NETNOTES: Columbia Pacific University Alumni Info

By Paul Hartal, PhD

Dr. David R. Hawkins is a distinguished psychiatrist, author, consciousness researcher and spiritual teacher who is internationally known for his innovative work in applied kinesiology and the nutritional treatment of mental disease. Born in Milwaukee in 1927, he grew up in rural Wisconsin and served as a minesweeper in the Second World War. He saw action on the seas that often brought him close brushes with death. The tribulations of war printed not only an indelible mark on his memory, but also shaped significantly his character and mindset.

After the war David Hawkins went to study medicine in New York, graduating from the medical school of Columbia University. In the 1970s Dr. Hawkins collaborated with Linus Pauling, the American chemist who between the two world wars revolutionized thinking in regard to the chemical structure of molecules. For this great scientific accomplishment Pauling won in 1954 the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Eight years later he also was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being in the forefront of the fight for nuclear disarmament. This made him the second person in history, after Marie Curie, to become the laureate of two Nobel Prizes.

In the 1970s Hawkins, similarly to Pauling, was already convinced that body and mind are interacting entities. This is contrary to the still prevailing dualistic Cartesian paradigm of the 17th century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes that views body and mind as entirely severed attributes. In 1979 appeared Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Hawkins’ first influential tome, co-authored with Pauling, in which the mind is seen as a habitat affected by physical factors. It is a revolutionary book, apparently the first psychiatric text advancing the idea that the human mind is an orthomolecular environment influenced by nutrition. It argues and demonstrates that patients suffering from mental illness such as schizophrenia can be efficiently treated by nutritional supplements, including mega-doses of vitamin B complex.

In 1995 Dr. Hawkins received his PhD degree from Columbia Pacific University in California. He wrote his dissertation on the Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness. The author’s aim in this ambitious work is no less than to develop a science of consciousness dedicated to absolute truth and its hierarchic gradations. The study develops a map of consciousness that charts a scale of relative degrees of truth as well as verifies the truth of spiritual realities. It has been published in book form as Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by Veritas Publishing, the author’s own publishing company. The book is translated into 15 languages and is available worldwide. Dr. Hawkins has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals; and in addition to the above mentioned books, he is also the author of The Eye of the I, I: Reality and Subjectivity, Dialogues of Consciousness and Truth vs. Falsehood: How to Tell the Difference.

A thick volume of some 500 pages, Truth vs. Falsehood was published in 2005 by Axial Publishing Company of Toronto. In the Autobiographic Note of this opus, the author narrates a dark winter’s night in rural Wisconsin in 1939 during which he was caught in a twenty-below zero blizzard. Exposed to the fierce wind, his clothes gradually became frozen stiff. He recalls that the shivering at some point stopped and was gradually replaced with a state of delectable warmth and an indescribable state of peace. “This was accompanied by a suffusion of light and a presence of infinite love that had no beginning and no end and was undifferentiated from my own essence�. And he adds: “An infinite Presence was all that was or could be, beyond all time and description� (p. 486). Eventually he was saved from freezing to death by his father’s love and anguish and the twelve year old boy returned to life. This experience left him fearless of death even in the Second World War when he was sailing in hazardous duty on a minesweeper.

At the age of thirty-eight he underwent anther profound spiritual transformation. This occurred at a time of a progressive illness that appeared to be fatal. He knew that he was about to die. Although Hawkins was an agnostic, in a moment of anguish and despair for the demise of his soul, he began to pray to God, and then fainted. Awaking from an altered state of consciousness, he was amazed by undergoing an astonishing spiritual transformation that left him dumbstruck with awe. He ceased to exist as the person that he was before. “There was no personal self or ego, only an Infinite Presence of such unlimited power that it was all that was.� And this Presence had replaced him in a manner that his physical body and its actions became controlled completely� by the Infinite Will of the Presence. The world was illuminated by the clarity of an Infinite Oneness that expressed itself as all things revealed in their infinite beauty and perfection� (p. 487).

Hawkins’ spiritual transformations and spontaneous healing transcend the realm of rational analysis. His unique mystical experiences can neither be duplicated in the laboratory, nor can they be examined under the microscope and tested by established scientific methods. However, similar experiences have been recorded throughout history in many places. They are phenomenological events, subjective occurrences of concrete individual knowledge. Sceptics who dismiss mystical phenomena because science cannot provide evidence for their reality adhere to a logically fallacious argument, for the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The basic premise in Dr. Hawkins’ conceptual scheme involves the idea that truth and falsehood are functions that can be calibrated as levels of consciousness. His model of truth takes into consideration that the criteria for verity are not historical constants. In it the parameters of perceived certainty and reality can be modified by specific circumstances, situation ethics, cultural differences, as well as other factors. Hawkins stresses that verifiable truth is the product of content, viewpoint, context and paradigm.

He defines consciousness as “the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence� (p. 14). For his part, consciousness exists as an absolute and irreducible substrate, independent of humankind, yet we are included within it. According to him, consciousness is all inclusive and all present, independent of location, of space and time: Like a mirror, it is unchanged and unaffected by the processes that unfold in the world. Similarly to gravity, it exists “as the context out of which potentiality actualizes from formless to form�, from unconsummated to consummated, from unaccomplished to accomplished.

Dr. Hawkins’ system calibrates truth on an arbitrary logarithmic scale that extends from 1 to 1000. It assigns the initial numerical value of 1 to bacteria, the first conscious forms of biological organisms. On the scale of 1000 points the consciousness level of the animal body is calibrated at 200, only five points lower than the human body. Criminals such as serial murderers, bank robbers and blackmailers, certain dictators in history, as well as Nazis and terrorists are rated at less than 100. In the category of sports and hobbies, prairie dog hunting, for example, is calibrated at 30, poaching elephant ivory at 130, as compared to 180 points granted for boxing, 345 points for basketball and 450 for soccer.

In American politics the Office of the Presidency receives 460 points whereas the United States Constitution gets 710 points. Measuring the arts provides interesting results. Hawkins calibrates classical music composers over 400. He finds that the music of Mussorgsky measures 485 units, Liszt 490, Beethoven 510, Bach 530, whereas Pachebel rises to 690. In literature he grades Susan Sontag at 200, Voltaire at 340 Hemingway at 400, Joyce at 440, and Shakespeare at 500 and Dickens at 540. Among the great painters he grants 365 points to Picasso, 465 points to Holbein, 510 to Cezanne, 565 to Leonardo da Vinci, 590 to Michelangelo and 700 to Rembrandt.

Hawkins gives the highest arithmetical value of 1000 on the scale to the great spiritual figures of history, such as Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus. According to him human behaviour and feeling modalities are associated with non-linear attractor patterns in the space of consciousness but they are independent of individual awareness. He examines events in human history from the perspective of relative power positions. For example, on the arbitrary logarithmic scale of a 1000, he calibrates the relative power position of Mahatma Ghandi at 700, against 175 representing the relative power status of the British Empire.

In evaluating consciousness levels through history Dr. Hawkins has explored the human experience by relating it to diverse coordinates such as philosophy, science, art, commerce, politics and sports. His quest for the calibration of truth evolves in contrast to the moral relativism of Post-modern theories. As against the nihilistic tendencies of Post-modernity, he strives for establishing clear demarcation lines between categories of truth and falsehood by buttressing his categories with corresponding constructive and life supporting criteria as against destructive and life threatening postures.

Hawkins incorporates into the conceptual framework of his study the notion of non-locality featured in Quantum Reality and the vision of a space of infinite potential described by Chaos Theory. These correspond with physicist David Bohm’s term of the implicate order, the invisible universe. This invisible universe represents the enfolded cosmos of unbroken wholeness, as contrasted to the observable material world of the explicate order of unfolded reality. The implicate order is associated with consciousness and envelops infinite energy and potentiality.

Dr. Hawkins attempts to establish a connection between the unseen implicate order and the visible explicate order of the universe by means of the controversial technique of Applied Kinesiology (AK). An offshoot of chiropractic, introduced by George Goodhart in 1964, AK is based on the idea that specific muscles correspond to the principal organs of the human body. Practitioners of AK believe that illness upsets the flow of vital energy through the body, manifesting itself in the weakened muscles that are associated with the diseased organ. Hawkins expands the theory and practice of AK to demonstrate that mental and emotional reactions regarding right or wrong pronouncements produce muscular transformations. Thus, in all individuals a true statement entails a positive change that can be detected in the growing strength of muscles, whereas a false statement results in a negative reaction that manifests itself in weakened muscles.

Hawkins asserts that through his research he discovered an internally consistent science of consciousness capable of determining truth from falsehood. According to him, the greatest difficulty in overcoming the ethical problem of telling right from wrong stems from the controlling role of the ego saturated intellect. However, attacking the ego by calling it sinful does not yield transcendence and compassion. Rising above one’s own ego and intellect can come only by taking the spiritual path of understanding, forgiveness and compassion.

Hawkins holds that the road to enlightenment is problematical for the western mind because the intellect is dominated by the basic premise of causality. The model of causality in the West has been morphed by the Newtonian paradigm of reality and also forms the basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution. However, says Hawkins, in actuality causality is an illusionary perception. The world doesn’t change because of the principle that events have causes, that there is a relationship between a cause and its effects. Changes in the world unfold by virtue of the transformative process wherein “the potential becomes the actual�, and “the un-manifest becomes the manifest�. He reminds us that “creation is an ongoing and continuous condition�.

Dr. Hawkins’ work represents a landmark stage in the history of attempts aimed at the quantification of quality. The first successful endeavour in this regard occurred twenty five centuries ago in Greece when Pythagoras discovered that music can be related to mathematics. This is so because the pitch of a musical note is determined by the length of the instrument string that produces it. Concordant intervals in the scale are produced by numerical ratios. The discovery that quality can be reduced to quantity introduced mathematics into the human experience and became a starting point in the development of science. In the modern age the best known thrust in the measurement of quality concerns the invention of intelligence testing. Since Alfred Binet established in 1908 the criteria for testing the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of humans, the controversial device mushroomed into many variations.

Another trial in the modern history of the quantification of quality involves the work of the renowned mathematician George D. Birkhoff. In Aesthetic Measure, a book published in 1933, Birkhoff argued that the ratio of order and complexity provides a key for the measurement of the aesthetic experience. He claimed that artistic value of objects can be calculated according to his mathematical formula.

Dr. Hawkins’ work is an outstanding masterstroke in the human effort of quantifying quality. It is also an inspiring theory and a stimulating position in the history of ideas. He is a formidable thinker and a man of extraordinary accomplishments. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World and many other references. He was a featured guest of MacNeil/Lehrer, Barbara Walters and The Today Show. Commenting on Power vs. Force, Lee Iacocca wrote that the book is “a significant contribution to understanding and dealing with problems we face today�. And according to Mother Theresa, Power vs. Force, is “a beautiful gift of writing�, spreading “joy, love and compassion�.

References

–David R. Hawkins, Wikipedia (cyber encyclopedia),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R_Hawkins

–www.veritaspub.com

–Marquis Who’s Who in America, 59th Edition, 2005