by David R. Hawkins M.D, Ph.D.

To become more conscious
is the greatest gift
anyone can give to the world;
moreover, in a ripple effect,
the gift comes back to its source.

Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot, by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what Is stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless.

But perhaps from compassion for each other's blindness, we can learn to forgive ourselves, and peace can then be our assured future. Our purpose on Earth may remain obscure, but the road ahead is clear. We may expect great transformations throughout human culture, as mankind becomes more responsible for its knowledge, and thus its deeds. We've become fully accountable, whether we like it or not. We're at the point in the evolution of our collective awareness where we may even assume stewardship of consciousness itself. Humanity is no longer resigned to passively paying the price of ignorance, or its communal consciousness wouldn't have risen to its new level. From this time forth, man may choose to no longer be enslaved by darkness; his destiny can then be certain.

Today, many topics are exploding in the news media: (1) the perversion of religion to the ends of political savagery; (2) the deepening depravity of crimes; (3) the involvement of children in violence; (4) moral confusion in politics; and (5) the bizarre violence of cults. All of these subjects appear against a backdrop colored by the prevalence of lies as social tender and a lack of consensus as to individual and collective responsibility toward one's fellow man.

The larger social issue is how, in view of the dark side of mankind's behavior, one can maintain compassion. It's a relative world; everyone acts from his own level of truth and therefore believes that his actions and decisions are "right" -- it's this very "rightness" that makes fanatics so dangerous. But the real danger to society doesn't come from overt bigotry -- such as white supremacism -- as such damage can at least be monitored. The really grave danger to society lies in the silent and invisible entrainment that stealthily conquers the psyche. In this process, negative attractor fields are covered up by rhetoric and the manipulation of symbols. Moreover, it isn't the obvious message of the negative input that destroys consciousness, but the energy field that accompanies it.

The extreme negativity of many popular works of pseudophilosophy, for example, is obvious if one tests these books. But even being forewarned can't defend us against unwitting entrainment by invisible energy fields that activate when these works are read. One may think that he can maintain his psychic independence by refuting the work intellectually, but mere exposure to the material has a profound negative effect that continues even after the material is intellectually rejected. It's as though, within these negative influences, there's a hidden virus whose invasion of our psyche goes unnoticed.

Additionally, we often relax our circumspection when encountering material that assigns the attributes of spiritual insight or religion to itself; we forget that every heinous crime that man is capable of has been perpetrated in the name of God. While violent cults may be clearly repellent, belief systems that masquerade as piety are far more insidious, for they corrupt by the silent entrainment of invisible attractor fields.

Here, it's best to heed the traditional wisdom that tells us not to fear evil or fight it, but merely avoid it, yet in order to do so, one first has to have the capacity to recognize it. Socrates said, in effect, that without such capacity, youth (including the youth that continues to reside within every adult) is corrupted by low-energy attractor fields. Although Socrates was put to death for trying to teach this discernment, his entreaty remains: Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness. The final issue, then, is the problem of how we may best cultivate and preserve the power of moral discretion.

Our journey of investigation has finally led us to the most critical realization of all: Mankind lacks the capacity to recognize the difference between truth and falsehood.

By humbly surrendering to this awareness, man may be forearmed. When we admit that we're gullible and easily seduced by the senses and deluded by glamour (including intellectual glamour), we have at least the beginning of discernment. Fortunately, in this world of duality, man has been given a consciousness that can instantly detect what's destructive and signal it to his otherwise ignorant mind -- by the grossly visible weakening of his body in the presence of the hostile stimuli. Wisdom can ultimately be reduced to the simple process of avoiding what makes you go weak -- nothing else is really required.

Through frequent practice of this technique, spiritual blindness to truth and falsehood can be progressively replaced by a growing intuitive vision. Some lucky few seem born with this innate perceptivity; their lives remain and undamaged by negative entrainment. But for most of us, life hasn't been so easy; we've spent a great deal of it repairing the damage done by destructive attractors that act like hypnosis. Recovering from a single addiction can take up the majority of a lifetime -- and the most common and insidious addiction is to denial, which "unenlightens" us through our intellectual vanity.

Contrary to its delusions of grandeur, the intellect not only lacks the ability to recognize falsehood, but also grossly lacks the necessary power to defend itself, even if it had the capacity for discernment. Is it irreverent, in light of history's enormous collection of works of intellectual speculation, to say that man's boasted capacity of reason lacks the critical faculty of discernment? The entire field of philosophy is merely evidence that man has struggled and failed for thousands of years to arrive at the simplest recognition of what's true and what's false, or the discourse would have reached some consensus long ago. And it's clear from common human conduct that even if the intellect could reliably arrive at this basic conclusion, it still lacks the power to stop the effect of negative fields. We remain unconscious of the causes of our afflictions while the intellect dreams up all kinds of plausible excuses, hypnotized by these same forces. Even when a person intellectually knows his behavior is self-destructive, this knowledge has no necessary deterrent effect whatsoever; intellectual recognition of our addictions has never given us the power to control them.

In scripture, we're told that man is afflicted by forces unseen. In this century, we've learned that silent, invisible rays of energy are emitted by innocent-looking objects -- the discoverers of radium paid for this realization with their lives. Roentgen x-rays are lethal; radioactive emissions and radon kill silently. The attractor energy fields that destroy us are equally invisible and no less powerful, but they're far more subtle.

When it's said that someone is "possessed," what's meant is that his consciousness has become dominated by negative attractor fields. By this definition, we can see that entire segments of society are so thoroughly "possessed" that they themselves are totally unconscious of their motives. Wisdom tells us that one worships either heaven or hell and will eventually become the servant of one or the other. Hell isn't a condition imposed by a judgmental God, but rather the inevitable consequence of one's own decisions -- it's the final outcome of constantly choosing the negative and thus isolating oneself from love.

Enlightened beings have always described the general populace as being "trapped in a dream"; the majority of people are driven by unseen forces, and for a great deal of our lives, most of us are in despair over this fact. We pray to God to relieve us of the burden of our sins, and we look for relief through confession. Remorse seems woven into the fabric of life. How can salvation be possible, then, for those who have unwittingly become ensnared by such destructive influence?

In fact, even from a merely scientific viewpoint, salvation is indeed possible; in truth, it's guaranteed by the simple fact that the energy of a loving thought is enormously more powerful than that of a negative one. Therefore, the traditional solutions of love and prayer have a sound scientific basis; man has within his own essence the power of his own salvation.