New Realities recorded on July 21, 2018
Summary
In this insightful interview, Alan Steinfeld speaks with Dr. David Hawkins about the nature of consciousness, the evolution of the ego, and his personal spiritual awakenings. Dr. Hawkins shares his profound experiences of non-existence and the ‘depths of hell,’ which eventually led him to a realization of universal divinity. They discuss the concept of kinesiology used to measure levels of consciousness, and how moving from an intellectual paradigm to one of love and compassion can elevate not just individual awareness, but the collective consciousness of humanity.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Ready? Dr. Hawkins?
David Hawkins
Are we on?
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, rolling.
David Hawkins
Well, we were having a good time. Shall we stop and get serious?
Alan Steinfeld
No, no. Let’s include the audience.
David Hawkins
Yeah, let’s include the audience. Bring them up to speed.
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. That was an informal opening with Dr. David Hawkins. Power vs. Force along with many books about understanding energy. That interview was done in 2003, never before heard here. This program is sponsored by Portal to Ascension, portaltoascension.org. There’s an Ascension conference happening in October in Irvine. Go to ascensionconference.com. That involves UFOs, ancient civilizations, evolution, consciousness, awakening. I’ll be there, Grant Cameron will be there, Robert Schoch, many of the people within the disclosure consciousness movement will be attending this conference. So I’ll be right back with David Hawkins after this music from Duke Williams and the Night Before the Future.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m talking to Dr. David Hawkins. He’s an MD, PhD.
David Hawkins
And he’s been knighted. Don’t forget Sir. Well, my real title in the East, they call me Sir Doctor Doctor. Because I was knighted by the Danish Crown plus I have two doctorates. So in the East they call me Sir Doctor Doctor.
Alan Steinfeld
Sir Doctor Doctor.
David Hawkins
That’s neat.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, 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 I’d say authority on consciousness.
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 I, and his latest is I: Reality and Subjectivity. Thank you, Dr. Hawkins.
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?
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 so we share access to a field of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But then it becomes individualized as the I, this field of consciousness.
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?
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?
David Hawkins
Well, the illusion that you’re limited. That you’re a limited 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.
David Hawkins
Yeah, 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.
David Hawkins
It’s limited to a personalization. We’ve personalized the general and then call the personalized section me, see.
Alan Steinfeld
And the mind, though, is, in your lecture you say, only 1% of the totality of this consciousness.
David Hawkins
That’s true. The mind is 99% silent. Only 1% is talking. And that 1% has hypnotized… We call that me.
Alan Steinfeld
I. So there’s really no difference between me and you?
David Hawkins
Well, I have a personalized section of it and you have a personalized section of it, so that part is unique. But the general, 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.
David Hawkins
If you track the evolution of consciousness on this planet, it started millennia ago, and yesterday we gave a lecture on the subject, 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 greater and greater awareness. Back to the awareness of where it began, would you say?
David Hawkins
I tracked where it originated so that we get to understand what the ego is and how we should positionize ourselves about it, how we should look at it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, how should we look at the ego? I mean, it’s not something to reject, because people who haven’t had a strong ego development never get to dissolve the ego. That’s my understanding.
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?
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 had some revelations younger and then you were an atheist and then you sort of 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?
David Hawkins
Since I was three years old, there was a focus, an almost obsession about discerning what is truth and what is the nature of truth. It started out with rather major kinds of what people would call spiritual realizations and confrontations. And that led me into a drivenness to discover what is the core, the essence of truth.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what were the spiritual revelations that happened?
David Hawkins
Well, 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 like somebody turned on the klieg lights, like you’re in the dark, and all of a sudden these lights come on and I suddenly realized I exist.
Alan Steinfeld
As a self-referential kind of being?
David Hawkins
Well, there was just the ordinary… no, 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? Why?
David Hawkins
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 non-verbal. 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?
Alan Steinfeld
But the fact that you did exist proved existence in a sense. Don’t you think things are what they are, and the idea of hypothesizing that they could have been is also the creation of the mind?
David Hawkins
That was the immediate contrary. So it was the polarity of existence versus non-existence.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay.
David Hawkins
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 then they fear… so everybody lives with the fear of death.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Instead of identifying with consciousness, which is infinite.
David Hawkins
Which is beyond death, right. But unless one goes through certain experiences, that is not apparent at all.
Alan Steinfeld
But as you progress from three with that kind of revelation, then what was the next phase?
David Hawkins
Then the sense of self would tend to disappear from an individual personal self into a sort of a universality. And I would be in third grade, you know, and I’d be sitting in the chair and I would remind myself that I am David and I’m sitting in this chair, that I’m just a me, you know, because the self would just become like universal.
Alan Steinfeld
You mean if you didn’t remind yourself…
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, see.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I know. I often have to remind myself of my name because it’s just a label of identification for response, right?
David Hawkins
That’s why your consciousness is moving beyond the ordinary.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I hope so. So you’d keep reminding yourself you’re David and you’re sitting in the chair.
David Hawkins
I was doing this in grade school, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And then… because then there was a place where you rejected it all when you got into science and medicine?
David Hawkins
Well, before that, when I was a paperboy in Wisconsin out in the blizzard, to get out of the blizzard after dark I climbed into a snowbank to get away from the terrible wind, ten below zero, and pitch black. I was out in the country, no lights, no houses, there you are by yourself in a blizzard. And the only concern was getting away from the wind. So I dug a hole in the snowbank and sat out of the wind. And all of a sudden the most exquisite state of consciousness. It was like you were melted by an infinite love, of infinite power, like dissolved. You’re dissolved, and outside of time and space, and just this infinite presence. The presence was not different than the core and essence of that which I am. It was also beyond time. So I realized that that which I am existed before all universes, and will continue on after all universes have gone. And this condition was beyond time. So you actually experience it like through the eons. You’re already beyond all time and space. And all that’s non-verbal, but it’s stunningly aware. So that was the first experience of what spiritually is called the Self with a capital S.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, the transcendence of the ego.
David Hawkins
At the time I’d never heard of it.
Alan Steinfeld
And how old were you then?
David Hawkins
Oh, 12, 14.
Alan Steinfeld
And that experience never left you? I mean, how could it, right?
David Hawkins
Well, it leaves a profound imprint, a profound knowingness. So anything less than that is not of the same rank.
Alan Steinfeld
But then you progress to be a doctor and study and kind of stuffed your consciousness back into your body, right?
David Hawkins
Well, then I really researched the nature of the unconscious, you know, in others, and then in myself in four years of psychoanalysis. 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
And 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, right?
David Hawkins
No, he didn’t go where Jung went.
Alan Steinfeld
And so there was a limitation on him.
David Hawkins
But he discovered the profound importance of the unconscious and of course we now all just accept that, you know, it was a novel idea at the turn of the century, but now everybody accepts that we have an unconscious and that it plays a big part in our life.
Alan Steinfeld
And the unconscious though is now I think in the place we are evolutionary wise is going into this spiritual awareness. So the unconscious and the spirit are kind of merging.
David Hawkins
So Jung went further than Freud. So Freud calibrated at 499 and Jung calibrated at 520.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I don’t think people know what calibration is…
David Hawkins
Well, that’s just between you and I, we won’t tell them.
Alan Steinfeld
No, but as far as your process, like once you had that experience at 12, then you tried to understand the unconscious, but you started to close down…
David Hawkins
Well, I was brought up very religiously, I was an Episcopalian, high Episcopalian, and I was a boy soprano, and an acolyte, etc. And I was quite religious, intact scrupulous, scrupulosity and all those. And one time I was out in the woods by myself, and which I forgot to talk about in the lecture at all, and all of a sudden out of nowhere came a comprehension of the totality of the suffering of all 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 of time.
Alan Steinfeld
And you felt that as well.
David Hawkins
A realization. And in that instant I became an atheist.
Alan Steinfeld
Really?
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. And I instantly became an atheist. And now I became an intense atheist to the same degree I had been an intense religionist. And I became a militant atheist, you know. And then later went on to a Jesuit university where I’m getting straight As in theology and metaphysics and all this.
Alan Steinfeld
Because you couldn’t believe God would create that much suffering.
David Hawkins
That’s right. So I held… well, 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? I mean, what was the trigger then? Many people don’t, because…
David Hawkins
Many years I was a very intense atheist, probably 20 years.
Alan Steinfeld
That must have made you miserable as well to think those thoughts.
David Hawkins
No, no, because 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
So you said there’s so much suffering, I don’t want to take on the responsibility of this too much and that God could never have created this world full of that. So, but how did you resolve it? What was your next steps?
David Hawkins
Well, I became an atheist, I was angry at God, because if God, there was a God, he created all this suffering. Right. I didn’t want anything to do with him, so I disconnected from him and became an atheist. I said there isn’t any God, see. So then I was intense atheist for many years, and then became involved in continuous search into the truth of reality and by then I’d been psychoanalyzed, so I was looking within, looking within for the source of the sense of existence itself. And I went into, I dove into the unconscious and I went, it was sort of like Dante’s hell. I went in deeper and deeper levels and eventually felt complete abandonment. And I researched I really ended up in the depths of hell. And I went through, I don’t know how Dante understood hell.
Alan Steinfeld
Alone and isolated and shut off, is that what the feeling was?
David Hawkins
Well, no, the top level of hell is torture and, you know, people being dismembered and crap. What usually people think of as hell, which is Jack’s for openers. I mean that’s just torture and horror. Right. Then it begins to get bad.
Alan Steinfeld
Like what? What is…
David Hawkins
Then what horror really means, all of a sudden you become almost that out of which horror arises. And 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 like cut off from God completely. And there’s like a knowingness as you go beyond 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 by God there’s like a sign there, a knowingness, beyond this there is no hope ever. And now you understand what eternity means. That you are 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. And after the oblivion cleared, I don’t know how long it was there, hours or a day or whatever.
Alan Steinfeld
But there was a surrender into that place?
David Hawkins
No, no surrender. It wasn’t a fight. It’s hopelessness. There is nothing with which to fight or to hope. 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 recurrent return of consciousness, and the mind had become silent. This instant the mind is so silent, and it was replaced by a brilliant revelation of the divinity of all that exists.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you describe divinity in that way? I mean…
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 like a shining forth, the obvious divinity of all that exists. And it was stunning and incapacitating, and therefore, not long after, I frankly 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. And a very elegant lifestyle, about as elegant as you can get. And I walked away from it all and spent some years in solitude as to how to refunction in the world.
Alan Steinfeld
Because, was this a continuous feeling, this divinity, or was it a momentary…
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 wanted to. Isn’t the idea of existence to live in that world of divine revelation or divinity with a foot in this world as well?
David Hawkins
Oh, that’s an intellectual concept. Subjectively, it isn’t that way. Subjectively, there’s no interest in the body, eating. All the bodily functions sort of cease, either that or you lose your awareness of them. And there’s a certain degree of learning how to be in the world again.
Alan Steinfeld
And this is where you are now?
David Hawkins
Now I’ve relearned how to be in the world to a fairly good degree. And where the body is. When you’re no longer the body, you see people talking to this body, and you wonder who are they talking to? I mean, I’m not there. You can see they all think that you’re that. So then you’ve got 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.
David Hawkins
It’s not even that. It’s none of that. Because you’re none of that. That’s the difficulty.
Alan Steinfeld
I guess there’s no way to talk. I’m trying to intellectually…
David Hawkins
I understand. You’re trying to get a description of what it was like.
Alan Steinfeld
And I guess there’s no way to describe it. You have to have the experience. It’s not even an experience, is it? Because an experience is still filtered through the me.
David Hawkins
Yes, but we’re trying to describe a phenomena that’s rather rare in history. And it has been described periodically. 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.
David Hawkins
If people are curious about it, they ask about it because of curiosity.
Alan Steinfeld
So where are you now? What’s the implication for them? That’s the real importance.
David Hawkins
Well, it plants a seed probably, that it might be something that they might go through or realize at some point that will match this.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, the process is called the progressive relinquishment of the ego. And the termination of identifying oneself as the mind and its intellectual functioning. So 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.
David Hawkins
Buddha did a good job of describing it.
Alan Steinfeld
But 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.
David Hawkins
The world looks to the average human mind like a world of causality. A Newtonian paradigm where a this causes a that. And 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. So the most important thing I try to teach in transcending the identification with the ego and the mind is the difference between what Descartes called res interna, that of the mind, and res externa, that of the world. And the illusion is that one thinks that what one sees in the mind, they project it on the world and they think that’s in the world. They think it’s real. Causality makes sense to the mind. So it 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 can only exist in your head.
Alan Steinfeld
But there is something out here, right? There is a world that we are interacting with.
David Hawkins
There very definitely is, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
But what is that world? There’s no way to know it.
David Hawkins
We don’t really know it except by our subjective experience of its phenomena. So 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?
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 self.
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. So what we try to do is go back in time and see how did the ego arise. And 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 say infinite field of consciousness, you could also say God. I like infinite field better, but people have said God, right?
David Hawkins
For the same reason Buddha said it’s better not to mention God, because people have all kinds of conceptions about God. But consciousness sounds a little safer to discuss. And 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. So the infinite awareness, and then it comes up to man.
Alan Steinfeld
And as we head back to the infinite consciousness. So man is the bridge from the spark of life back to the infinite consciousness.
David Hawkins
He becomes the bridge, yes. So then 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…
David Hawkins
Yes, that’s the beginning of it. And we share many things with the animal, territoriality and…
Alan Steinfeld
Food and survival.
David Hawkins
All that stuff. And then on top of being an animal, we develop a prefrontal cortex. We were doing okay until we got a prefrontal cortex. Now…
Alan Steinfeld
What did that do for us?
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 that spiritual awareness. So it’s quite a project.
Alan Steinfeld
So the frontal cortex is where the consciousness itself can be realized as the infinite.
David Hawkins
That’s where we process things. The infinite can be somehow held in thought in the prefrontal cortex. When the prefrontal cortex was put there, the old animal brain was not removed. Then we wouldn’t have any problem. No, the animal brain is there, and now you add the prefrontal cortex. To make it up to a consciousness level 200 or so, you just have the physical prefrontal cortex. Then as you start to become spiritually awakened, there’s the release of what traditionally has been called the Kundalini energy, the spiritual energy. Now it 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. And now a 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?
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. And one will say, wasn’t that awful? And the other will say, 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 most…
David Hawkins
Yes, that was the thrust of the first book, Power vs. Force. We covered 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?
David Hawkins
The impact of the work was that man, because of the structure of the ego, 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.
David Hawkins
With what?
Alan Steinfeld
With people doing the muscle testing. It’s influenced by the tester and the testee.
David Hawkins
If people don’t know how to do it. 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 then map truth?
David Hawkins
We created a scale of 1 to 1,000 relative degrees of truth. That which is more or less above 200 is true, and that which is under 200 is not true. And it’s impersonal.
Alan Steinfeld
How do you define true?
David Hawkins
That’s what the whole book is about. Man has 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. So we define truth differently than has 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. So you have to discover some absolute.
Alan Steinfeld
What would the absolute be?
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. The 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. So 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, responding to the stimulus of creation.
David Hawkins
That’s what it does. It’s a clean field, clear field.
Alan Steinfeld
So you mapped a whole scale of consciousness.
David Hawkins
All possibility within this domain.
Alan Steinfeld
And you found that the most realized beings registered at 1,000, like Jesus, Buddha. And most of human society is below 200.
David Hawkins
In America it’s 50/50. The calibrated level of consciousness in America is 421. It’s extremely high. It’s the highest country in the world as far as calibrated level of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that because people have gone beyond survival here and have achieved a level of spiritual pursuit?
David Hawkins
The calibrated levels of 400s are the intellect. In other words, what we consider our normal world is rational, sensible, logical. It follows the rules of logic and it’s educated. It’s really quite sophisticated.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s our world. But let’s start from zero to 100 is basically animal nature, survival. And from 100 to 200 is…
David Hawkins
More energy. There is an increase of energy as you go up. Below 200 we call it force, because force has an opposite. And from 200 up it is power. Power doesn’t have an opposite. So 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. And 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
How would one raise their level of consciousness?
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, you suddenly see the sacredness of all of life. Now, 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. All life is sacred.
Alan Steinfeld
But 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.
David Hawkins
That’s true. Interestingly, in all of human history, the world has been at peace only 7% of the time. 93% of human history, the world has been at some kind of war.
Alan Steinfeld
Why do we live in this strata of consciousness? Why can’t we all live in this peaceful world, or must there be a purpose for existence creating this large venue of interactions?
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
But 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?
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 in it.
David Hawkins
7% of the time at least it gives up war.
Alan Steinfeld
But we’re evolving as a conscious race.
David Hawkins
That seems to be the purpose, sort of a karmic evolution of consciousness. As the Buddha said, 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 thing…
David Hawkins
Well that’s only what you witness as phenomena within the material world.
Alan Steinfeld
But things have an evolution to them.
David Hawkins
All of life is evolutionary. How we witness it depends on the degree to which we have transcended the ego, how we interpret it. As we say, 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. 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
But 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?
David Hawkins
That is beyond comprehension.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you have a sense, do you have any feeling?
David Hawkins
The sense is that consciousness was impersonal. It 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.
David Hawkins
Then you transcend the identification with limitation.
Alan Steinfeld
But it’s so nice, the illusion is so pleasurable and the reality… You don’t think so?
David Hawkins
A great deal of the time it is, yes.
Alan Steinfeld
And so 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 into worlds.
David Hawkins
That is a relatively advanced level of consciousness. And 85% of the people in the world would not agree with you.
Alan Steinfeld
So there’s no way to deal with people at these levels of 200 want to make war except to let them play out their levels.
David Hawkins
Well, everyone tries to uplift the total awareness of mankind. And I will say all the people who pray and through acts of goodwill and good works tend to lift the overall level of consciousness. And by doing that, they lift all the ships on the sea. So what can we do for people who have less? If we raise the level of conscious awareness itself, it has a positive impact.
Alan Steinfeld
And this is what the purpose of consciousness then does.
David Hawkins
That’s the purpose of prayer and peace vigils and all these things.
Alan Steinfeld
So what’s the next step for you? Where are you heading?
David Hawkins
What I’m doing is finishing a book in which we use a technique to tell the calibrated level of consciousness of things, the degree of truth. What we’re really calibrating is the degree of truth. And then we use these calibrated levels of consciousness to examine everything in the world. All the movies, all the places on the planet from Machu Picchu to the…
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what are some of the high places you found?
David Hawkins
Well, this trip we did the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Did St. Thomas’ Cathedral. And we did Fifth Avenue, we did the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty.
Alan Steinfeld
What registers really high on this level of truth? What are some of the high points in New York City and around the world?
David Hawkins
In New York City? Around the world, yes. We did the cathedrals around the world. Frankly, the great cathedrals really calibrate generally higher than anything else.
Alan Steinfeld
More than the pyramids in Egypt?
David Hawkins
Yes. The great cathedrals of the world really as a locality calibrate higher than any other place.
Alan Steinfeld
St. John the Divine calibrates…?
David Hawkins
Over 610. Extremely high.
Alan Steinfeld
What was another high cathedral?
David Hawkins
St. Thomas and Chartres Cathedral in France, Notre Dame. So the great cathedrals oddly calibrate higher in energy than any other objects or localities.
Alan Steinfeld
So is there a radiance or a reflection that happens when you’re sitting in these places that help uplift our vibration?
David Hawkins
I think it comes about as a result of intention. So it’s the intention behind it. Plus maybe a thousand years it takes to build it, over a couple of centuries to build some of these.
Alan Steinfeld
But if we’re sitting in these places, there must be that intentionality reflecting on our field.
David Hawkins
The energy field of those places is uplifting. So that’s why people go to church to feel uplifted. But any place that has great beauty, I think Central Park, we didn’t calibrate Central Park, but going through there yesterday, the obvious intention of preserving and reflecting the beauty of nature, the beauty of creation through the beauty of nature. All those things are uplifting.
Alan Steinfeld
Uplifting as opposed to the things that are not uplifting which would be what?
David Hawkins
Things that are demeaning, things that play off the lowest impulses of man. Like war. Let’s say gangster rap, in other words, to exploit the downside of man’s sensationalism.
Alan Steinfeld
And places? Are there places that are down as well?
David Hawkins
Yes, you can feel it, you can tell down places.
Alan Steinfeld
But isn’t part of that the illusion to love everything and to see it all as divine?
David Hawkins
How one relates to that is personal. But what it is, is impersonal.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re measuring the impersonal response to truth that exists.
David Hawkins
So what that reflects about society, it would be the downside. So on a calibrated level of consciousness, there’s also the downside. What does the downside look like? The downside looks like cruelty, lascivious exploitation of sexuality, indifference to the rights of others, violating other people’s boundaries. Murder.
Alan Steinfeld
So as a conscious society of course we’re evolving towards a place of not morality, but a decency.
David Hawkins
We could call it just an aesthetic awareness. So as you become more evolved, things become distasteful because they’re just totally foreign. An evolved person doesn’t need laws to not rob and kill and steal and murder. An unevolved person really needs to know it’s against the law.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. But I’ve always hoped to live in an enlightened society.
David Hawkins
421 is a pretty enlightened society. It’s very concerned with ethics and morality, current events, the ethics and morality of everything. Movies, the morality and ethics are really very central to the American discourse about everything.
Alan Steinfeld
And can you calibrate the future, where we’re heading?
David Hawkins
No, the future you can’t calibrate.
Alan Steinfeld
Why is that?
David Hawkins
Because it doesn’t have any existence. So the field of consciousness is like an electrostatic field that can only respond to what is. And it cannot respond to what is not.
Alan Steinfeld
But yet there’s a place beyond time as well. So timelessness is the future takes place within a linear thing, but there’s a timeless place as well. This is what I’m trying to understand.
David Hawkins
The substrate of all of existence is timeless. And time is a track that we superimpose and project onto it.
Alan Steinfeld
I hope that the future is moving into the timeless, but that’s also part of the illusion of the mind.
David Hawkins
It’s already in the timeless. In fact the present is in the timeless. Time is only a track within the head. And one thing that happens when you escape the ego is the instant stop of time. So the states I went into are all timeless states. And then you get reoriented to the world and you learn how to time track it again. But frankly, you live timelessly.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re living in a timeless place. In actuality. But you’ve learned how to time track it. So you still hold onto your personality somehow.
David Hawkins
With effort.
Alan Steinfeld
But by yourself you let it all go. By yourself what happens, where are you?
David Hawkins
One is just sort of timeless existence. And there’s no you.
Alan Steinfeld
No, there’s no personal you. But when you interact with people you readopt a persona. Is it possible to exist without the persona?
David Hawkins
That’s the reality, that’s the reality that’s going on all the time. That’s the underlying reality underneath it all, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Because it’s the persona that creates the problems on the mind.
David Hawkins
That’s true, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
So we could exist just being without persona.
David Hawkins
Well actually we’re doing that right now.
Alan Steinfeld
We are. All right. But we don’t want to sound strange to the world, so we’re all doing it though, right?
David Hawkins
That’s true, we’re all doing that.
Alan Steinfeld
And it’s just this kind of… many people are very attached to their personas. And their mind. And thinkingness.
David Hawkins
I personally love thinking. I get pleasure from thinking.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh you like thinking? That’s good.
David Hawkins
No, but it’s also part of that illusion.
Alan Steinfeld
You can get pleasure out of everything, that’s fine.
David Hawkins
Some people get pleasure out of misery.
Alan Steinfeld
They love it.
David Hawkins
People come up and they got endless misery, and you think you could have let that go 30 years ago.
Alan Steinfeld
And how do you let it go and why don’t they?
David Hawkins
When you let go wanting to hang onto it. Because the ego gets satisfaction out of it. So when you 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
So you’ve made a great bridge from the psychological to the divine, like you have spanned those worlds. How does the world make that bridge because people are locked into their psychology and don’t see this other level.
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. So they’re all united in that, they’re all trying to move to the awareness of divinity.
Alan Steinfeld
But that doesn’t happen until you have a revelation.
David Hawkins
In this lifetime Freud moved up to consciousness level 499. As did Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. So that’s pushing the intellect to see how far can you go with the intellect as a tool in understanding absolute reality.
Alan Steinfeld
But you can only go so far.
David Hawkins
The intellect, if you calibrate it, is the 400s. And at 499 you move to 500, and 500 is love. Then you enter the realm of love as the ultimately important reality. Now you’re in a different paradigm. Now 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 and you just have to jump.
David Hawkins
It’s a jump to the subjective. So in the 400s you’re concerned with out there-ness. 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. And what’s out there is relatively important except to the degree that it reflects or enhances the subjective exquisiteness of life. So going through Central Park was beautiful because of the aesthetic, you see the value of the aesthetic. And I thought, without Central Park they would not have access to the aesthetics of the surroundings, the love of nature, the appreciation of beauty and flowers and joy.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and we bring that all in to modify the illusion, to uplift the level of consciousness. We bring these aesthetics in so we can…
David Hawkins
Well, we increase our awareness of it. And then we transcend it. And then for a while you only experience it within certain settings, certain music, certain settings of nature. And then as conscious awareness progresses, you begin to experience it everywhere all the time. And 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. Then you have to learn how to live in the world again, and how the world sees everything. And so it’s an adjustment.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s a place we’re all heading towards.
David Hawkins
That’s what they say. Then what use would the world be? We’d all be in the celestial realm. So we wouldn’t be running through this earth life anymore.
Alan Steinfeld
Do things happen in your body as well with that revelation? The kundalini, the energy…
David Hawkins
That was quite intense, yes. On 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. And it would flow up into the brain actually. And so the pleasure of it was exquisite. And then sometimes the energy would flow down and radiate out into various things happening within the world. Like rounding a bend and the car just turned over and crashed, and this energy just flew 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.
David Hawkins
I myself did nothing, except this phenomenon would occur in various places. I got the feeling that people were praying and you were like sort of a way station and the energy would come down through you and out to the person praying. And then it would suddenly stop. Or there’d be a fight starting someplace. One time in Chicago, it’s running down the block, and I get down the block, I see these two gangs ready to go at each other. This energy is flowing right into them. All of a sudden you see one side go like this, and the other side go like this. And 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.
David Hawkins
That slowly faded away. And other phenomena took its place.
Alan Steinfeld
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.
David Hawkins
Hypothetically that’s true. That’s the way the phenomena occurred. And this phenomena, things would heal themselves in it. People would walk in and sit in this field next to me. In fact we sat under the clock, the Biltmore. I was sitting there, and this lady sits down next to me. And she’s ranting and raving, she’s got paranoid delusions, and aches and pains, and limping. And this energy starts going over, she’s rattling away there talking to herself, and this energy goes there. After a few minutes, the energy slowly comes to a stop. And she stops her ranting. She was having paranoid delusions running about someone wanting to meet her under the clock, there was no such person. And she got up and walked away fine, calm and peaceful, and she walked normally. So it was that energy that did that. And I was just like an impersonal antenna. So this is the energy of consciousness interacting with form as we evolve. Classically it was called kundalini energy over the ages. Sanskrit.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you Dr. Hawkins for sharing your experience and giving something to the world.
David Hawkins
Well, we were talking about it from somewhat a different way than the way I usually present it, which is more like how the world would be interested in it. That’s why I was interested in it.
Alan Steinfeld
I think so. For me of course I want the experience there. It’s intellectual for me in a sense. I’m getting an idea of it, but until I have it…
David Hawkins
Well, 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. Intention for divinity. Intention for achieving. Your intention will then pull to you all that’s required to reach that goal. So you just hang onto the intention, that’s all you gotta do.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. I’m talking to Dr. David Hawkins, author of Power vs. Force, the Eye of the I, and I: Reality and Subjectivity. And an explorer of this world of phenomena, that’s what I would call you.
David Hawkins
It’s like we discovered the microscope, we saw this and we draw pictures of it. So we describe with a new tool now what was not observable throughout history.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks for listening to New Realities. Unfortunately, David Hawkins has passed on, but I’m so happy I was able to present this interview as part of his legacy, part of his teachings for the planet. He was truly a master. You can go to his website, still up: DavidHawkins at Hawkins. H-A-W-K-I-N-S. Thanks for listening. If you want to reach me, email me at newrealities@earthlink.net. Check me out on YouTube, youtube.com/newrealities. Look for me at the Ascension conference, Irvine, California, October.