Taking On the Contradictions of the Spirituality Industry
Are David Hawkins's book, “Letting Go,” and his Map of Consciousness simply spirituality-lite?
I was prompted by a commenter on my last article, to dig more deeply into the spiritualist David Hawkins and the spirituality industry in general. I have nearly finished Hawkins’s book on Letting Go, and I am finding it a very mixed bag of truisms, cliches, homespun wisdom, practical advice, and bedeviling contradiction. I use the term spirituality industry associated with Hawkins because spirituality IS a fast-growing and multi-billion dollar network of businesses, programs, workshops, retreats, products, elixirs, etc., all aimed at “higher consciousness”, physical and mental health, emotional fulfillment, and the like.
From the modest million dollars or so amassed by David R. Hawkins’s estate, to the couple of millions accumulated by Marianne Williamson to the billions controlled by Joel Osteen, Tony Robbins, and Oprah, there is no shortage of gurus and leaders willing to “evolve” people and the planet to higher states of being for a tidy sum.
Here is the exchange between reader, labaker@gmail.com, and me:
labaker@gmail.com (See! Comment! I do read, respond, and think deeply about your comments!):
I quite enjoy your articles, Zeus, but this is one of your better ones!
I studied and followed Dr. Hawkins for years and eventually walked away from his cult. I'd suggest looking at Scott Jeffrey's book Power vs Truth, Peering Behind the Teachings of Dr. David Hawkins. I'd certainly never recommend him.
Here is my reply:
I too have fallen away from the metaphysical groups Hawkins emerges from (I.e. Sedona). These can be overly based in methods that are intellectual passed off as spiritual. I am still able to glean some gold in the dross. I am no acolyte. Just call me a refiner. I will engage and process the impure ore offered by gurus for the benefit of those who mistake this spiritualism for pure gold.
THAT is what I intend to do in this article. Now that I have largely finished David Hawkins’s book, Letting Go, I feel I can confidently separate the wheat from the chaff.
David Hawkins is an influential figure in the metaphysical community. Many people refer and recommend his Map of Consciousness as a shorthand for spiritual evolution. Some, like the originators of Focused Life Force Energy (FLFE), use his scale to develop their technologies. Hawkins uses his scale to differentiate and rank certain being states or feeling states according to relative frequencies. Low frequency states are associated with the lower yogic chakras, and high frequency states with the higher chakras. To ascend is to transform lower states into higher states and Letting Go attempts to develop a kind of science of surrender of the lower states, a system of techniques and principles to so ascend more effectively.
Like so many self-anointed spiritual leaders and human evolution advocates, spirituality has become a general catch-all term that sometimes hides the danger of SPIRITUALISM. “Spiritualism” much like racism or scientism, is the fetishization of the TRAPPINGS of spiritual inquiry or advancement for the purposes of individual or in-group opportunity, power, or profit. In spiritualism, an apparent fundamental contradiction emerges: Supposedly IMMATERIAL spirituality has been fashioned into a MATERIAL industry about how NOT to be materially-minded! In the topsy-turvy post-modern world we pay (i.e. “let go” of our dollars) to learn to “let go” of our material habits and attachments.
This may seem like simple flim-flammery, a con or fraud, but I believe there is something even more fundamental at the root— an attempt to resolve the apparently contradictory human condition as both physical AND spiritual into a coherent worldview and plan for life. This brings up a critical and central question for exploration: How can we fruitfully explore, understand, an interact with our own spiritual nature as it runs up against the grain of our physical and social lives?
Most contemporary attempts resolve this unsatisfactorily by materializing the spirit for profit, or spiritualizing the material for profit. (Teaser: I will discuss at the end of this article why I believe both these efforts is an inherently flawed, because they do not recognize the creative and loving RELATIONSHIP between spirit and material.)
Most paid spiritual programs appear as a hierarchy of enlightenment, where one is promoted up various prescribed levels of spiritual achievement. Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness is hardly original but offers rather an effective summary of the basic tenets of the spirituality industry: Lower thoughts, feelings, and vibrations (like hate, apathy, fear, etc.) emerge from BELOW in our lower chakra centers, and prod us painfully to escape our tortured condition and reach for a more sublime and trouble-free existence. Higher divine callings and capacities (located in our higher chakras and spiritual centers) beckon us from ABOVE to an ascendant and transcendent path of universal love, freedom from desire and suffering, and eternal peace.
In Hawkins’s conception each level and the corresponding state of being is given a consciousness number ranging from 1-1000, with higher numbers corresponding with higher states of being. The graph provided by Life-LongLearner.com gives an easily readable summary along with the corresponding numbers:
So we have the basic layout of Hawkins’s approach to spiritual development. What about the particulars? As I listened to Hawkins’s book, Letting Go, I decided to take a few notes on points of what appeared to be key contradictions in an attempt, not to condemn Hawkins, but get at the spiritual/material contradiction at the heart of the human condition. In this sense I was grateful for the opportunity to engage his book. Truth be told, I did not hear much that I had not heard before in Hawkins’s book, but I did gain insight into:
WHY one as to “let go” in the first place.
What may have motivated this book and desire to spiritually ascend.
Problems and contradictions with the “letting go” philosophy.
What important things are missing in the conversation (i.e. spiritual relationship)
WHY does one have to “let go” in the first place?
According to David Hawkins, “letting go” can be a shortcut to material success and having trust that the universe will provide if one simply offers a specific, richly detailed INTENTION. In Letting Go he gives the example of intending to find a small apartment in NYC close to work to escape a grueling commute. He even details the rather narrow criteria on a piece of paper: Reasonable rent, at least 8 floors up an rear facing ( to avoid street noise), on Fifth Avenue in the 70s block near the Central Park entrance and close to the office.
Hawkins (or the example person who was wishing to try “letting go”to acquire this apartment— I couldn’t tell) just “happened” to have an impulse to drive into the city, traffic parted, parking space right out in front of the first real estate office, who just happened to have the only Fifth Avenue apartment for rent come up an hour before, 500 dollars (rent controlled), ninth floor, rear facing, in the 70s block. This person saw the apartment immediately and signed the lease on the spot: “It fit the description of the goals exactly” less than 24 hours after using the “letting go” technique.
So one answer to the question “Why let go?” is that is allows you to get stuff you want by releasing the desire to want it? You see, seeded in the desire of wanting is the notion of “not-having” and the energy of not-having will ensure that you indeed don’t have, i.e. don’t get your dream apartment. Okay, as someone whose third grade teacher said, “Zeus tries too hard,” I definitely am familiar with the reality and misery of trying too hard to achieve something and therefore exerting too much energy and pushing it away. Okay. But I have known many who have “put the energy and intention out there into the universe” and found no one home to receive it and fulfill it. There is something VERY dangerous about assuming these methods work all the time for everyone.
I have known many people who have sincerely and deeply followed Hawkins’s and other gurus’ methods to a tee, and receive nothing but failure. The implication almost always is: 1) “You didn’t do it right”, or 2) “You are not spiritually advanced enough. You aren’t really ‘letting go’.” So now you are left poorer financially, with a physically failed goal, AND an implication that you are a spiritual failure as a person in addition! Some teaching! (In truth, there is a real lesson here: TRUST YOURSELF, try new things, keep learning and working, rest, and don’t place your faith in gurus!)
Could the “success” of these spiritual techniques simply be selective confirmation bias, where you only cull the stories that support the technique and somehow fail to scientifically include and investigate the failures? Might this be tantamount to an infomercial that raves about a couple who began immediately making 40,000 dollars a month in the real-estate market after using some sure-fire technique to flip houses or a prosperity gospel preacher who shares stories of poor people who emptied their wallets to aggrandize his ministry (as an act of faith in a televangelical “God”) only to receive a windfall many times that?
WHAT may have motivated this book and desire to spiritually ascend?
It seems another “why” of letting go (and the apparent motivation of the book) is to release oneself of being abused and objectified by the world. In Hawkins’s process, through responsibility, one moves beyond being a piñata (“Life happens to me”) , toward agency (“I make life happen”), and then through surrender to cooperating with life, and and finally through oneness to “life IS me”, as the below cartoon summarizes.
In other words, one “lets go” to escape victimhood, i.e. being at the beck and call of others and being the brunt of exterior forces. I am not altogether unsympathetic with this aim. We indeed MUST take responsibility for our own lives, but if that becomes too bound up in worldly results, the implication is that we are fatally flawed and hopeless as human beings if we fail. Hawkins’s approach emphasizes PURELY individual endeavor. Like many Western self-help techniques, Hawkins’s lacks adequate discussion of a social or shared component of enlightenment where we learn to help and support each other. Not only are these Western techniques almost always purely individually oriented and motivated, but they are high-stakes as well: Either you are among the successful “spiritual” or unsuccessful and flawed also-rans.
In addition, structural justice is completely ignored in Hawkins’s book. Social injustice is portrayed as a mere product of individually projected illusion:
This is a self reinforcing system of illusions what the enlightened sages mean when they say we are all living in a world of illusion. ALL we experience is our own feelings, thoughts, and beliefs projected onto the world, causing what we see to happen. (my emphasis).
You mean there are no bad actors exploiting or abusing others, just people taking responsibility of their own projections? If spirituality is, in the end, about cultivating selfless service, as even Hawkins himself proclaims, how is this selflessness going to be achieved— by self-oriented “spirituality”?
Perhaps Hawkins should take his own advice (which I happen to agree with): “We are only channels of love, not its origin. Spiritual progress is known to be the result of grace, not the result of our personal endeavors.“ It is in recognizing the gift of grace, the received gift of life and spirit that we are hopefully moved to share with others and serve others with what has been gifted us.
What are the problems and contradictions of “letting go”?
In addition, this book seems to assume, that if one individually removes the blocks to spiritual flow, that a nirvana will manifest itself both “effortlessly” and spontaneously.
As Hawkins says:
Because of being totally surrendered, the impossible became possible, manifesting itself effortlessly and rapidly. We can all doubt this mechanism and look back at things that we wanted and that were achieved through ambition, desire, craving, and even obsessive, frenzied wanting… The truth is we could have gotten them anyway, only without anxiety, fear of not getting, without all the energy expenditure, without all the effort, without all the trial and error, and without all the hard work… Why should we go through pain and suffering to achieve anything in life? Isn’t that a sadistic view of the world and the universe?”
There is precious little in Letting Go to acknowledge the positive necessity and virtue of spiritual desire and effort— desire for relationship with the divine, desire for God, and effort toward these ends-in-themselves. Without this other-directed divine desire and effort as manifested love (the opposite of self-directed covetous desire), there is no positive “pull” to the spiritual. One cannot simply “attain” spirit through one’s mind, nor does spirit simply show up when you get rid of the negative stuff.
Another blind side in the Letting Go book is glaringly present in Hawkins’s notion of “vulnerability,” which he defines purely in negative terms, as weakness, victimhood, or exposure to injury. Positive vulnerability is, in fact, a letting go or a surrender to one’s deeper and more sensitive core, openness to the enhancing information and influence of others, and permeability to the inspiration of God.
One must risk inter-dimensional and interpersonal vulnerability to one’s own spirit and the spirit of the divine. This exposes us humans to emotional risks that can, in fact, traumatize or injure us in the world. There is no foolproof method or technique to escape this, nor would this be desirable EVEN IF it were possible. Being fully human means being fully divine AND fully worldly, an irreducible, creative, loving, dynamic that flames out if one removes either the spirit OR the material.
Escape from pain and negativity cannot be the driving motivation. Rather LOVE AMID suffering is the true test. Recognizing and facing difficulty IN ONESELF AND THE WORLD is ESSENTIAL to compassion as well as spiritual growth and joy.
True vulnerability and facing one’s demons are two of the highest forms of human courage. Hawkins has the mistaken notion that courage primarily involves EXTRICATING that which is painful or challenging:
The level of courage knows that it is not necessary to endure the pain and suffering of the negative emotions or their interference with the satisfactions of life. In courage, we are no longer willing to pay the cost of negativity. We are concerned about the effects of our negative feelings on the welfare of others… On this level… major life problems (of people using the “letting to” technique) are now under control. They are experiencing vocational satisfaction and success. Material wants are supplied. Major problems in relationships have straightened out. They are no longer consciously experiencing pain and suffering, and there is satisfaction from having grown and developed in certain areas.
Contrarily, I happen to strongly agree with Hawkins’s statement on letting go of guilt as consistent with deeper self-respect, courage, and improvement:
Our mind would like to make us think that guilt is laudatory. The guilt mongers of the world love to make an idol of it. Which is more important: To feel guilty or to change for the better? If somebody owes us money would we rather they feel guilty about it, or pay us the money?…
In spirit, pain takes on another context. It is pain FOR something highly valued and good. It is sacrifice. Rather than being erased, pain in the spiritual context is embraced, SHARED, and TRANSFORMED in a higher love for a higher purpose.
What important things are missing from “letting go” (i.e. relationship)
From the standpoint of Hawkins’s “letting go” framework and accompanying philosophies and techniques, Jesus Christ was an abject failure on every level:
Jesus wasn’t able to manifest much materially, starting as a poor carpenter, and ending as a poor wandering preacher.
Jesus hung out with the unsuccessful, “unspiritual” ranks of tax collectors, prostitutes, and lepers. Clearly, from the “letting go” framework”, he was unable to put negativity and suffering behind him.
Jesus brought on his own execution by knowingly challenging authorities, when he could have just “let go” and kept his nose clean.
Jesus failed to “let go” on the Cross expressing victimhood (“God why have you forsaken me?”) until his last moment of realization before his last breath (“I commend my spirit to thee”).
And yet Jesus Christ is seen as one of the foremost avatars of spiritual courage and advancement in the history of humankind. Hmmmmm. Maybe Hawkins has a very different idea about spirituality and “letting go” than Jesus? Here are Jesus’ own words from the Sermon on the Mount:
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:21)
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:1-4)
Hawkins believes in letting go of negativity to get positive material goods, escape self-torment and guilt, and achieve “oneness” with the universe. Jesus believes in letting go of pretension, pride, worldliness, sanctimony, and cowardice in order to receive the rewards of spirit and favor of God. Hawkins’s is a therapeutic technique. Jesus’ is a spiritual practice. I invite you to compare these two systems in your own being, and find which calls more to you, if either. My character aligns with the latter.
I have always been drawn to the Christian mystic tradition of Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, and the Desert Mothers and Fathers. As succinctly summarized by Bernard McGinn, this Christian mystic tradition embodies “...new ways of knowing and loving based on states of awareness in which God becomes present in our inner acts” not in elevated states of psychological pleasure, as nice as that may be. In Christian mysticism, suffering which brings greater divine presence is good, and pleasure which removes one from the divine is to be “let go.”
What is the fundamentally difference between Christian mystic notions of spirituality and Hawkins’s? I believe the answer can be found in RELATIONSHIP.
Christian mystics understood that so-called worship was neither “obedience” in its prostrating vulgar sense NOR ascension to godhood, but rather a deep and full indwelling and relationship with the divine, so that a person experiences the PRESENCE of God “as” and “in” oneself. Unlike the new agers, a mystic would never say “I am God” (subsume God into you), nor “I am in servitude to God” (in the sense of becoming an unthinking, unquestioning, unchoosing subject of God), but rather a deep relation and friendship with a divine creator, generator, and sustainer of life on all levels, physical, emotional, mental, psychological, and spiritual.
Love becomes possible as an act of SELF MEETING OTHER— “indwelling” [the intimate experience of interior divine presence] MEETING “outreaching” [expansive transcendent and transformative connection with others and the world]. One both deeply inhabits oneself with all one’s sufferings, hopes, faiths, and joys, and grows beyond oneself with one’s challenges, dreams, learnings, creations, connections, and endeavors.
I will talk a little more about this in a later article. I have learned not to load too much on to one post. Let me know your own inspirations and thoughts, and I may incorporate them into this later article!
All the best, Zeus