Power vs. Force

Recommended by the minister of the church I attend. This is an excellent book on how to judge the relationship between power vs. force. Strongly concur as this is an important book and offers a methodology to evaluate the positive and negative of our life experiences. Sociologists and psychologists will appreciate this book.

The following are my opinions, and thus not subject to lawsuit from Hawkins or his publisher*.My first surprise in Power vs. Force was to find L. Ron Hubbard's 1950's emotional tone scale (the main Scientology "scale" in use for judging people) slightly re-hashed as a scale of "levels of consciousness". To trust and be hugely taken in by a faulty belief system is devastatingly painful, and the recovery is slow. Now I know how all those ex-Scientologists felt, their lives ruined when their unworkable belief system finally failed them completely. Then there was the glaring error in Hawkins' explanation of his version of the scale being "logarithmic" where he shows "three-hundred to the tenth power" in figures as ten to the three hundredth power.In the spirit of seeking truth, I rationalised these and other things and forged ahead. But the fact is Applied Kinesiology is phenomenal as a diagnostic tool, but Hawkins' version is not really AK and does not work for finding universal truths. This is (in case you also wondered) why, in the sixteen years since Power vs. Force first appeared, the world has not adopted his method for use in science, law enforcement, justice, business, preventing wars, &c. His anecdotal examples of his method solving crimes, finding missing people, and ferreting out information that could prevent a war can all be better attributed to the latent psychic powers of his testing teams. Unfortunately, these are not available to everyone, although investigating muscle testing as a way to access them might be a worthwhile research project.If you find yourself thinking you're a little dense because you don't understand his science, it may be because his use of cutting-edge scientific terms is hardly more than dodgy analogy.Nevertheless, I opened myself trustingly, reasoning that my concept of truth might be entirely faulty. Just be wary that you don't open yourself to be programmed with a bogus belief system of which you will eventually have to labouriously divest yourself.If you must read a Hawkins book, go straight to Truth vs. Falsehood: How to Tell the Difference while you still have some discernment left. It will dissuade you on its own, and if you're already hooked on Hawkins, it will de-program you. It seems that his "trilogy" was intended to relieve you of whatever you believed in, and this book is meant to then reprogram you as a neo-con. Between its beginning and last token spiritual chapters you will find something surprisingly like the Pravda ploy, the old marketing trick of naming your product as that which it lacks the most ("Pravda" means "truth" in Russian).He pushes Yay America, the only worthwhile country the world has ever seen, all other countries are inferior and not worth mention except to denegrate and condemn. America is at its greatest only when the Conservative Republicans are in power. And G.W. Bush was one of the noblest, sanest, and most honest Presidents and world saviours the world has ever known; the [physically impossible] official story of the 9/11 attack is "integrous"; and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the wisest possible courses of action, supposedly to prevent evil low-consciousness Islam from getting nuclear capabilities from Pakistan (which is itself an Islamic country, meaning the evil, sub-animal Muslims already have nuclear weapons of mass destruction). I should think if that were the real reason, it would have made more sense to infiltrate (or invade, if you must) Pakistan and take their nuclear capabilities away from them.Anyone who questions authority or thinks very far outside the conservative Republican box is very mentally ill, according to Hawkins. In fact, the whole thrust of the book is highly judgemental in the way that a psychiatrist-gone-mad would project all of the mental illnesses in the book upon anyone in the world who doesn't share his views.If you believe there was ever an object that moved through the air that was not identified (the definition of "UFO"), guess what, you're wrong. This one "calibration" is unequivocally erroneous (and was thrown into a chart of belief-system calibrations rather than being presented as a true/false, fact-or-fiction type of calibration). Beyond the supposedly delusional belief that "UFOs are real", he questions no further on the subject of intelligent life in the universe, let alone whether any of them might have visited us.There is plenty more of this sort of highly bias-producing selectivity and manipulation of his "data". Glaringly of note is the fact that he actually gives very few calibrations to support his commentary (his opinions). It even begins to appear that his commentary is the real content of the book (and there's lots and lots of it), with an occassional rating number he simply made up himself and called a "calibration". I should think he would make his database of calibrations (if there is one) available to the world in the interests of truth and let it speak for itself.And more glaringly, he completely omits even the slightest mention of the most pressing issues in life that would be truly illuminating and helpful. Probably none of the things you're really "dying to know" will be found in this book. And if you think there might be some truth to world conspiracies, you are a low-consciousness and sick person. He never calibrated whether there are any such conspiracies, but only the derogatory term "conspiracy theory" (again, calibrated as a belief system rather than fact or fiction).He never explains how a "logarithmic" scale of consciousness can be adequately used as a truth scale, nor does he add a column of levels of truth to the scale. Wouldn't a simple zero-to-100-percent scale be better, with 50% being the true/false delineation?He stresses the importance of context (though in his concept of what context is there is no context). And then he doesn't give any clues as to what different contexts his calibrations were made in.As his teachings slowly crumble away from me, leaving me feeling bereft but refreshingly released, I realise he never said anything about enlightenment that hasn't already been said by the true teachers and leading-edge researchers, some of whose works he has read and referenced. The great hope that kept me going was that someone who claims to be fully enlightened and who has had an infallible truth-detector for thirty-five years would have found the very best expression of spirituality that would shed all error and make it all enlighteningly clear in one simple and elegant statement, or book, or even three books. He didn't.Perhaps he had the enlightenment experience, but like many, it left him, or like some, it precipitated a psychotic break, or maybe he is only a fraud who was commissioned by the powers-that-be to attempt, under the banner of "infallible truth", to stem the tide of rising consciousness that can see through them.* Hawkins' publisher is reportedly very litigious and has apparently even used threats to get wikipedia's page on him removed - yet litigiousness calibrates at 140, as does narcissism (all on page 202 in this book). He diagnoses all the most evil people in the world (mostly Muslims) as having a malignant narcissistic messiah complex . . . but it seems like that's what he has. But his isn't malignant and he doesn't advocate killing Americans, only Muslims, so that must make it all right.I rated it five stars because the crisis these books precipitated provided me with a few valuable revelations.

Amazing Book

Power vs ForceThis book, Power vs. Force, can’t be praised highly enough. Any praise will be far beneath the mark in terms of its value. This book will quite literally change one’s life. Its subject is consciousness, with both a capital and a small “C”. Fortunately we no longer hang or burn people at the stake for revolutionary insights because this certainly would have been David Hawkin’s fate. He introduces us to a new paradigm, a greater context with which to look at life. The book by itself might be viewed as simply interesting but not really grabbing because its insights are so new and unique. We have nothing with which to compare it, so it remains an oddity. But this is not true. For serious students of the Bhagavad Gita we may be lucky enough to see that what David Hawkins is making clear here is really a validation of a basic concept of the Gita, that is, the gunas. This is all about consciousness, all about moods and mental states, three basic levels of consciousness, called tamas, rajas, and sattva, and mental states beyond the gunas. Hawkins is validating what the Gita is presenting, and the Gita is validating what Hawkins is presenting as a new paradigm. Each is enforcing the other. It’s a bombshell when you get this. The subject of the gunas is these three levels of consciousness and how these levels manifest in our lives. Implicit is the understanding that we can raise ourselves through these levels and reach enlightenment, the major theme with David Hawkins. This is what our lives are all about.David Hawkins is what we call a Realized Soul, Self Realized, one who has broken the limitations of human consciousness and become a spiritual being, the whole project we are discovering in Eastern thought . So what we are getting here is the fruit of Hawkin’s breakthrough combined with the value of his past as a well recognized psychiatrist, a life time student of the mind and abnormal psychology. It is a unique gift and blend of insights. He says, reading this book with understanding will raise our level of consciousness considerably. I do not doubt this a bit. It has made a great difference in how I think and see the world.