Category Archives: Books

Power vs. Force

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I’m currently reading a book by Dr. David Hawkins called Power vs. Force.  A great book for looking at levels of consciousness and even answers what consciousness is.  The book is very complex and it will take several reads before I absorb all of the messages in it.  It feels intuitively right to me, so I’m going to keep reading it.  I’m about 3/4 of the way done and so far, it has been a very humbling experience.  Whether or not you believe in pure consciousness or what others call “a higher power,” this book is extraordinary in its case for raising your level of existence to the point where you are living more effectively and not only that, with much more wisdom.

There is a scale of consciousness, all the way from shame to enlightenment.  Shame is when you are living so low that suicide seems like the only option and enlightenment is where you are one with everything and live in a timeless manner.  I’ll steal the descriptions of these levels of consciousness from Steve Pavlina’s site because I find that it will be more accurate and detailed than my descriptions, having read this book only once (not yet):

Shame – Just a step above death. You’re probably contemplating suicide at this level. Either that or you’re a serial killer. Think of this as self-directed hatred.

Guilt – A step above shame, but you still may be having thoughts of suicide. You think of yourself as a sinner, unable to forgive yourself for past transgressions.

Apathy – Feeling hopeless or victimized. The state of learned helplessness. Many homeless people are stuck here.

Grief – A state of perpetual sadness and loss. You might drop down here after losing a loved one. Depression. Still higher than apathy, since you’re beginning to escape the numbness.

Fear – Seeing the world as dangerous and unsafe. Paranoia. Usually you’ll need help to rise above this level, or you’ll remain trapped for a long time, such as in an abusive relationship.

Desire – Not to be confused with setting and achieving goals, this is the level of addiction, craving, and lust — for money, approval, power, fame, etc. Consumerism. Materialism. This is the level of smoking and drinking and doing drugs.

Anger – the level of frustration, often from not having your desires met at the lower level. This level can spur you to action at higher levels, or it can keep you stuck in hatred. In an abusive relationship, you’ll often see an anger person coupled with a fear person.

Pride – The first level where you start to feel good, but it’s a false feeling. It’s dependent on external circumstances (money, prestige, etc), so it’s vulnerable. Pride can lead to nationalism, racism, and religious wars. Think Nazis. A state of irrational denial and defensiveness. Religious fundamentalism is also stuck at this level. You become so closely enmeshed in your beliefs that you see an attack on your beliefs as an attack on you.

Courage – The first level of true strength. I’ve made a previous post about this level: Courage is the Gateway. This is where you start to see life as challenging and exciting instead of overwhelming. You begin to have an inkling of interest in personal growth, although at this level you’ll probably call it something else like skill-building, career advancement, education, etc. You start to see your future as an improvement upon your past, rather than a continuation of the same.

Neutrality – This level is epitomized by the phrase, “live and let live.” It’s flexible, relaxed, and unattached. Whatever happens, you roll with the punches. You don’t have anything to prove. You feel safe and get along well with other people. A lot of self-employed people are at this level. A very comfortable place. The level of complacency and laziness. You’re taking care of your needs, but you don’t push yourself too hard.

Willingness – Now that you’re basically safe and comfortable, you start using your energy more effectively. Just getting by isn’t good enough anymore. You begin caring about doing a good job — perhaps even your best. You think about time management and productivity and getting organized, things that weren’t so important to you at the level of neutrality. Think of this level as the development of willpower and self-discipline. These people are the “troopers” of society; they get things done well and don’t complain much. If you’re in school, then you’re a really good student; you take your studies seriously and put in the time to do a good job. This is the point where your consciousness becomes more organized and disciplined.

Acceptance – Now a powerful shift happens, and you awaken to the possibilities of living proactively. At the level of willingness you’ve become competent, and now you want to put your abilities to good use. This is the level of setting and achieving goals. I don’t like the label “acceptance” that Hawkins uses here, but it basically means that you begin accepting responsibility for your role in the world. If something isn’t right about your life (your career, your health, your relationship), you define your desired outcome and change it. You start to see the big picture of your life more clearly. This level drives many people to switch careers, start a new business, or change their diets.

Reason – At this level you transcend the emotional aspects of the lower levels and begin to think clearly and rationally. Hawkins defines this as the level of medicine and science. The way I see it, when you reach this level, you become capable of using your reasoning abilities to their fullest extent. You now have the discipline and the proactivity to fully exploit your natural abilities. You’ve reached the point where you say, “Wow. I can do all this stuff, and I know I must put it to good use. So what’s the best use of my talents?” You take a look around the world and start making meaningful contributions. At the very high end, this is the level of Einstein and Freud. It’s probably obvious that most people never reach this level in their entire lives.

Love – I don’t like Hawkins’ label “love” here because this isn’t the emotion of love. It’s unconditional love, a permanent understanding of your connectedness with all that exists. Think compassion. At the level of reason, you live in service to your head. But that eventually becomes a dead end where you fall into the trap of over-intellectualizing. You see that you need a bigger context than just thinking for its own sake. At the level of love, you now place your head and all your other talents and abilities in service to your heart (not your emotions, but your greater sense of right and wrong — your conscience). I see this as the level of awakening to your true purpose. Your motives at this level are pure and uncorrupted by the desires of the ego. This is the level of lifetime service to humanity. Think Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. At this level you also begin to be guided by a force greater than yourself. It’s a feeling of letting go. Your intuition becomes extremely strong. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by 1 in 250 people during their entire lifetimes.

Joy – A state of pervasive, unshakable happiness. Eckhart Tolle describes this state in The Power of Now. The level of saints and advanced spiritual teachers. Just being around people at this level makes you feel incredible. At this level life is fully guided by synchronicity and intuition. There’s no more need to set goals and make detailed plans — the expansion of your consciousness allows you to operate at a much higher level. A near-death experience can temporarily bump you to this level.

Peace – Total transcendence. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by one person in 10 million.

Enlightenment – The highest level of human consciousness, where humanity blends with divinity. Extremely rare. The level of Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus. Even just thinking about people at this level can raise your consciousness.

Dr. Hawkins says that these levels are numbered from 20 to 1000, with 1000 being the highest possible level of existence by humans.  This has to do with a science called kinesiology.  It has to do with a test using two people and using this simple test to calibrate the levels of certain people, events, and situations.  It is said that below the level of 200 (courage), you are using force and not power, which is nowhere as strong as power and always loses to power.  After 200, there is a gradual progression all the way up to enlightenment.  At 500, unconditional love is the default state of being.  At 600, nonduality is the default state of being.  At 700 or higher, enlightenment is the default state of being.  Enlightenment can be described as pure bliss, ecstasy, complete oneness with everything and everyone, with a timeless component to it.  One becomes pure consciousness at this point and sees that our inner reality and outer reality are but one in the same.  It is a place without thought, just a deep inner knowing of the connectedness of everything.

Dr. Hawkins says, however, that most people never move more than 5 points in their entire lives.  Why is that?  Because at the lower levels (below 200), there is a ton of denial.  Most states of consciousness at that point are being dictated by circumstance and not from our inner power.  Courage is the gateway to get out of this force-ful way of living and moving into a more power-ful state of being that is much more rewarding.  So, what is it that holds these people back, other than denial?  Fear, greed, guilt, and other negative emotions.  It takes a gigantic amount of effort just to progress to another level above where you are, never mind go from shame to enlightenment.

I find this book to be very comprehensive and well-written.  I’m not going to divulge any more information on the book because I’m not quite done with it yet.  You can use these calibrations for anything, books, music, whatever.  He explains in detail how to do this in the book.  I have to say, thus far, it is a highly recommended book that deserves significant attention.  For those of you who are interested in raising your consciousness and experiencing higher states of being, as well as understanding how to get there, this is an exceptional book that rivals anything I’ve read in the last 5 years.  It is a lot of material to absorb, so you may not get all of it in your head with just one read, but the concepts he presents here are universal to the human condition and timeless as far as I’m concerned.

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Reading Before Bed Equals Vivid Dreams

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Here is something that’s happened to me as of late: I stopped watching television, so my new hobby before bedtime is reading fiction books. I find it is a great exercise in imagination and also puts me in creative mode before bed. When I was a child, in elementary school and middle school, I read every night before going to bed, and I would often stay up later than everyone else, just so I could finish the book or one more chapter. I’m starting to become more into reading now that I no longer watch the tube. The natural consequence of this is after I read and set myself off to bed, my mind is still in creative mode from visualizing the story I was reading minutes earlier. This creative activity in my brain carries into my dreams, and gives me at least two to six dreams I remember each and every night.

When I used to watch television, my mind was just accepting what it saw, and was constantly being pushed to the flight or fight response mechanism from all the changing camera angles and blood/violence I saw on the screen. Now that I have books to read, and the whole experience is going on insde my head, and not through my external senses, it is entirely my creation. I think what all the characters look like and I create the scene by filling in the gaps and it is a wonderful experience. There is nothing to react to, all I need to do is create.

People always compare books to movies. First, the book comes out and it is a national bestseller, so they decide to make it into a movie to make more money. And everyone is always so happy they made it into a movie. Then it rules at the box office, and most of the people that go see the movie never read the book, at least not up until that point. Maybe after seeing the movie, they decide to read the book, but most people say they do not have time. I find that if I read a book after seeing the movie, I am forced to put the characters from the movie, the actors who played the characters, into the novel and it takes away from my imaginative power. I would rather imagine the characters the way I see them, making it a richer experience. If I ever read The Shawshank Redemption, every time the narrator describes a scene, I do not want to be thinking of Morgan Freeman’s voice. That would just place celebrities in a book I am reading to form my own impression about the book.

Even when I do read a book after I see the movie, I still find the book was always better. The book always contained more information, different scenes from the movie, and all of that good stuff, so it is not entirely the same. But the affect it has on my dreams is amazing. If I read the book, I start to have much more vivid dreams. They are so amazing, it is incomprehensible. Better than before. It is a mix of people from my life, and the storylines from some of the books all brought together, and sometimes there are things I never experienced, nor had I ever read these experiences, which is really interesting. I find that no one, or hardly anyone, ever wants to discuss dreams and how they relate to real life. I am one who loves to explore the dimension of dreams and its discontinuity. Its lack of persistence from night to night, from dream to dream. In a given night, I can create as many as six vivid scenes, six amazing dreams that put me in six different states of mind. And they all start off like this is my life, this is what I do, this is what is really happening.

Lucid dreams come few and far between, but I did have one about a week ago. That is something I need to get better at. I believe the key to unlocking that realization is when something happens in the dream that would never happen in real life, or would seldom happen and you would never expect it. Like the time I became lucid recently, I found over eighty dollars on the ground, and I thought to myself, “Hold on a minute, this never really happens, and if it does, I must be dreaming.” So that is how I became lucid. Although I really did not do much in that lucid dream except celebrate that I was lucid, it is something that was an indicator of progress, and the more I read, the closer I feel I am to having richer and possibly more lucid dreams.

The whole fact is that I have taken initiative to strengthen my mind and getting rid of the television was the first step. Now that I allocate the time I used to watch to either reading or writing, imagining instead of passively accepting images in front of me, I am unlocking the creative side of me that was dormant for so many years. Luckily, the first place the creativity struck was in my dream world, the place where I can have the most fun, at least in comparison to everyone else who is sleeping. I intend to read from now on every night. Another thing I added to my routine is going to bed earlier. Instead of staying up watching some sitcom I have already seen ten times anyway, I decide to read for maybe 45 minutes to an hour and then go off into dream land. It is less stimulating and relaxes me into sleep, like a warm bath.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my dream vividity and also come back for some more tips on how to have better dreams in the near future. I look at it this way: If you are asleep, would you rather dream vivid dreams, or essentially do nothing while you sleep? The choice is up to you.

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Attitude, Gratitude and Perspective

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Crippling financial beliefs can hamper your financial abundance level. If you believe you cannot make the big bucks, then you will not. I guess that’s all I have to say about that. I am kind of disappointed in myself that I could not elaborate on that point more. Oh, boy, here I go again, another meaningless rant into time and space, just wandering around in the ether, not really getting anything of value done. Let me add this point in here, that if you believe something, then it is so. That is a quote that has changed my life and the lives of the people around me. I know for a fact it is true, so please spare me the skepticism. I have seen it work firsthand in my life, so if you don’t believe me, stop reading now.

I remember a day where I was suffering with the after-effects of radiation on my brain: swelling, pressure, constant pain, with no real end in sight. The doctors had me on steroids, painkillers, and a host of other treatments and I was beginning to lose hope. I felt miserable and I did not know what was going to happen. Then I decided to take control of my life. I bought a book, a simple book, called Creating Power by Kareem Hajee, but it wasn’t just the book that changed my life, it was the attitude I had going into it and the feelings I had about getting to a point where I felt like myself again. It was knowing that everything is a product of the mind and that through conditioning of the mind, you can succeed in any aspect of your life that you want to.

It was all about figuring out what it is you want. In my situation back then, my first and foremost goal was to get healthy, so I focused primarily on that, with daily affirmations, visualizations, expanding on possibilities, and making sure I knew that anything, and everything was possible, and still is possible. One of my favorite examples from the book was he told a story of a man who was getting ready for work and accidentally dropped a jar of mayonnaise on the floor, shattering it everywhere. Some other family member comes in and makes a sarcastic comment about how you dropped the jar and now have to clean it up, therefore making you late for work. The obvious way to react to the situation in a reactive mode, meaning a defensive mode, sort of, is to yell at the family member and become enraged at the jar of mayonnaise, and clean it up grudgingly, and proceed to go to work in a huff, carrying that negative energy with you, and making your whole day miserable.

The alternative way to react to the mayonnaise situation was to say to yourself, “I’m cleaning up the mayonnaise and having a great day.” It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it works. You could spend your whole life in a negative state based on your external circumstances, and it won’t do you much good, but perhaps decoupling the feelings from the external actions and situations can somehow free us from emotional instability. If you can maintain an internal positive state at all times, you are less likely to be ruffled when things don’t go your way. It’s all about keeping things in perspective anyway. Let me explain:

If you are having a good day, a really good day, it may put you in a state of complete joy. You may be bursting with pride or whatever, but in that good day, it helps to realize that in order for this day to be a really good day, you have to look back at some other days and see that they were anything but good. Some of them were downright awful. But it makes the good days that much sweeter, knowing that they are not forever, that cherishing each positive moment is a sacred practice. But getting overly attached to these good days can be kind of unhealthy if you know where I am going with this. When things start to not go your way once again, if you are overly attached to the good days, a bad day could send you into a deep depression. But if you can look past the bad day, observe it, and say to yourself, “This may be a bad day, and it is a part of life, but there are more good days coming, as well as more bad days, as is the nature of life,” you may get a better bearing on understanding life is more about attitude than it is about situations.

I think it’s great whenever I talk to elderly people and I ask them if they are having a good day and they say, “Every day I wake up is a good day.” It shows an overall appreciation for life, no matter how good or bad it may be. If you can appreciate life itself, every part of it, be thankful for the good and the bad, then you are on your way towards enlightenment or whatever you want to call it.

I can honestly say I am thankful for everything, even my unexpected brain cancer. It was another form of “personal growth.” I know that it was a terrible experience, but it changed me for the better in so many ways and allowed me to no longer be afraid of who I really am and to share myself with the world, without any kind of fear or regret. I sometimes forget this and have to constantly remind myself of who I am and what I have overcome and that once I get the inside right, the outside will take care of itself. It is an overall approach to life, to have a positive attitude, to be thankful for everything you receive, and to prosper indefinitely with the fruits of existence.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I overcame the pain, the swelling, and if it ever comes back, if any sort of suffering comes back to me, I will accept it, and change my attitude towards it, be grateful for the health I have, thereby sending me more of the health I need. Good day.

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An Excerpt From My Book

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As you may or may not know, I am currently writing a book about a man who goes into complete solitude in order to escape the pressures of society and he envisions the way the world is supposed to work in the following passage:

“I’m just having trouble overcoming this fear of society. Sure, it’s nice to live in solitude and I’ve made a lot of progress in many areas, but it’s becoming integrated in a society that is so preoccupied with material wealth and superficiality that stifles me from doing so. I’m not of material gain. I care more about the inside of a person than the outside. But society conditions us to look on the outside and take possessions over knowledge. That’s one reason I got away. There is no more value in truth. The value is in creating a life that others would envy, whether or not the life is true. It’s all about ego. Ego and the gratification of that ego. But when you live alone for as long as I have, the go pretty much disappears. You no longer are your birth name. You just become an entity. You don’t really have a specific ego because you are no longer trying to impress people. There is no drive to do so, especially by telling falsehoods. You learn to get by from being an honest and loving person, even if the only person you love is yourself. It’s not that I fear society, I fear the fact that if I were to become part of it once again, I’d be considered the weird one, the one who doesn’t conform to conventional normalities. People will wonder if I’m completely insane or if I’m some sort of serial killer. The things I do will be suspicious in a world bombarded with fear. Even if I were doing activities that resembled Jesus, people would pass me off as a crazy man because no one acts like that anymore.

And it’s a shame no one does. We’ve isolated ourselves anyway. Most people get up, go to work, and then go back home in their safe little house. So it’s not like I’m doing anything that radical. Most people spend the majority of their time in isolation or with very few people. Maybe I’m not that different. Maybe I need to lead a revolution about slowing down and relaxing and thinking, for Christ’s sake! The whole world is almost devoid of thinking. People have so many things to occupy their time that thinking has become of a low priority. Very few individuals think on a regular basis. This is why most of them can’t have nice things. And by nice things, I mean a sense of inner peace, a feeling of connectedness with nature, and an overall good feeling about where their lives are headed. But it’s not really their fault. It’s society’s fault. The media has conditioned them to believe that in order to be happy, you must buy things that will ultimately not make you happy. It’s because the things you’re after aren’t material, but internal. The internal part of yourself can never go away. The materials will come and go. There is not permanence in material wealth, but there is permanence in spiritual and intrinsic wealth. This is why most Zen Buddhist monks own hardly anything. They don’t feel bound by the impulse to always get more things because they have such a good inner self-image and peace that they don’t need external substance to ground them.

I think that’s what we all crave, though, isn’t it? To be able to be content with the things that nature gave us, the food we were intended to eat, and the peace we were intended to have. I feel that if we could all do this, then there would be no more wars, no more famine, no more greed, lust, and the other deadly sins and catastrophes. There would be no more need for entertainment because we would get that from experiencing our daily lives. There would be no need for processed foods as we would be grateful to eat the foods nature intended for us. These are the things that I wonder about. Could we actually go to a place like this, where everyone lives in complete harmony? A place where people help each other out of compassion and not for a reciprocal gain? That we all give, but by giving we also receive, but without actually receiving anything physical? A place where judgments are left at the door and never picked up again. That’s the kind of place I would like to live in. Maybe if I imagine it clearly enough, it will come true. I can see it so vividly in my mind’s eye. There are only peace, harmony, and unconditional love for one another because we all know we’re all pretty much the same. And we embrace that fact by working together to better the world and erase the terrible state that it’s in now. But we don’t organize anything. Whenever an organization forms, there becomes a need for greed and fear-based conformity. Take Christianity for example. They prey on the fact that they believe if you don’t follow a specific book written over 2000 years ago, you will go to a place that’s so bad it’s beyond your imagination.

The real motive is to decouple the fear mentality from the doing good to others mentality. I want people to help each other because they inherently want to, not because they feel that they have to or something bad will happen. I want people to live to their full potential while also making the world a better place. I want them to become a vibrational match for peace, love, and forgiveness. I want to us rely solely on each other and place trust in one another. I don’t want people out for their own selfish causes. I want people to only exist to help each other and do what inspires them. No more need for people do do jobs they hate just to make money. There will be no need because money will eventually become obsolete as everyone’s basic needs will be met and the rest will take care of itself through people living their passions. It will be a form of mutual connectivity that will most likely never divert back to the way the world is now.

The problem with the world is that we were born into it. We weren’t born before it was created, so we’re not really wholly responsible for the way it is. But we’ve become so accustomed to it that we just take it for what it is. We don’t really know where to begin to start correcting it, so we place those thoughts in the back of our minds in a filing cabinet with a lock on it. And when we go to retrieve the information, we realize we don’t have the key for the lock on the filing cabinet, so we decide to accept the world as it is and not make significant steps to change it. And then the cycle perpetuates to the point of utter materialism and gluttony as a society, which leads to the depletion of our natural resources, which leads to the extinction of mankind. And we will never see it coming. Even if we do see it coming, we’ll be too late to stop the disaster that will ensue. ”

There, I hoped you enjoyed the little snipet from my book.  I’m really enjoying writing it, as it is simply a “continued journal,” as the man in the book was completely given up using dates and times to run his life.  It’s kind of like reading someone’s organized thoughts continuously.  It’s a very itneresting book to write, that means it will be fun to read for whoever ends up publishing it.

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Comedy Books I Recommend

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Here is a short list of the comedy books I recommend.  These are books about stand-up and how-to books that I really found informative:

The book I found most enlightening on comedy was definitely Judy Carter’s Comedy Bible because it really had a no-nonsense approach to comedy.  It had pretty good exercises and had some quizzes to determine if you were funny.  It was filled with personal stories, commentary from hundreds of pros, and jokes from more than fifty different comedians.  It also featured how to do a one-person show, write a sitcom, and many other comedy-related things.  Business advice is also very prominent.  I really enjoyed this book.  Of all the books I’ve read, I would recommend this one above everything.

The other two books are very informative and cover the theory of laughter and what makes people laugh.  It talks about different things that cause tension and all that stuff that’s very theoretical in nature.  I would recommend Greg Dean’s book if you’re more of a beginner as it covers basic joke structure and beginning stuff that you really should know already, but he makes a lot of valid points.

How to Be Funny is just a book for being funny in everyday life.  It gave me a ton of great ideas of what creates laughter and basic things like that.  These things have made me a hit at parties and social gatherings, mostly because I think a lot more consciously and on my toes.  It also helps that I have  a sharp wit.  If you don’t have a sharp wit, I’m sure this book will at least sharpen it to a certain extent.  I sure hope you enjoy these three books because I sure did.

Keep in mind that I havnen’t read every comedy book, but I do know when I read bad books and when the books I read are very informative.  Take my word for it, you’ll enjoy these books if you are interested in comedy to some degree.

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