This book sits right at the border between spiritual mumbo jumbo and science. It is presented as a thesis of a serious research that dived deep into the science of consciousness, by a researcher who is a psychiatrist, a clinician, and then a self-proclaimed spiritual teacher even though he is openly an agnostic.
That’s right, it is one of those books where the author simultaneously talking about spirituality but berating religion that introduced the spirituality.
In this book Dr. Hawkins addresses the many different levels of consciousness, where he heavily uses a numbered scale that looks impressive at first, but then become questionable due to the fact that he never explained where he got the numbers from. This makes the numbers and figures highly subjective.
Here’s an example, using a scale of 1-1000 (with 1 as the lowest and 1000 as the highest level, while 200 marks the benchmark level for attaining consciousness): “The calibrated consciousness level of humans evolved slowly. At the time of the birth of the Buddha, the collective consciousness of all of mankind calibrated at 90. It then rose to 100 by the time of the birth of Jesus Christ and slowly evolved over the last two millennia to 190, where it stayed for many centuries, until the late 1980s. Then, at about the time of the Harmonic Convergence in the late 1980s, it suddenly jumped from 190 to 204-205, where it stayed until November 2003, when again, it suddenly jumped from 205 to its current level of 207. At the present time, approximately seventy-eight percent of all humanity calibrates below consciousness level 200, although that figure is only forty-nine percent in America. The significance is that the consciousness level of close to eighty percent of the world’s population is still below 200 and therefore dominated by primitive animal instincts, motivations, and behaviors (as reflected in the nightly news).”
So, first of all how can he quantify the COLLECTIVE consciousness of ALL mankind during the time of the Buddha? Then how can he measure the growth to 100 by the time of Jesus Christ as if it’s like a stock price movement that we can monitor on a screen, and to 204-205 in a very specific date November 2003 (that he never care to explain – spoiler alert: after further research, it was a Harmonic Concordance event in New York that he of course attended)? And what is the methodology behind his conclusion that the consciousness level of 80% of the world population is still below 200? He even presented a table with the level of consciousness of animals, again without explaining how he got the numbers from.
Which brings us to the next question, if Dr. Hawkins did not write this book using the scientific approach (with the sequence of: thesis, data gathering, findings or the interpretation of data, and then conclusion), and instead he jumps right to conclusion using the made up data that magically appears without explanation, why did he has to present his thesis as science? I suspect, to give credibility to his bland spiritual teachings.
Here’s more consciousness (or calibration) levels according to Dr. Hawkins, on a same scale of 1-1000: Bacteria 1, fish 20, reptiles 40, birds 105, wolves 190, deer 205 (is he telling us that the consciousness of 80% of world population is lower than a deer?), cats 240, family cat 245, cat’s purr 500 (no idea why), and a whole bunch of others. Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens 600,000 years ago was 80-85, the allegory of Adam and Eve calibrates at 70, Socrates’ statement calibrates at 700, megalomaniac leaders such as Hitler and Napoleon were in the 400s at first and then crashed, Yasser Arafat went from 440 to 65 because “peace would be the greatest threat possible” (sure, not biased at all), while he actually said skeptics have consciousness level below 200 (implying that we shouldn’t question his methods).
Moreover, according to Dr. Hawkins the consciousness level of Karl Marx is 130, Thomas Aquinas 460, Galileo 485, Aristotle 498, Newton 499, Marcus Aurelius 445, Shakespeare 465, Darwin 450, Einstein 449, Lao Tzu 610, Mahatma Gandhi in his 700s, Mother Teresa 710, the Buddha 1000 (of course), he even labelled the consciousness level of God, but at infinity level (I swear it’s like my kid assigning power levels to his imaginary play, with Gen-Z lingo of plus aura or minus aura). And Dr. Hawkins’s own teachings? From other sources outside this book, we can find that his books calibrate from 850-999.5 ranges! More than the level of Catholicism 510, the energy level of Christmas 535, Kabbalah 605, Ramayana 810, and far exceeded any other 20th century spiritual guru.
To be fair, there are some good psychological textbook contents in the book, especially when Dr. Hawkins refer to Freudian theories, while if we strip away the calibration levels of the various emotions from greed, fear, anger, all the way to love; his arguments actually make psychological sense. But when he does that, he uses unnecessarily big words to describe something simple. And then afterwards he often proceeded to write something factually absurd, such as his argument that a kamikaze pilot is suicidal in nature (yes the end goal is death, but it’s not performed by a depressed person but rather by a person with a sacrifice mission to destroy the enemy. More Patriotism, less “act of despair”).
He also criticizes “organized [Western] religion” quite often, but ironically using very weak examples to make his points, which shows the shallow depth of his understanding of religion (they all do, even Sam Harris, nay, especially Sam Harris). And not to mention his gross corruption of the sacred teachings of the [Eastern] Vedic spirituality, where he weirdly tried to blend his cliche interpretation of spirituality with his version of subjective science.
THE CHAOS THEORY 