This post is part 2 of a 7 part series on my personal experience working with applied kinesiology (muscle testing) and David Hawkins Map of Consciousness.
These posts are not my prescriptions on how you should live your life or make decisions. I share these thoughts and experiences not to gloat or cast judgment, but rather to feel the joy of creatively expressing myself and to potentially help others on a similar journey.
In part 1 of this series, I shared how muscle testing helped me determine that I had a parasite and subsequently reclaim my health.
In this post, I’ll provide an overview of the practice of applied kinesiology (muscle testing) and start to describe how I use it in my own life. The ideas in this post are reports of my own experience alongside my interpretation of the work of Dr. David Hawkins. David is one of my favorite authors and his work aimed at illuminating the bridge between the secular, linear dimension (form) and the spiritual, non-linear dimension.
The practice of muscle testing today is kind of underground, but seems to be popping up in my life more and more. It’s most commonly used by functional medicine doctors and chiropractors to diagnose illness and find potential root causes of health issues.
This practical area of application sparked my initial interest, but it was David Hawkins whose work applied these concepts in the realm of consciousness that really captivated me.
The History of Muscle Testing
Originally applied kinesiology first gained interest when Dr. George Goodheart noticed that certain muscles would reliably react strongly to a certain stimulus and weak to others such as artificial sweeteners1.
A few years later, this line of study expanded when Dr. John Diamond observed that in the presence of certain emotional stimuli such as joy vs. hatred the body would also reliably go strong or weak2. The most fascinating thing was the repeatability amongst patients of the corresponding positive or negative response. Not shockingly, many practitioners thought this phenomenon was worth investigating further.
Dr. David Hawkins, who at the time was running the largest psychiatric practice in the country, began to employ and experiment with these techniques with his patients. He was astonished at the reliability and repeatability of the testing. This propelled him to begin to study the kinesiologic response as it relates to truth vs. falsehood, and eventually the expansion of human consciousness.
Power vs. Force
Let me start out by saying that there is obviously an entire series of books written by David Hawkins on this concept that do a much more thorough job of explaining what I attempt to summarize below.
In his practice, David set out to determine whether you could use the body’s physiological response of strength vs. weakness to determine the truth about any statement. He found that in a high percentage of his patients' cases there was reliable accuracy.
If a statement was true, the patient’s physiological response would be strong. If a statement was false, it would go weak.
Over the course of 20 years and experimentation across thousands of patients, David then expanded this work by the creation of an accompanying scale he called the Map of Consciousness. I have highlighted excerpts of the formation of this scale in his own words in order to preserve the integrity as well as linked further details here:
The testing technique just described is that recommended by Dr. Diamond in Behavioral Kinesiology. The only variation introduced in our study was the correlation of responses with a logarithmic scale to calibrate the relative power of the energy of different attitudes, thoughts, feelings, situations, and relationships.
The numerical scale elicited spontaneously from test subjects ranges from the value of mere physical existence at 1; up to 600 in the ordinary worldly realm, which is the apex of ordinary consciousness; and then from 600 on up to 1,000, which includes advanced states of Enlightenment. Responses in the form of simple yes-or-no answers determine the calibration of the subject.
With repeated testing—using either individuals or groups—a consistent scale emerged, which correlates well with human experience, history, and common opinion, as well as the findings of psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, medicine, and the famous Great Chain of Being. It also correlates quite precisely with perennial philosophy’s strata of consciousness.
Here is a rendering of David’s original map I had a designer create. I will do into more depth of how to interpret this in the next post.