A Teacher
David R. Hawkins
Map of Consciousness & letting go
The transmission
David R. Hawkins was an American psychiatrist and spiritual teacher who, after a long clinical career, became known for a body of work fusing nondual mysticism with a quantified model of consciousness.
In Power vs. Force (1995) he introduced his “Map of Consciousness,” a logarithmic scale calibrating emotional and spiritual states from low-energy conditions such as shame, guilt, and fear up through courage, acceptance, love, and ultimately enlightenment, claiming these “levels” could be detected through applied kinesiology (muscle testing).
His later book Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (2012) distilled a practical method: allowing suppressed feelings to surface and be released rather than resisted or expressed, so that the underlying energy dissipates and consciousness rises.
Hawkins occupies an important and contested place in the mind-power lineage. His “letting go” technique is one of the most influential modern formulations of surrender as an active practice, directly relevant to the surrender stream running from the Christian Quietists through to manifestation’s “release the resistance.” His calibrated levels of consciousness also helped popularize the idea of an “emotional frequency scale”—a framework echoed in Abraham-Hicks’s emotional guidance scale and across contemporary “raise your vibration” teaching.
At the same time, his calibration claims (assigning specific numerical “levels” to people, books, and ideas via muscle testing) are scientifically unsupported and widely criticized, making him a clear case where a genuinely useful psychological practice (felt-sense release) is bundled with unverifiable metaphysical measurement.
What they gave
Letting go / the pathway of surrender: A concrete method of allowing and releasing suppressed emotion—a leading modern surrender practice.
- Map of Consciousness: A scaled model of emotional/spiritual states that popularized the “levels” and “frequency” framing of inner states.
- Power vs. Force distinction: Contrasted coercive “force” with aligned “power,” a framing widely adopted in self-development.
- Bridging psychiatry and nonduality: Lent clinical credibility to nondual and surrender teaching for a mainstream audience.
In their words
Feelings come and go, and eventually you realize that you are not your feelings, but that the real “you” is merely witnessing them. You stop identifying with them. The “you” that is observing and is aware of what is happening always stays the same.
The mind, with its thoughts, is driven by feelings. Each feeling is the cumulative derivative of many thousands of thoughts.
When the clouds are removed, the sun shines forth and we discover that peace was the truth all along. Surrender is the mechanism that uncovers the true nature of our existence.
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it.
We think that our happiness depends on controlling events, and that facts are what upset us. Actually, it is our feelings and thoughts about these facts that are the real cause of our upset. Facts in and of themselves are neutral things.
Love is the energy that silently transfigures every situation.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Advaita and nondual mysticism; Jungian psychology; applied kinesiology; Christian and Eastern contemplative surrender traditions.
- Taught / Influenced: modern “letting go” and surrender teaching; consciousness-calibration communities; “emotional frequency / raise your vibration” spirituality; manifestation emotional-scale frameworks. (Critical note: the kinesiology-based calibration claims are unverified and contested.)
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior1995
- Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender2012