Emergent Phenomena Consistent with the Map of Consciousness (6 of 7)
How my experience has changed in accordance with the scale
In the last post, I shared my personal consciousness calibrations over my lifetime from David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness.
If we look at the numbers, a pretty clear picture emerges of an upwards shift in consciousness measurements congruent with my life experience.
The main purpose of the map is to characterize how consciousness expresses itself at these different levels. The calibrations reflect the predominant attitudes, thoughts, feelings, situations, and relationships, as well as your views on life, god, and the process we go through.
One reason I found the map so profound is how difficult it can be to cogently describe the changes that are occurring in you to yourself, let alone other people. The map was so encompassing and congruent with my own experience that it was impossible to ignore.
I’ve discussed this in becoming no one, but with my spiritual growth all sorts of phenomena have emerged that I would have never anticipated and frankly didn’t used to believe in.
David Hawkins talks about how common these expressions are in relation to consciousness expanding in his books. It is also why I consider the expansion of consciousness to be synonymous with human evolution. That which we experience and think is possible is all relative to our paradigm. This all became clear to me the further I went and sought frameworks like this to make sense of it all.
This post will outline my experiences in more detail in relation to the map as well as provide some takeaways from my own chart.
Interesting Phenomena Relative to Scale Expressions
The most obvious changes that coincide with increases in consciousness is a more enjoyable, predominant state. Things that used to bother you no longer trigger you and increasingly you are at peace with reality as it is. Eventually, you start to experience an opening of the heart.
It is important not to comingle “predominant state” to simply mean the presence of an emotion. One reason I find the map of consciousness so compelling is that is effectively describe the encompassing paradigm shift that occurs which extends much beyond just feeling more of an emotion. An open heart doesn’t just mean you feel a greater sense of love in your life, it impacts the entire way you experience the world inclusive of even the thoughts and beliefs you have.
A simple example of this is how you would contextualize someone being an asshole. In the lower states, you’d probably experience a negative reaction and then resentment to that person for a prolonged period of time. You might even then find yourself discussing the event with other people to validate your position.
The same exact experience in open heart territory would probably look like this. You experience a nefarious act and for 5-10 seconds you are aware of anger arising which shows up as a tightness in your chest. You observe and feel as it passes through you without engaging it. You recognize that emotions arise spontaneously and are part of the human condition so you do not try to suppress the anger even though some “spiritual people” once told you spiritual people shouldn’t get angry. The whole time this is happening you see the pattern that is causing this person to engage in this way and feel a sense of compassion for them amidst the anger. Peace quickly returns and you see the entire experience as interesting or a growth opportunity rather than an inconvenience. You get on with your day with a warm feeling of inner joy and there are no lingering thoughts about what just happened.
What seems like a helluva 20 seconds all feels very natural at this level of consciousness. There is no “trying” to not be angry or move on, because you just are.
Part of what facilitates this new reality paradigm is the shift in how one views the self which is part and parcel with the heart opening. Because you are spending longer durations identified as consciousness rather than “Scott” or the personality concept, everything has a levity to it. You increasingly interpret things with curiosity rather than try to control or resist them for the purpose of self preservation.
The inner paradigm shift is the most enrapturing part of the process which is why as one progresses the interest in the outer world becomes less and less compelling relative to going deeper on the inward plane.
Emergence of Intuitive Guidance
I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point over the past year or two I really began to evolve my perspective on the mind.
Once upon a time, I never really though much about thoughts. I just knew I had a lot of them and sometimes they could be quite pesky. For the longest time, I thought I was my thoughts.
Then at some point, my mind really started to quiet down where it just felt like I was walking around with a blank mind for long stretches of time. I could try to think and start experiencing the presence of thought, but if I didn’t actively try, I’d just watch everything unfolding around me in complete stillness. When I talked, I wasn’t thinking about what to say, I was just observing things come out of my mouth spontaneously. When I moved, my body would just move without any conscious precursor and I would just watch it moving. It’s very hard to really understand the shift to this phenomenon until you have experienced it. I can definitely say though that this feels quite different then when I was identified as the thoughts and the body.
With this increasing feeling of blank mind through most of the day, I started to receive audible transmissions that provide guidance and insights. These happen spontaneously when my mind is quiet, during the middle of the night, or when I choose to provoke them by self inquiry with a quiet mind.
Now you may be reading this and thinking, well isn’t that just a thought? It certainly sounds like a thought!
The difference is hard to describe. For those that have done heavy doses of psychedelics where spontaneous insights and knowing emerges, it kind of feels like that. For some people these come in the form of images, but for me it’s always words.
They have a more emergent texture than any sort of active thinking and are often completely unrelated to whatever is in my current awareness. I will just be doing something and a loving voice will pop into my awareness suggesting something.
I kind of think of it like I have the defensive coordinator of team Source calling plays in my head!
Many people think this type of phenomena where new insights emerge when under the influence of substances is generated from the brain functioning better as measured by brain scans.
But this does not answer where the information comes from which is often beyond our local consciousness. How does your brain synapses being more connected reveal information you’ve had no experience with?
This for me is one example where there is a misinterpretation that symbolizes the limitation of current science and lack of understanding of the energetic realm.
I think a better explanation is to think of yourself having an antenna in your consciousness that is a receiver for information. And as you expand your consciousness permanently or in temporal states with substances, the antenna comes online because the impediments blocking it are removed.
This allows you to tap into the collective field of information outside your immediate local consciousness…kind of like muscle testing, but the mechanism is different.
All the information on what is happening or has happened are just packets of energy (waves) that you can increasingly have access too.
These auditory insights come through spontaneously all the time now and at will when I choose to quiet my mind and practice inquiry. I can drop into a deep state immediately and pose any question to the silence. Instead of it feeling like I am actively thinking something, it feels more like I am having a conversation with what I’ll call source. I often get answers that I feel like I would have never conceived of. The first time I experienced this phenomenon of communicating with a higher intelligence was during my first ayahuasca experience. Now the presence, clarity, and availability is ever present.
The voice is always loving and the information has proven to be far superior than any mentation as defined by the results of following its guidance in my life. This has pushed me to increasingly trust and rely on it for even small decisions.
If I had a dollar for every time, I’d told my girlfriend “let me meditate on it” I’d probably have like $527 or something! 🤣
Although I have not completely abandoned reason, I now see the reasoning mind as limited relative to the creativity and wisdom available through tapping into the quiet. As time progresses this sense of guidance and direct knowing has increased in frequency.
David talks about how this intuition or direct connection to source begins to come online in the 500’s. For me, it feels like it was probably sooner than my 34th birthday (c. 489) because I’ve felt this shift for a while. In any case, I am eternally grateful and wish this emergence for everyone!
Attractor Fields
One concept that you hear often in the spiritual world is “you attract what you put out” or like attracts like. People even say things like “we’re on the same vibration” without even really understanding what it means.
What it’s referring to is someone being at a similar energetic log (levels of consciousness) which means you have a similar reality paradigm.
I was fascinated to put this to the test by calibrating my current girlfriend and past relationships at the time of us dating. To my amazement, they all were very close in their consciousness expressions. It wasn’t like they were perfectly matched energies (c. 235 and c. 235), but they were absolutely in the same “stage” and relatively close in number.
Another fascinating example of attractor fields is how I met my spiritual teacher at almost precisely (c. 200). In an earlier article, we outlined how this is a critical threshold when someone moves out of survival and into integrity. Maybe it's merely coincidence that my teacher came to me at this point in my evolution, but it’s certainly curious!
Prior to experimenting with the scale, I largely believed that we attracted things into our life solely for the purpose of maximal spiritual benefit. This new dimension of attracting things in your life due to harmonious energetic signatures is something to be explored.
It’s my experience that lots of things you encounter in life aren’t going to directly match your consciousness, but are good for your personal growth. For example, my spiritual teacher who has a very high calibration came to me around level 200? That does not meet the model of like frequencies attracting to each other.
The interplay between these two forces is fascinating and something I hope to explore further in my personal research.
Synchronicity
Synchronicity is one of my favorite things in the world. It makes life feel magical and leaves us in awe.
The frequency of synchronicity in my own life has increased concurrently with my growth. Sometimes it's borderline insane and can make me feel like I’m the star of my own movie. Like, how could things work out so perfectly with such impeccable timing!?! And the humor of it all!
I remember when I first started experiencing synchronicity I couldn’t help but think, “has this been happening the whole time and I just didn’t see it”?
If you agree with the view that your paradigm (level of consciousness) creates meaning more so than the content of life itself, this would actually make sense.
David talks about how in the higher states (high 500’s+) one increasingly feels like they are the author of their reality. Things manifest easily and instantly. I don’t claim to be there, but notice glimpses of it and wonder about where this all may be going.
Physical Phenomena
I intend to write an entire series on learnings about the transformations of the physical body and nervous system on the spiritual ascent. I wanted include some highlights here.
If you buy into all things being energy and the map as a tool to reveal the power of your personal frequency, you can contemplate what this means in a literal sense.
A 110V socket can handle a lot less power than a 220V socket. When you put a 220V device in a 110V socket, the power is too much so it breaks.
If we were to adapt this to our own bodies, if we rapidly increase our consciousness our body must evolve to handle the more powerful and abundant energy. The primary mechanism that must handle these changes is the nervous system.
Ironically, my spiritual evolution has coincided with the most challenging period of health in my life up until very recently. This used to piss me off because I thought that all this work should result in immediate improvements in health.
If you take the view of the body purging things as it recalibrates to the new energy, you start to see why this might occur. You need not look further than the reports of many spiritual beings including David Hawkins himself undergoing immense health challenges during their awakening to see other potential evidence to this theory.
The other interesting thing in the context of an energetic scale, is how sensitive I have become to certain things.
I used to slam a cold brew daily and drink lots of alcohol socially. Now I find coffee to be too much for my system beyond a few sips. I become so wired that I no longer enjoy it. I also can’t really drink alcohol without my body lapsing into all sorts of odd reactions. I often feel ungrounded and out of body for an entire day after drinking. So I’ve cut that out too.
If you think about this purely from an energetic perspective, you can see as you grow in your consciousness the resonance between you and the energetic calibrations of different substances like alcohol (c. 90) and coffee (c. 190) grows further and further apart as evidenced by the deltas displayed below.
Does the energetic dissonance manifest as your body having more difficulty processing it? Who knows!
I can definitely say though I now literally understand why someone would say “it no longer resonates” in reference to things like alcohol.
Over the past few years, I also feel like I can increasingly sense everything going on inside my body in a way that I never did before. It’s like an acute awareness. This includes lots of energy surging through me that I never felt before. This happens when I am doing the pattern work and sometimes spontaneously. At first, this was very anxiety inducing. It was very unfamiliar and all these new feelings made me think something was wrong.
I’ve now settled into this new normal and there is less concern about the body in general as my identification has evolved.
Lastly, I just need a lot less sleep than I used to in order to feel good.
Using the Scale With My Own Calibration
For my own personal growth, the next milestone on the horizon is unconditional love (540+). Understanding where I am and where I want to go really helps me be mindful of my response to life. My only job right now is to try and see when my heart closes to any part of life. When I identify these patterns which cause me to close, I can then do the necessary contemplation and energetic transmutation/release to remain more open in the future.
By aligning my repeated behaviors with the frequency of unconditional love, I hope to continue to move closer to this higher expression. And I trust the school of life will bring me the requisite experiences in order to achieve this ascension in perfect timing : )
Takeaways From My Calibrations and Experience
I wanted to take a step back and review some high level takeaways from everything I just shared. This makes the assumption that you think the scale and my own research are not full of shit haha.
At a high level, all of this provides evidence to me that:
You can rapidly increase your consciousness with intention, devoted effort and correct instruction
As you do this, your paradigm of reality shifts, but no one will recognize it but you
Part of the paradigm shift occurs in the physical body and many things we didn’t think were adaptable, evolve like the capacities of the mind (i.e. source guidance). This is why human evolution is accordant with the evolution of consciousness
All of this can be measured on a relative scale to map your paradigm to the power of different energy levels
How can you trust the scale?
Obviously, the first question that comes to mind for anyone reading this is, “is all of this total bullshit?”
First off, I’m not trying to convert anyone to believe anything. I’m just sharing my experience because I genuinely find it fun to synthesize and codify it all into a narrative. It feels like art to me. I’m not trying to build a following, gain status, or sell anyone anything. I just like writing about it and did this daily for almost a year for myself before we sold my company, after which made sharing these ideas more tenable…and it feels damn good to do something just for the joy of it.
This point aside, here’s my rationale for why I have decided to implore this as a tool in my own life.
My Experience
My personal measurements correlate with my qualitative experience. If I look at my own evolution or calibrations of things around me that I investigate, the map fits…sometimes eerily so.
Many times I’m surprised by a reading, but after the fact can see why something would be that way. Obviously, this gets into the world of “well isn’t this just your own biases reflecting all of your results.” Frankly, I don’t know because I don’t know the nuances of how ultimate reality works…yet! ; )
And what if it was? Wouldn’t that be interesting to understand?
Many people think the whole world is just a projection of your own consciousness! This would mean that I’m not real and really just a projection of your mind like a dream! Or maybe it’s the other way around 🙃
All I can say is that my intention is always to seek truth when I perform these tests rather than confirmation of a desired outcome.
I usually heed the advice of the calibrations and my life just keeps getting better. So I continue to implore the practice.
Repeatability
As alluded to earlier, when I test something, I generally get the same or a very similar directional calibration when I test it again. This inspires confidence.
As mentioned in the muscle testing overview, there are a number of reasons why one might get an inconsistency such as:
You are skeptical and don’t think this work
The statement was phrased incorrectly or in a way that could be misconstrued
You are in an stressful, agitated, or depressed state impacting your thymus gland
Your intention is greedy and non-integrous
You did not ask permission
You calibrate below the level of integrity (c. 200)
Resonance
Everything I have ever read from David Hawkins feels like it was written for me. Sometimes the synchronicity can border on the bizarre where he uses obscure phrases I’ve said my whole life. My worldview is that we encounter the people and things in our life for reasons often beyond our immediate understanding.
So the fact that David and muscle testing kept showing up in my life originally piqued my interest. With application, this interest blossomed into trust and appreciation.
When I meditate and practice self inquiry, I am guided towards continuing to engage with the information. I feel a deep connection to him that is hard to explain.
This may not be a good reason for some people to engage in something, but it is enough for me.
I am aware that humans have a proclivity towards wanting to believe things that conform to their desires. This can be particularly true in the cases of emergent phenomena because it meets the need of the ego’s desire to be special…look at this special technique that might give me a competitive advantage and admiration!
I am keenly aware of this dynamic and can authentically say that this type of behavior no longer interests me.
But What About Science!?!?
I have read about 20 of the most recent papers on applied kinesiology and its ability to accurately forecast diagnosis and truth. The results frankly are a mixed bag. Many studies outright show that using muscle testing vs. just your best guest result in the same results. Others show a statistically significant improvement in accuracy in forecasting diagnosis when relying upon the test. No official scientific study shows perfect accuracy of muscle testing’s ability to forecast unknown information that I have been able to find.
So what do I make of this?
I can’t help but come back to context. David asserts that as your consciousness expands, your ability to discern truth with the technique improves. It’s like the metaphor I described earlier where your antenna has better reception. There’s not as many hurricane clouds and trees obstructing it so the ability to tap into the database of collective consciousness becomes more finely tuned.
He also mentions many reasons related to motivation, intent, and level of skepticism that would cause misinformation.
I have no idea what the paradigm of these people in these studies were and whether they conform to the required conditions for accuracy in David’s model.
I can’t help but have compassion for skeptics in general because I don’t know if they will ever be able to experience the full potential of spiritual growth. If you look almost all great beings, the main mechanism required for ascension always comes back to faith. The opening of the heart and entering the spiritual domain (> c. 500) requires it and is why all great traditions allude to the same concepts: surrender, trust, faith.
If you live in a paradigm where everything must be provable by available instruments, there will always be a ceiling. The rewards accompanied by total surrender will always elude you and playing this game is fine. Having been on both sides, it’s just far less interesting to me personally.
My personal allegiance is and will always be the truth which I find inside myself. I don’t need science which is constantly changing or validation from someone else’s subjective context for me to believe in something. Though I certainly remain open to considering both.
What I care about at the end of the day is the results within my own experience. Thus, I choose to cautiously believe in the information I derive from muscle testing and the map while juxtaposing it with how life unfolds. It is yet another input in my effort to try and make sense of everything and make the best decisions I can!
In the next post, I will conclude by discussing things I have observed while calibrating other objects as well as an F.A.Q. on the practice at large.
This post is part 7 part series on my personal experience working with applied kinesiology (muscle testing) and David Hawkins Map of Consciousness.
So helpful. Thank you for putting this to words. 🙏🏼
absolutely incredible work. Thanks Scott <3