. You were witnessing it, you weren’t doing anything?
Dr. David Hawkins
I myself did nothing, except this phenomena would occur in various places. I got the feeling that people were praying, and you were like a substation and the energy would come down through you and out to the person praying. And then it would suddenly stop. Or there would be a fight starting some place. One time in Chicago, I see these two gangs ready to go at each other. This energy is flowing right into them. All of a sudden they both fell back, and the fight stopped. This energy did that for five or six years.
Alan Steinfeld
And then it’s not happening anymore?
Dr. David Hawkins
That slowly faded away. And other phenomena took its place. If time is an illusion, then we could take this moment and be in another place instantly, because this is a creation of the mind. That’s the way the phenomena occurred. Things would heal themselves. People would walk in and sit in this field next to me. I was sitting under the clock at the Biltmore. This lady sits down next to me and she’s ranting and raving, she’s got paranoid delusions and aches and pains. This energy starts just going over. After a few minutes, the energy slowly comes to a stop. She stops her ranting. She got up and walked away, fine. Calm and peaceful and she walked normally. It was that energy that did that. I was just like an impersonal antenna.
Alan Steinfeld
So this is the energy of consciousness interacting with form as we evolve.
Dr. David Hawkins
It’s called spiritual energy. Classically it was called kundalini energy over the ages in Sanskrit.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you, Dr. Hawkins, for sharing your experience and giving something to the world that…
Dr. David Hawkins
We were talking about it from a somewhat different way than the way I usually present it, which I thought more like how the world would be interested in it.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, thank you. I think for me, of course, I want the experience. It’s intellectual for me, I’m getting an idea of it, but…
Dr. David Hawkins
Intention takes you there anyway. If you handle that intention, then everything that is needed to achieve that comes to you, it’s handed to you.
Alan Steinfeld
The intention for divinity. Intention for achieving.
Dr. David Hawkins
Your intention will then pull to you all that’s required to reach that goal. You just hang on to the intention, that’s all you gotta do.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. Talking to Dr. David Hawkins, author of Power vs. Force. And an explorer of this world of phenomena.
Dr. David Hawkins
The new book is going to be Exploring. It’s like we discovered the microscope. Now in this book we’re going to describe what we saw. So we describe with the new tool what was not observable throughout history.
