A Map of YOU
The Hidden Determinants of your Behaviour
If I was only able to write ONE more Substack and I wanted to give you the greatest gift of human understanding, it would be to introduce you to the ideas in this piece today.
It’s mind boggling to me how impactful this map of our consciousness has been to me I’m so grateful for this work. It even the ties to the name of this Substack. The Field to me is really a field of consciousness. It’s spacious and holds every stage of our human development and helps us see beyond any of our perceived limitations or concepts of what is wrong or lacking in us to the very nature of our Being.
Myths, parables, jokes, images and maps can be more powerful than the real deal simply because they are symbolic, archetypal and help us see something that is more true or Universal and that applies to all of us in ways that we may not even be aware of from our level of common hour thinking. Those epiphanies and aha moments are what we take with us into all of the chapters of our lives, our relationships, our work and can even shift what we previously believed to be possible and can raise our level of consciousness and our entire experience of life.
The map is not the actual landscape, but seeing the big picture all laid out before us and our becoming aware of why we (and others) behave the way we do is the greatest catalyst to help us find our way.
There’s a saying that I once heard my Father-in-law say that we’re making good time, we’re just going the wrong way and that is how it can sometimes feel when we’re deep in the trees of our life and we’re suffering. It’ like we’re wearing horse blinders and we can’t see past our own current experience of life, we feel resentful, we hold grudges, we feel victimized, powerless, stuck in a sense of lack or not having our needs met in some way and we accelerate deeper into a dark place wondering if there is more to life.
Good news, there IS.
Today you are getting a double feature (two weeks worth of reading in one). This one is a masterpiece, sadly not because of the quality of my writing, but because the actual content makes it worth reading twice.
When I first heard that an atom is 99.9999% energy and 0.0001% matter I’m pretty sure I frowned. How can that be? The human body contains about a billion billion billion (10^27) atoms. Fair to say a lot but any way you slice it we are mostly space, not solid. We’re energy vibrating. Like a musical note we express at different octaves and tones.
‘Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it’.
Albert Einstein
So how is knowing that we’re mostly energetic beings helpful or even practical for us to understand how to live well and find joy and peace in our lives?
It’s everything.
Having an awareness or a mental map of how we operate can be an extraordinary way for us to evolve to higher levels of consciousness individually and collectively.
The topic today as you may have guessed is our consciousness, the different levels of conscious awareness that we exist at and how they impact what we see, do and believe.
“Get over it and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual.”
Richard Conn Henry -Professor of physics and astronomy Johns Hopkins University
Before I continue, I just want to acknowledge that this concept of energy and consciousness can be a giant intellectual hurdle, or at least it was for me.
It’s especially challenging to understand that our attitudes can literally alter the world we perceive before us and even that there are numerous valid ways to experience it. Today as you read through the descriptions see if you can identify what level of consciousness you are currently operating from and reflect on any times that you may have visited higher or lower levels of consciousness and what level could be possible for you in this lifetime with this new understanding.
There are so many great models of consciousness and it seems to be one of the fastest-growing areas of scientific study, but this one was a game-changer for me from the moment I understood it something inside of me shifted and while I can only do so much in 40 minutes I hope it brings you some great insights you may wish to continue exploring these teachings on your own.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
~Nikola Tesla~
One thing that scientists can agree on is that we are energy. Our thoughts are energy. Our emotions are energy in motion. Even our physical bodies are made of atoms and essentially we’re energetic beings.
Do you ever wonder why you resonate with some people and not others?
We are like walking receptors for everything that is (or is not) a match to our own energy.
It’s a bit like when you pluck a guitar string or hit a piano key, if there is another guitar or piano in the room that same string or key begin to vibrate.
Most of us have heard this concept before, but to take it even deeper, in some ways, we project out what we are energetically and it is reflected back to us in our lived experience. To push the envelope a bit further, WE ARE the very things coming from our own thoughts.
The radical idea that we create our own reality is nothing more than language given to something that has been at play since the beginning of creation. In fact, NOTHING is even created on earth, in this existence, on this plane without it “being thought” first.
So why don’t we navigate our day-to-day awareness with this in mind?
You might be thinking… “Sure Nona, have another one…I didn’t create this airport that I’m sitting in. Or the blemish on my nose. Or the tree outside”.
Well, in fact, you DID. We all did it on a collective level of thought. Just by being here, we are giving an energetic handshake to all that is.
If I’m being honest, I think it took me decades to accept this as fact, although I had my suspicions I was resistant even after having some wild experiences consciously manifesting things and situations into my life and playing with my intentions and the Law of Attraction.
New information and understanding can’t get into a closed mind. Many of us are so convinced that we know everything already and it’s easy to be unaware or recognize that our egos are closed-minded skeptics on a good day.
The biggest reason though was because I was experiencing it first hand so I allowed this information deep into my own mind and it was the fertile soil for some profound unexpected shifts in my own level of consciousness and now I’d like to dedicate my life and my work to helping guide others to have their own.
I used to read Oprah’s magazine when it first came out and she had a section on the very back page that was called “What I Know for Sure”. Every month she would share a hard-earned lesson or some bit of wisdom, lessons, stories, experiences, and truths that she learned over the years. They all reflect some kind of truth that she knows with certainty and which helps to frame and guide her life.
Today’s piece feels like that last page for me.
What I know for sure is that nothing was created in this world, in this existence, on this plane of consciousness without it being thought of first. We think and feel things into being with our conscious awareness. Having an enhanced self-understanding about our own levels of consciousness makes it easier not only to understand other people as well but to move through the world with a larger sense of why we all behave the way we do so we can easily change and transform our experience of ourselves and others.
What we see and experience in our lives is like a mirror. It’s why we hear physicists refer the Universe as holographic or illusory in nature. Our unique perspective is dictating our individual and our collective experience of life. Hundreds of people may read this and it will be experienced in hundreds of different ways based on your level of consciousness.
It affects how and why we believe and do what we do. In fact, the manner in which your level of consciousness is at DECIDES what you see. External events may define the conditions but they do not determine the consciousness level of our Human response. I’ll walk you through one clear example to illustrate the effects of this at each level of consciousness so you can have a better idea of how it all works.
How many times have you been in a situation where Person A is absolutely certain that what they’re perceiving is reality, while Person B sees something totally different? And over there is Person C who thinks they’re both crazy. With all of that subjective certainty and opinions flying around, how can anyone know what’s true?
There is a way.
It’s pretty easy to imagine how the world might change for the better if we had the means to identify truth objectively. What would you say if I told you we actually do have such an ability, but just haven’t widely recognized it yet?
I included that Tesla quote at the beginning of this post because “the day science begins to study non-physical phenomena” has already happened. A method has been discovered that produces an objective reading of the essence of the information in a way that's similar to how a thermometer provides an objective reading of temperature. The method is called Coherence Verification.
Let’s just step back for a moment to the topic of us being energy. Einstein came along and really shook things up. He showed us that there’s more to the universe than what we can see. As author and cellular biologist Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D. says in his book The Biology of Belief, Einstein’s work revealed that “energy and matter are so deeply entangled [that it’s] impossible to consider them as independent elements”. The discoveries of Einstein didn’t negate Newtonian physics, they just revealed that the universe is much more complex—and invisible—than was previously thought.
Senior Experimental Particle Physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory:
“Everything—and I mean everything—is just a consequence of many infinitely-large fields vibrating. The entire universe is made of fields playing a vast, subatomic symphony.'“
~Don Lincoln~
As an energetic Being, when you are aligned to a frequency, it’s how you experience yourself and how you’re experienced by others.
So, everything is composed of vibrating fields of energy. Your body is energy, your thoughts are energy, the device you’re reading this on is energy, and the potential amazement or disbelief or enjoyment you’re experiencing right now in response to reading this information is energetic in nature.
It’s all energy.
As we become increasingly aware of ourselves as energetic beings, the question is what frequencies are available to us? How can we access higher levels through our senses and what will that mean to our lives? How can we discover what is really universally true and not just our own unique perception?
When I was a little girl growing up we had 3 or 4 television channels. Then somebody got the idea that you could program more channels through a cable system. And now there are hundreds of channels and much, much more programming and consequently more information available to the receiver through the television set.
Guess what? YOU are the television set.
You may have been operating with 4 channels up until now, but you can multiply that to 20 as you begin come engage with accessing information through your subtle or energetic body. Once you get a sense of this you begin to see that what impacts you the MOST is your choice.
In fact, as an indication, if you’re still reading, you are farther along than you may think because if you were operating at a lower level of consciousness you would never have signed up for this Substack in the first place, reading this would be much too irritating.
The way we react to things and what we enjoy, even the kinds of books we read, music we like, the television shows or movies we watch can be predicted by the level from which we observe.
In the same way that although we are often with partners that match our frequencies. We can still be compatible and feel out of sync day to day. If you are tired or grumpy and you’ve been up all night with babies and your partner just had 8 hours of sleep, is highly caffeinated and returning super chipper from a two-hour run and wants a sweaty kiss and a big breakfast that may not end well. It’s difficult to rise or to relate to where they are when the difference is too great. Your frequencies will not match until he comes down to earth and you settle and free yourself from your anger and resentment and rise up a bit to your neutral state.
If you’re angry and you see a smiling person, you may feel annoyed. You are simply on different energetic frequencies and in a sense the other person on some level is also you, you're connected, and one way to see it would be that the life scenarios, people and patterns that get repeated or drawn to us, especially the ones that trigger us or create conflict are for all of us to learn and grow beyond the lower stages of consciousness to help guide us to evolve to the highest possible version of ourselves.
This to me the map below is a guide to help us actualize our highest human potential.
The popular saying that “we don’t experience things as they are, we experience them as we are” is very true. But this goes MUCH deeper than any point of view or how we choose to see the surface of things.
When we’re willing to ask, we’ll be gifted with a preview of a few more channels. Once you consciously decide to become aware that what is available to you, you can align your system to be the receiver of it.
The good news is that there are premium channels available to all of us and best of all, they don’t cost a thing. We can live at a higher frequency (or LOC- level of consciousness) and begin to hear counsel from our higher selves. To be guided and supported in ways that we otherwise may never even know possible at a lower LOC.
As a culture or a world, once we become aware of our creations, all those things that we’ve invented for good or for whatever intent was behind them when they were created, we will begin to get a sense of how powerful we truly are.
From personal experience, I know that we can shift and transform our reality to the extent that we can bring forth a new ideal of awareness of ourselves as a creative force in the world. The powerful cause of all the effects we see. As we begin to understand our plasticity, the malleability of our lives, our bodies, and everything we encounter we can begin to shift anything we see at the level effect from our awareness.
We can even do this in groups and the changes will be magnified.
In fact, prayer is simply concentrated psychic thought with an intention to applicate to the power that created us and everything. Call it what you will. The Holy Spirit, God, Source, The Divine. We energetically align to it and our vibration LITERALLY increases.
You have an innate ability to be IN manifestation not just ordering things up from the outside or praying in a transactional or petitioned way to a God concept outside of you (read: begging) for someone to come and save you, to airdrop bags of money down your chimney. It’s unfortunately the way we’ve been taught in our mainstream religions. It’s basically your own soul’s discourse WITH you or two the source or essential nature of your being. There are no magic wands here. It’s our own frequency we’re working with.
It’s like we are one with God, with the source of everything that we see before us, not separate beings. We have reverence for our higher power as our creator, but if God was a key lime pie in the sky then we ARE a teensy energetic sliver of that pie, not a separate disconnected or differently flavored pie. That is why there is nothing wrong with our pie, it’s perfect. It’s Divine. We’re divine.
It’s taken me well over a decade to deconstruct some of my very unbending religious beliefs and wrap my head around the metaphysics of who and what we really are and how we serve. There is nothing wrong with religion per say, we’ve just gotten a bit off track with our human interpretations of it. All of the science certainly aligns with biblical teachings in new ways that I never could understand or even imagined possible and even my personal experience of the law of attraction as well.
Look around the room you’re sitting in, notice what you’re wearing, what’s on the walls. Nothing comes into form in this world without first being imagined. What you see in your physical environment was once held in someone’s mind before it could manifest physically.
Like it or not, we are the ones guiding our life experiences. What we have brought forth into our lives has been created by us, with no excuses. When we stop blaming others, our parents, our partners, our bosses, our children, our lack of resources, our schools, our government, big pharma, the prime minister, or the President of the United States. Our bodies. Because they are exactly and uniquely our own curriculum based on our level of consciousness.
Not just individually but collectively because we’re all connected even if we can’t see it or understand it quite yet, we have collectively created what we see before us.
To the extent that we can see and accept this truth, we become empowered to change that which we see before us.
You might think “Nona that’s ridiculous, I don’t have what I want so I can’t possibly be that powerful. I can’t pay my bills or afford to buy a house or have what I need why would I keep hurting myself this way”.
Stay with me here… if you believe that, THAT is what you are creating from.
We will eventually all see that what we have brought forth are things that are all about the abnegation of individual authority in creation. We grew up being told what to do, what to believe, how to behave, what to think, when and what to eat, and even how to greet each other. We’ve given our personal power away. We’re relegating our authority.
There are so many amazing models to help explain this phenomenon and our levels of consciousness, but today I’d like to share one of my all time favorites with you.
There is one man who over the course of his 45 year-long career discovered a method for objectively measuring the quality of all forms of energy. He was a pioneer in discovering and he confirmed that human consciousness is actually a field of energy that we’re all participating in and expressing aspects of. Consciousness is an energy field, and what’s more, his research confirmed that everything in the universe is actually a unique (but quantifiable) expression of the energy field of consciousness. Carl Jung founded the school of analytical psychology and is responsible for proposing and developing the psychological concepts of the collective unconscious that also describes this field.
His name was Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D Ph.D. and he was a bestselling author, a nationally renowned psychiatrist, researcher, spiritual teacher, and even a lecturer at Harvard and Oxford. He was an honored physician with too many awards to mention and in 1973 he co-authored the groundbreaking work Orthomolecular Psychiatry with Nobel Laureate chemist Linus Pauling, initiating a new field within psychiatry. He also oversaw the largest clinical practice in the United States while he was the Medical Director of the North Nassau Mental Health Center (1956–1980) and the Director of Research at Brunswick Hospital (1968–1979).
His book “Power vs Force” was a game changer for me. I think what made him so unique was not only was he was a well educated scientist and physician he was very human. He was in recovery from an addiction, he was very well-versed in the Bible, A Course In Miracles, the twelves steps and most of the major spiritual texts from East and West and he was not just an intellectual, he vulnerably practiced his way to his own transformation, experience and understanding. He had several powerful mystical or awakening experiences throughout his life that had him realizing that we are missing out entirely in the intellectual education and in some of the scriptural interpretations we receive from our organized religions so he set about finding a scientific way to measure what he experienced which resulted in numerous books and lectures over a 50 year career.
Thank GOODNESSS for this man.
Before I show you the results of his research, I just wanted to share that his primary tool for discovery in consciousness research is an advanced form of muscle testing similar to what’s traditionally called “Applied Kinesiology.” It’s a method used to identify a patient’s response to various stimuli, or to locate the source of a breakdown in a physical system in the body.
This method is commonly used by practitioners like naturopathic or osteopathic doctors, chiropractors, and nutritionists. A practitioner using Applied Kinesiology is able to directly “ask” the body of a patient how it responds to various things like potential allergens or supplements, and determine what might be of assistance or potentially harmful to that specific person. I have a practitioner that uses it in his Osteopathy practice and it feels like magic because I can feel and see the test results the DURING the actual session and its astounds me every time. My arm and indicator muscles will tell him when he’s finished when my arm goes strong and sometimes it takes a few tries.
A very simplified description of what happens during a test is that a muscle group stays strong and is able to resist pressure, or momentarily loses strength and can't resist even minimal pressure. A strong group of muscles is targeted for testing. The most common involves the deltoid and trapezius muscles in the shoulder. Not only are these generally rather strong muscles, but when they’re flexed to hold the arm out (as seen in the picture below), they have something of a “locking” quality to them. This helps the moment they weaken to be particularly noticeable.
What’s happening when the muscle goes weak is that there is a momentary break in the electrical system of the test subject’s nervous system, which results in the muscle reacting as if it was momentarily “unplugged” from its power source. So the testing method is just a way to make that natural (and frequent) break in continuity explicitly visible.
The tester has the test subject hold their arms parallel to the ground and then apply pressure to the test subject’s wrist at the appropriate moment. I found this picture online that shows you the body parts used.
This isn’t surprising when you recognize that one of the most basic functions of biological survival is the ability to determine what is harmful or beneficial in one’s environment. As Dr. Lipton says, “All organisms, including humans, communicate and read their environment by evaluating energy fields.”
Before diving in and looking over the charts below, it may also be helpful to just cover the difference between Power and Force.
Essentially, force requires movement to get a result and it exists at our lower levels of human consciousness. For example, in a physical fight or conflict one will hit another with our fist, whereas power’s solution is most often found in stillness. An example of the fight scenario with power would be Gandhi and his peaceful protests that brought down a Colonial Power without throwing a single punch. Two different ways of asserting ourselves from different levels of consciousness.
Another example of power is gravity or love. It does not move, but everything in its vicinity is moved by it like a magnet with metal shavings and is attracted by its magnetic power. In regards to our levels on his map of consciousness, power comes from within and is based on principles such as integrity, courage, and compassion. In contrast, force is external and relies on fear, coercion, and manipulation.
Take your time and check out the two different charts below. The first was the cover shot for this post and the second I find really helpful.
As I mentioned earlier, consciousness is a field of energy. What’s more, the energy of our thoughts exists on a quantifiable spectrum where each point on the spectrum has distinctive qualities. It's similar to the way different frequencies of light appear to us as different colors. Similar to the map of our chakras and yes, the models do match up in case you’re wondering. The emotional states that we call “courage”, “shame” or “love” exist on a spectrum in much the same way that we see various frequencies of light as the colors red or blue, or green.
One thing to note is that the 200 level of courage and anything below falls into the category of force and power is everything measuring above 200.
We can rise and fall in states of consciousness daily, but our stages are slower to shift or change and moving up one level can take an entire lifetime. Once we shift to a new major stage it’s permanent like a stage of development. Just like when you learn how to read or ride a bike, you will always know how to read and ride a bike.
We’re all capable visiting higher states of consciousness as a sort of sneak preview of things to come, but we’ll often cycle downwards again. It operates more like a spiral dynamic moving upwards, always evolving in an expansion of our conscious awareness, but there seems to be some life stages where it can feel temporarily like we’re stuck, moving laterally or even descending before we catapult upwards to a new stage of growth.
I like to imagine that it’s like we’re a condominium tower and we have an elevator of consciousness inside of us going up and down all day that dictates our view from the different floors available to us and we simply experience ourselves and our lives from where we are looking out from. There are no buttons for us to press on this elevator so we can’t manipulate what level we’re on, but we can learn and intuit or feel our way to different floors with our life experiences and insights and that is how we learn to rise up to higher levels of consciousness. The bathroom floor moments and more painful ego destroying ones seem to work best for me, but even immersing yourself in spiritual teachings can help to elevate our understanding. Learning and knowing this map inside and out can raise your level of consciousness and coherence by 35 points.
All of the stages, even the 1000-floor “upper room” is accessible and possible for us to all experience in any lifetime, we just need to realize our way there.
This work also interestingly aligns with the teachings in A Course In Miracles in fact he states on page 287 of his book Power vs Force:
When someone goes from the influence of a lower attractor field to that of a higher, it is often acclaimed as a miracle. The unfortunate verdict of human experience is that few escape the energy fields that gradually come to dominate their behaviors. A currently popular spiritual program designed to facilitate such escape is ‘A Course In Miracles’. The purpose of this course of spiritual psychology is to prepare the necessary groundwork to precipitate a sudden jump in consciousness through encouraging a total change of perception. In more traditional fashion, prayer and meditation also provide points of departure to rise from the influence of a lower energy field into a higher.
Spiritual teachings like ACIM or anything measuring over 500 can help us save time to make the inner shifts.
Here’s another diagram I found online that might be helpful in light of my condo metaphor where each calibrated level would be a decipherable floor:
We have free will and we can get out on a lower floor and stay. We can get stuck in anger, resentment and be unforgiving at the level 150. We can get caught up in a web desire, wanting and addiction at 125. There is nothing stopping us from spending our entire lives camped out on any level. It doesn’t feel like it most days, but we ultimately get to choose.
Let’s just pause here for a moment.
This is hard for us to swallow. Even as open-minded skeptics, I think in part because muscle testing can only be accurately read by a person measuring a minimum level of 200 or above the consciousness of courage so there are many skeptics that will never get past the level of pride at 175. Anyone measuring below 200 is not coming from a place of power or truth so they cannot replicate this work or achieve an accurate reading on the calibrations and you can imagine how well any ego will take that feedback you may understandably find pushback on this model . It seems like our culture’s lower levels of consciousness has many of us stuck in a violence of sorts. It’s like we’re attracted or resonating with a level that has us convinced that being judgmental, critical or combative is a sign of intelligence. Far from it. If this seems unclear or conceptual just hop on Twitter for ten minutes to read some comments and you’ll get the picture.
This model or conception feels like pure genius to me and aligns with my own life experiences having visited higher levels of consciousness for brief blissful periods and spending more than my share in the very lowest levels of consciousness available to us as a species. There is not a debate anymore in my own mind about its efficacy and yet I can empathize and understand if that’s what you are experiencing. All I can say is that if you can trust that I do and read to the end you may begin to see things differently.
No matter where you may fall today on this scale, see if you can open your mind to it conceptually, remember it’s just a map. No need to judge it, dissect it, discredit it… just let it wash over you to see if you can find any resonating truth in the descriptions below.
If we do let it in, one more caveat is that our egos would like to make this a competition and goal to reach higher levels of consciousness but this is not that. It doesn’t work that way. Where you are now and every single level is correct, it’s ALL divine. The bottom is not bad and the top is not good. It’s just an indication or timeline of an unfoldment or an evolution of where we are heading. Moving from being unripe to ripe. In some senses we may prefer to be ripe or end our suffering but a key thing here is that all floors are available to us and we don’t need to stay stuck at lower levels and yet whatever is happening now is perfectly ok and allowing it to be so is what allows us to rise and shift to new levels.
I think it’s why I love being a student of A Course In Miracles so much, because if I had to sum it up in one sentence the message of the course would be…THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU! In the same way that a butterfly is no better than a caterpillar. Same insect. Butterflies have a four-stage life cycle, and as most insects do undergo a complete metamorphosis. For humans, it can take many lifetimes and just focusing on this one is our work. Even though we all have access to the highest levels, we forget our essential nature for a reason, so we can be here now experiencing contrast and evolving as a Soul through the stages and they can’t be rushed.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, we may visit higher levels on rare occasions but most of us are much farther down the scale than our egos will allow ourselves to even admit including my own. My ego even gets triggered when I read that one of my favorite teachings or spiritual teachers like Marianne Williamson was calibrated at 195 or at a lower level than I expect or think they should. It’s funny, I’ll share some so you can see for yourself. The fact that only 15% of us are currently at 500 at “Love” or above is telling. That number is on the rise globally and it’s where we will all eventually end up in our spiritual evolution.
Enlightenment measures at 750.
The level of truth originally expounded by Jesus Christ or Buddha calibrated at 1000 when they were here on earth, the highest attainable on this plane. By the second century the level of truth of both of their teachings had declined. Buddhism to 900 and Christianity had dropped to 930 and by the 6th century, had dropped to 540. By the time of the crusades, at the beginning of the eleventh century, Christianity had fallen to its current level of 498. A major decline in the year 325 A.D. was apparently due to the spread of the misinterpretations of the teachings originating from the council of Nicaea. Any Christians reading will probably find it interesting to know the level of truth of Christianity as a practice was MUCH higher before than after Paul, Constantine, Augustine, etc.. had their way with it. And when our churches tell us to be aware of anything other than the bibles and specific books that they have approved or chosen for us, well sorry that is an intellectual red flag for me. Book burning is fear. From any higher state of consciousness we can clearly begin to see that truth is truth and it can be spoken in many different ways, no one has a monopoly on it and the only true blasphemy is a denial of the Divine not a specific faith, religion or denomination. That is ignorance.
It’s interesting to me that Buddhism has deteriorated less than any other religion. Hinayana Buddhism still calibrates at 850, Mahayana at 950, Zen Buddhism is in the 600’s but it has kept its integrity and may be why so many Westerners have flocked to it in the last century.
A Course In Miracles calibrates at 600 and Meister Eckhart and 14th century mysticism is between 600-700. Islam calibrates at 700 but extreme fundamentalist groups calibrate under 125.
The teachings of Abraham calibrated at 985 but at the time of Moses it was closer to 770 and the Talmud at 665 in 2011. Modern Judaism calibrates at 499. The old Testament calibrates at 475. Take out some parts of the bible and it becomes more true. I think most of us that have read it cover to cover have suspected that on some level.
The Koran and Sufism calibrates at 700 but Islamic fundamentalism calibrates between 90-130.
It’s interesting to me that the Lamsa translation from the Aramaic of the New Testament calibrates at 750 whereas the King James version from the Greek is 500.
The decline of the level of truth of the world’s great religions we get the sense that those teachings measure initially very high and get a bit lost in translation as followers put their own spin on the original teachings as we interpret, filter, nominate and denominate ourselves. Going back to the earliest translations and I can see why so many of us find ancient teachings like Celtic Christianity so naturally appealing, it’s a version of Christianity before it’s disfigurement focused on original blessing not sin, on the Divine Feminine and the heart beat of God being found in nature itself.
As you can see the testing is done kinesthetically on a scale from 0 to 1000 and the average North American was vibrating at around 212 the last time I checked. We were at 190 for many centuries and finally in the mid 1980’s we experienced a jump to 204. This is a significant jump because 200 is the initial level of empowerment. It’s the level marking the beginning of the willingness to stop blaming others and accept responsibility for our own actions.
There is no end to us using this model to test what is true. An organic banana tests higher than a conventional one. Musicians and their music can be calibrated as well. It’s not surprising to me that classical, pop, and country test higher than heavy metal and rock. Marylin Mason calibrates at 35, Eminem at 60, Nirvana 70, Pearl Jam and Led Zeplin at 100, Billie Eilish at 150, U2 and Taylor Swift at 190, Adele at 250, David Bowie at 330, Jack Johnson at 370, The Eagles at 400, Sarah McLachlan 460, Eric Clapton and Frank Sinatra at 470, and spiritual and some gospel music like Hillsong Worship and Snatam Kaur over 500.
Let’s go over these levels in order in more detail now, mostly focusing on the ones between courage and reason since that’s the range where the majority of us are most likely to land. The labels and all the credit are Hawkins’ and the descriptions of each level are based on the descriptions from his book, but shortened and blended with a few of my own thoughts.
Hawkins defines this as a logarithmic scale, so there are far fewer people at the higher levels than at the lower ones. The energy levels among the world’s population would resemble the shape of a pagoda in that 85% of us test under 204. The power of the relatively few individuals near the top counterbalances the energy of the masses toward the bottom to achieve this overall average. The sad thing about that to me is that any meaningful human satisfaction cannot even begin until about the level 250 when some degree of self-confidence begins to emerge as the basis for positive life experiences in the evolution of consciousness.
An increase from one level to another will result in enormous changes in your life.
*To apply this in a practical way, at the end of the description of each level let’s use the example of a person experiencing homelessness as seen from the different levels of consciousness. Imagine an elderly man in a fashionable district in a big city like New York’s Manhattan. He’s alone, has not washed for days, is wearing tattered clothing and leaning against a beautiful Brownstone.
Shame – Depression and hopelessness are the lowest levels of our Human consciousness and it’s not surprising that it’s where most of us seriously contemplate getting off this ride or we decide to end our lives, there is now where else to go so it’s just a step above death. In a sense, without any signs of hope contemplating suicide at this level seems like the only next logical step for us, not existing. It can also sadly become self-directed hatred with sociopathic projections of personal shame like school shootings or serial killings. *In our example, at the level of shame calibrating at 20 we are repulsed by the person experiencing homelessness. We might call him a Bum, give him a dirty look, think he’s disgusting, smelly and a disgrace to society.
Guilt – A step above shame, but you still may be having thoughts of suicide. You are probably convinced at this stage that there’s something wrong with you, you may think of yourself as bad (or in religion’s terms a “sinner”), unable to forgive yourself for how you currently feel or past transgressions. You sense that you’re missing the mark, that you’re out of alignment and you feel stuck in your life. *At this level of 30 you would blame him for his condition. He deserves what he gets, he’s reaping what he’s sewing. In your mind he’s clearly just a lazy welfare cheat working the system for a free meal.
Apathy – Feeling hopeless or victimized. The state of learned helplessness. Many homeless people are stuck here. *At this calibrated level of 50 or hopelessness you might see his plight as desperate. Unfixable. It’s a shame but there is nothing you can do, there will always be people falling through the cracks and at the end of the day they will always exist, nothing can be done.
Grief – A state of perpetual state of sadness, loss and despondency. You might drop down here after losing a loved one temporarily but those who remain here live a life of constant regret and depression. Still higher than apathy, since you’re beginning to escape the numbness. *When we are calibrating at 75 the homeless man seems tragic to us. It feels terrible to us that he has to live on the streets. It’s such a shame, poor man he has no one that cares about him. No family or friends. We feel sad when we walk by and it stays with us.
Fear - Fear of enemies, old age, death, rejection, social fears like being overweight or losing our hair. We see the world as dangerous and unsafe. Paranoia. Usually, you’ll need help to rise above this level, or you’ll remain trapped for a long time, such as in an abusive relationship. It can become obsessive, can lead us to jealousy and stress and is culturally contagious and become a dominant social trend. *At the level of 100 we may decide to pick up our pace or avoid contact with the man, he feels like a possible threat, a social menace and we may even calling the police because we live nearby and we fear he might commit a crime.
Desire –We have more energy available at this level. This level motivates vast areas of human activity including the economy. Advertisers use this level of consciousness to their advantage and link needs selling to our instinctual desires. We are moved to expend great effort to achieve goals or obtain rewards. This is the level of accumulation, greed, addiction, craving, and lust — for approval, money, power, fame, etc. Consumerism. Materialism. This is the level of smoking, drinking and recreational and even prescription drugs. At this level we seek social approval and the desire for sexual approval has produced billion dollar industries of cosmetics, fashion, the movie industry. There is never a satiation, only wanting more. *When we calibrate at 125 we barely notice the man at all, because we are caught up in our own minds and we are thinking about ourselves, our busy worried world and about the fulfilment of our own feelings of lack, our needs and desires. If we do notice him we’d wonder why isn’t anyone doing anything about it and we would blame the system and feel frustrated.
Anger – Anger is the level of frustration, often from not having your desires met at the lower level and can lead you to constructive or destruction action. This level can spur you to action at higher levels, or it can keep you stuck in resentment, hatred and lack. In an abusive relationship, you’ll often see an angry person coupled with a fearful person. As we move out of Apathy and Grief to overcome Fear as a way of life, we naturally begin to want and Desire leads to frustration, which in turn leads to Anger. Anger leads easily to hatred. *At level 150 Anger will have you upset when you see the man and you’ll be quick to assess him as violent and unstable, or you may be furious that there are so many homeless people in Manhattan and you may direct your anger at politicians.
Pride – The first level is where you start to feel good, but it’s a false feeling. It’s also what runs the Marine Corps and is the level aspired to by the majority of people. We feel positive when we reach this level because we have just come from the lower levels. We are a winner, we look good and we know it. We strut our stuff in the parade of life, we love posting selfies at good angles, having body shots taken because we’re proud of our bodies, but pride is defensive and vulnerable because it is dependent upon external conditions, without which it will revert to a lower level. The inflated ego is very vulnerable to attack. We are dependent on external circumstances (money, prestige, etc.), so it’s vulnerable. Pride can lead to nationalism, racism, and religious wars. Think Nazis. A state of irrational denial and defensiveness. Religious fundamentalism is also stuck at this level. You become so closely enmeshed in your beliefs that you see an attack on your beliefs as an attack on you. An egoic stage of feeling like you are special and right. You use this rationale to judge others that are different from you as wrong. *At 175 seeing the homeless man feels like an embarrassment, you think he lacks self-respect and wonder why doesn’t he take better care of himself. How could he allow that to happen.
Courage – The first level of true strength where power begins to appear. This is where you start to see life as challenging and exciting instead of overwhelming. You begin to have an inkling of interest in personal growth, although at this level you’ll probably call it something else like skill-building, career advancement, education, etc. You start to see your future as an improvement upon your past, rather than a continuation of the same. You might hire a coach and even learn to meditate but you prefer to call it mindfulness because of your belief system and fear you are triggered by spiritual teachings and your ego is still intact. Courage exists because fear still exists in your mind, and it needs to be overcome by you to move forward. *At the level 200 you might wonder if there is a local homeless shelter nearby that could help him. You wonder about maybe helping him find a place or a job.
Neutrality – The energy is more positive on this level and can be epitomized by the phrase, “Live and let live.” It’s flexible, relaxed and unattached to outcomes. You’re taking care of your needs, your family’s needs, but you don’t push yourself too hard. You have a sense of well-being, you’re confident and capable. You’re non-judgmental and you don’t feel the need to control other people’s behaviors. *At level 250 you don’t judge the man, he looks okay. Interesting and you see that he’s making a choice and is not hurting anyone so you leave him be.
Willingness – Now that you’re basically safe and comfortable, you become more participatory and successful. Whatever happens, you roll with the punches. You don’t have anything to prove. You get along well with other people. A lot of self-employed people are at this level. A very comfortable place. You’re effective. You begin caring about doing a good job — perhaps even your best. You think about time management and productivity and getting organized, things that weren’t so important to you at the level of neutrality. Think of this level as the development of willpower and self-discipline. These people are the “troopers” of society; they get things done well and don’t complain much. This is the point where your consciousness becomes more organized and disciplined. You’re open-minded and with some worldly success, you see the possibilities. *At level 310 you might be willing to go over to him and smile and see if you can connect with him or even cheer him up. You might feel inspired to volunteer at the local mission.
Acceptance – Now a powerful shift happens, and you awaken to the possibilities of living proactively. At the level of willingness, you’ve become competent, and now you want to put your abilities to good use. This is the level of setting and achieving goals purely in service to others and you see your will as aligned with the will of God or source or creation. You begin accepting responsibility for your role in the world. If something isn’t right about your life (your career, your health, your relationship), you define your desired outcome and change it. You start to see the big picture of your life more clearly. This level drives many people to switch careers, leave a marriage, quit smoking, start a new business, or totally change their diets. *At level 350 we may feel intrigued by the man and wonder if he might have a story to tell. You might wonder how he got to be homeless.
Reason – At this level, you transcend the emotional aspects of the lower levels and begin to think clearly and rationally. Hawkins defines this as the level of medicine and science. The way I see it, when you reach this level, you become capable of using your reasoning abilities to their fullest extent. You now have the discipline and the proactivity to fully exploit your natural abilities. You’ve reached the point where you say, “Wow. I can do all this stuff, and I know I must put it to good use. So what’s the best use of my talents?” You take a look around the world and start making meaningful contributions. At the very high end, this is the level of Einstein and Freud. It’s probably obvious that most people never reach this level in their entire lives. *Calibrating at 400 you see the man as a symptom of the current economic and social malaise, or a good subject for an in-depth psychology study worthy of a government grant.
Love – This is not the kind of love depicted by Hollywood and the mass media where you see someone as special over another. It’s an unconditional divine kind of love, a permanent understanding of your connectedness with all that exists. Think compassion. At the level of reason, you live in service to your head. But that eventually becomes a dead end where you fall into the trap of over-intellectualizing. You see that you need a bigger context than just thinking for its own sake. At the level of love, you now place your head and all your other talents and abilities or masculine energies in service to your heart (not your emotions, but your greater sense of right and wrong — your conscience). I see this as the level of awakening to your true purpose which is to be in alignment with nature, source or God. Your motives at this level are pure and uncorrupted by the desires of the ego. This is the level of lifetime service to humanity. Think Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Dr. Albert Schweitzer. At this level, you also begin to be guided by a force greater than yourself. It’s a feeling of letting go. Your intuition becomes extremely strong. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by 1 in 250,000 people during their entire lifetimes. Here is Dr. Hawkins full description:
The 500 level is characterized by the development of a Love that is unconditional, unchanging and permanent. It does not fluctuate because its source within the person who loves is not dependent on external conditions. Loving is a state of being. It is a way of relating to the world that is forgiving, nurturing, and supportive. Love is not intellectual and it does not proceed from the mind. Love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of its purity of motive.
At this level of development the capacity to discern essence becomes predominant; the core of an issue becomes the center of focus. As reason is bypassed, there arises the capacity for instantaneous recognition of the totality of a problem and a major expansion of context, especially regarding time and process. Reason deals only with particulars, whereas Love deals with wholes. This ability, often ascribed to intuition, is the capacity for instantaneous understanding without resorting to sequential symbol processing. This apparently abstract phenomenon is in fact, quite concrete; it is accompanied by a measurable release of endorphins in the brain.
Love takes no position and thus is global, rising above the separation of positionality. It is then possible to be “one with another,” as there are no longer any barriers. Love is therefore inclusive and expands the sense of self progressively. Love focuses on the goodness of life in all its expressions and augments that which is positive. It dissolves negativity by recontextualizing it rather than by attacking it.
Power vs Force, ch. 4, pg. 112-113
*At the level of love or 500, the man is not just interesting but loveable. We experience him as friendly. We might find wisdom in his choice to transcend social limits and we notice that he is enjoying his freedom and he is joyful to see us. We marvel at the wisdom of age on his face and the serenity that comes with indifference to material things. We order a double lunch and offer him one not as charity but just to be kind to a brother and we genuinely would be happy to sit down and eat with him if he’d have us and get to know him as we would anyone.
Joy – A state of pervasive, unshakable happiness. Eckhart Tolle describes this state in The Power of Now. The level of saints and advanced spiritual teachers. Just being around people at this level makes you feel incredible. At this level, life is fully guided by synchronicity and intuition. There’s no more need to set goals and make detailed plans — the expansion of your consciousness allows you to operate at a much higher level. A near-death experience can temporarily bump you to this level.
*These final energy levels of Joy 540, Peace 600 and Enlightenment 700-1000 we see the man is being revealed to us in our experience as an extension of ourselves. He is our own inner self in its temporary expression, there is no separation between us. We are one. He would feel loved, seen, relaxed and comfortable in our presence. There would be no thought or words even necessary. We would have a powerful attractor energy field and we may have people wandering along following us pulled in by our radiance and identify as Divine or one with the consciousness of all and this is the peak of the evolution of consciousness in the human realm.
Peace – Total transcendence. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by one person in 10 million.
Enlightenment and Transcendence – The highest level of human consciousness 750-1000, where humanity blends with divinity. Extremely rare. Even just thinking about this level can raise your consciousness.
This model is worthy of reflection.
You may observe that some parts of your life seem to calibrate at different levels than others, but you should be able to sense and identify your current overall level.
You also might be at the level of neutrality overall, but still be addicted to smoking (level of desire). The lower levels you find within yourself will serve as a drag that holds the rest of you back. But you’ll also find higher levels in your life.
There have been so many egoic misinterpretations of this diagram where our brains have decided that one is good and one is bad. Not so, they simply a truth telling timeline of our human evolution.
The biggest takeaway and practical use for me was understanding that depending on where we are, THAT is how we experience life. The spiritual texts all share this view but somehow it never really hit home until I saw it all laid out this way for me. We may not have the eyes to see it or the ears to hear it now (as Jesus said to his followers) but having it in our awareness and being open to it or asking and praying to see things differently is what precipitates our inner shift and change.
No matter where we land it’s best to check our egos at the door when we look at models like this and not let ourselves get sucked in on the idea of being on a specific level. We now know that we can’t force the levels with our goal setting or external force, but we’re all being called deeper into ourselves with this new awareness.
The Universe holds its breath as we choose, instant by instant, which pathway to follow; for the universe, the very essence of life itself, is highly conscious. Every act, thought, and choice adds to a permanent mosaic; our decisions ripple through the universe of consciousness to affect the lives of all.
Power vs. Force
I can remember reading that the average advance in the level of consciousness in our lifetime is a mere 5 points, so basically some of us live our entire lives and only a few lessons are learned. It may be because at lower levels of consciousness we feel powerless and caught up in a web that feels impossible. We stay stuck.
We can uplevel much faster with a teacher, support, spiritual practices and even if you only ever studied and mastered this work your consciousness level would go up by 35 points.
Some teachers calibrate higher than others. If the Spiritual material is a higher calibration than 500 that is a good start, it’s okay for a teacher to be lower if you like them or they resonate with you because essentially if we’re here we’re all students. Just for fun, here’s a random sampling to give you and idea: Jay Shetty calibrates at 180, David Goggins 200, Tony Robbins 210, Brene Brown is 230, Joel Osteen 245, Bruce Lipton 250, Joe Dispenza 255, Pope Francis 280, Pema Chodron 285, Mooji 290, Byron Katie 290, Wim Hof 295, Jordan Peterson 300, Eckhart Tolle 360, Michael Beckwith 395, Tenzin Rinpoche is 500, Ram Dass 400, Rupert Spira 430, Sydney Banks 435, Bernadette Roberts is 460, Thomas Keating 505, Thich Nat Hahn 500, Allan Watts 500, Dalai Lama 510, Herman Hess 550, Helen Schucman 550.
I find it fascinating that we are born imprinted with a level of consciousness that is already in effect. It’s a sobering fact with profound implications as our collective consciousness itself moves through slowly through numerous generations. Many of us will continue to express our native energy field, but we can move beyond it. What defines one’s level is motivation and a willingness which proceeds from meaning and context. It’s not by striving but by compassion and understanding.
The good news is that we’re in this together and the few humans that have advanced consciousness counterbalances whole populations at lower levels. One individual at the level 700 counterbalances 70 million individuals below 200. A single Avatar like Jesus or Buddha does in fact counterbalance the collective negativity of all of mankind even after they have passed. Without them, we would self-destruct out of our sheer mass of unopposed negativity.
Our thoughts can be measured (in microwatts) and the difference in power between a loving thought and a fearful thought is so enormous mathematically as to be beyond our human capacity to even comprehend.
Even a few loving thoughts during the course of the day more than counterbalances all of our negative thoughts. Ignorance dissipates the light but nothing dissolves dishonesty faster than the simple act of revealing the truth.
We increase our power not though manipulation, but by increasing our integrity, understanding and capacity for compassion. We can all learn how to reach the level of Love which is a place that gives rise to forgiveness and compassion. It’s the doorway to Grace, the final realization of who we are and why we’re here, and the ultimate source of all existence.
In scripture we are told that man is afflicted by forces unseen.
In science we’re told that man is literally made up of forces unseen.
Enlightened people that have walked the earth have told us that we are trapped in an illusion, in a dream. We are blind but now that the great majority of us are above 200 we can expect great transformations throughout the world in every culture. As I was typing this paragraph I was getting goosebumps and tingling at the back of my head which is how I physically detect truth for myself.
It’s time for us to take full responsibility for all of our creations and to become stewards of the earth and one another or we will pay for our ignorance.
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!
With love,
Nona
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality”
~Carl Sagan~
Excellent read Nona❤️