What if Pure Consciousness -- unadulterated by opinion, cultural bias, nationality, age, gender, intellectual acuity, or mental capacity could demonstrate “Truth” or “untruth”?  What if, furthermore, a methodology could be designed which could very precisely calibrate levels of Consciousness, in both a personal and species context?

     Dr. David Hawkins, an internationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, lecturer, and genuine mystic, convincingly presents a case in the affirmative to both of those “what ifs”.  His book, Power Vs. Force is the culmination of twenty years of research involving millions of calibrations on thousands of test subjects worldwide. 

     His rigorous scientific and academic discipline is powerfully augmented by his several direct encounters with The Divine. The first such experience occurred as a paperboy during a 20 below zero morning, as his physical body completely ceased functioning as he huddled, trapped in a blizzard.  “Upon succumbing”, he writes, “the shivering stopped-and then a state of peace beyond all description –a suffusion of light and a Presence of Infinite Love, which has no beginning and no end, and which was indistinguishable from my own essence.”

     Jung’s collective unconscious; Bache’s species mind; and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, which Hawkins calls a database of consciousness, all link our individuated consciousness to all of human consciousness in all of human history like a personal computer connected to the Internet.

The connecting mechanism in Hawkins’ work is Kinesiology, now a well established science, based on an all or none muscle response stimulus.  The widespread veracity of this science was given broader application by Dr. John Diamond, who, in the 1970’s demonstrated that this muscle response occurs with both physical and mental stimuli.  It is that proposition that lead Dr. Hawkins and his research team to the years of testing and ultimately to Power Vs. Force, the first in a trilogy steeped in Pure Consciousness. 

     As a devotee of these three remarkable works, I certainly appreciated the science and the exhaustive bibliographic references laced throughout  Power Vs. Force and the other two works.  My linear, left-brain “hungry for information” self, delved with pleasure into each page.  It was, however, my non-linear right-brain spiritual intuition that, in the final analysis, found a truly comfortable home immersed in the facts that my left-brain was hungrily absorbing.

     As a serious meditation practitioner (The Ishayas’ Ascension) and a seventeen year student of A Course in Miracles, I have gradually, often haltingly, come to realize at depth that the Illusion is NOT my sense of individuality, but is more accurately my sense of being isolated from the Whole.

     If, as you’re reading this review, your intuition is the same or similar, Power Vs. Force may very well deepen your intuition closer to a certainty that you, the reader, are Pure Consciousness linked directly to Divine Consciousness.  You will not likely look at human existence in the same way ever again.

                   Reviewed  by Patrick King