Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (Power vs. Force, #1)

by David R. Hawkins

In the late 1970s, Dr. John Diamond refined this specialty into a new discipline he called behavioral kinesiology. Dr. Diamond’s startling discovery was that indicator muscles would strengthen or weaken in the presence of positive or negative emotional and intellectual stimuli, as well as physical stimuli.

spiritus mundi,

The research reflected in this volume has taken Dr. Diamond’s technique several steps further, through the discovery that this kinesiologic response reflects the capacity of the human organism to differentiate not only positive from negative stimuli, but also anabolic (life-enhancing) from catabolic (life-consuming), and, most dramatically, true from false.

The calibrated scale has been examined here in light of current discoveries in advanced theoretical physics and the nonlinear dynamics of chaos theory. Calibrated levels, we suggest, represent powerful attractor Fields within the domain of consciousness itself, which dominate human existence and therefore define content, meaning, and value, and serve as organizing energies for widespread patterns of human behavior.

In general, the challenge in presenting this material lies in the paradox of comprehending nonlinear concepts in a linear, sentence-by-sentence structure.

In 1973, he co-authored the landmark book, Orthomolecular Psychiatry, with Nobel Laureate chemist Linus Pauling, initiating a new field within psychiatry.

What the addict is seeking is not to be ashamed of. The whole spiritual world wants to reach that blissful state of

consciousness. Change your technique, not your aspiration. The state doesn’t have to be sought; it is always within us.

The outer work can never be small if the inner work is great. And the outer work can never be great if the inner work is small.

~ Meister Eckhart, 14th-century Christian mystic

love is more powerful than hatred; truth sets us free; forgiveness liberates both sides; unconditional love heals; courage empowers; and the essence of Divinity/Reality is peace.

compassion for all beings, tireless dedication to alleviate suffering,

“Be kind and forgiving to everything and everyone, including yourself, at all times without exception.”

“To discover something that relieves suffering — it’s one’s responsibility to share it with others so that they are benefited.”

The information and overall context of this book hold the

power to diagnose and resolve all inner blocks and ailments. It functions like an enzyme of spiritual facilitation to ameliorate suffering. Upon contact, it potentiates the inborn mechanisms of self-healing, self-awareness, and inner evolution within the human psyche.

This has always been the difficulty of the sage: how to communicate the nonlinear realities that lie beyond the reach of the mind in a way that the mind can understand.

The truth of one’s Self can be discovered in everyday life. To live with care and kindness is all that is necessary. The rest reveals itself in due time. The commonplace and God are not distinct.

The basic law of the universe is economy. The universe does not waste a single quark; all serves a purpose and fits into a balance—there are no extraneous events.

failure. Because societies lack the necessary reality base for formulation of effective problem resolutions, they fall back, over and over, on a resort to force (in its various expressions—such as war, law, taxation, rules, and regulations), which is extremely costly, instead of employing power, which is very economical.

Man’s two basic types of operational faculties, reason and feeling, are both inherently unreliable, as our history of precarious individual and collective survival attests.

The main obstacle to man’s development, then, is the lack of knowledge about the nature of consciousness itself.

Can man lift himself up by his bootstraps? Why not? All he has to do is increase his buoyancy and he will effortlessly rise to a higher state.

Man thinks he lives by virtue of the forces he can control, but in fact, he is governed by power from unrevealed sources, power over which he has no control. Because power is effortless, it goes unseen and unsuspected. Force is experienced through the senses; power can be recognized only through inner awareness. Man is immobilized in his present condition by his alignment with enormously powerful attractor energy patterns, which he himself unconsciously sets in motion. Moment by moment, he is suspended in this state of evolution, restrained by the energies of force, impelled by the energies of power.

As will be seen, the body can discern, to the finest degree, the difference between that which is supportive of life and that which is not.

We should not be surprised at this. Living things all react to what is life-supportive and what is not; this is the fundamental mechanism of survival. Inherent in all life forms is the capacity to detect change and react correctively—thus, trees become smaller at higher elevations as the oxygen in the atmosphere becomes scarcer. Human protoplasm is far more sensitive than that of a tree.

The world conventionally assumes that the processing of problems requires starting from the known (the question or conditions) and moving on to the unknown (the so-called answer) in a time sequence following definite steps and logical progression. Nonlinear dynamics moves in the opposite direction: from the unknown (the nondeterministic data of the question) to the known (the answer)! It operates within a different paradigm of causality. The problem is seen as one of definition and access rather than of logical sequence (as in solving a problem by differential equations).13

(The existence of so-called operants can be inferred by asking the question, “What encompasses both the possible and the impossible, the known and the unknown?” In other words, what is the matrix of all possibilities?)

This description of how the universe works is in accord with the theories of physicist David Bohm, who has described a holographic universe with an invisible implicate (“enfolded”) and a manifest explicate (“unfolded”) order.15 But it is most important to note that this scientific insight corresponds with the view of reality experienced through history by enlightened sages who have evolved beyond consciousness to the state of pure awareness.

Conclusions of current research are that the brain’s neural networks act as a system of attractor patterns, so that the system does not behave in a random fashion overall—although each individual neuron may behave in seemingly random fashion.

The range of 1 to 600, representing the domain of the vast majority of human experience, is the primary scope of this study; the levels from 600 to 1,000, the realm of non-ordinary evolution—that of

enlightenment, sages, and the highest spiritual states—will later be described.

To “make sense” has ordinarily meant to be definable in terms that are linear:

logical and rational. But the process, and therefore the experience, of life itself, is organic—that is to say, nonlinear by definition. This is the source of man’s inescapable intellectual frustration.

(Note that in a holographic universe, the achievements of every individual contribute to the advancement and well-being of the whole.) Our study also correlates with the conclusions reached by Nobelist Sir John Eccles that the brain acts as a receiving set for energy patterns residing within the mind itself, which exist as consciousness expressed in the form of thought.25 It is the vanity of the ego that claims thoughts as “mine.” Genius, on the other hand, commonly attributes the source of creative leaps of awareness to that basis of all consciousness, which has traditionally been called Divinity.