In the spiritual life should you follow your heart, or follow your head?

Posted on by James Rowse in Blog, Philosophy and Spirituality, Practical Exercises

Since the spiritual realm lies beyond the mind – and many people even argue that the mind is the enemy of spirituality – should we assume that all our emotional impulses come from an inspired source, and should be followed? Or do all these impulses need to be passed through the mind before they are to be followed? Or is there an even higher principle we can apply that transcends both?

This is actually a very simple matter, but it tends to cause much unnecessary confusion. After all, following our heart at all times appears to open us up to dangerous emotional caprices – and subjecting every motion of the heart to the cold rationality of the mind would surely cut us off from all the inspirations of the higher spiritual faculties. So how do we decide when to follow our heart, and when to follow our head? The Hawkins scale of consciousness gives us the answers.

Negative emotions like shame, guilt, grief, fear, desire, anger and pride are all very low in consciousness, and fall below the crucial threshold of 200 that distinguishes ‘power’ from ‘force’. On the other hand, rational intellectual enquiry calibrates at 400, making it vastly superior in consciousness to these negative feelings. In effect, this means that all negative emotions should be rationally examined, to the extent that this is possible. On the intellectual level, we cannot always talk ourselves out of a negative emotion with reason, but it pays to examine the feeling and determine whether it actually has a rational basis.

For example, shame is essentially an emotion that tells us ‘you are bad’. A person who accepts this feeling uncritically as evidence that they are bad is likely to suffer from poor self-worth, and all the problems that come along with it. Giving in to the feeling without any rational analysis of it is essentially agreeing that you are bad. A rational response to the feeling of shame would go something like “I did some bad things in the past, and I will ensure I do not repeat those mistakes. But I am a perfect child of God with inherent self-worth. These feelings do not in any way represent my true self.”

Anger, fear and suspicion are all emotions that can play major havoc with our lives, especially in relationships. For example, one person in the relationship may fear being abandoned by the other; perhaps due to having been abandoned in the past. This feeling, if unchecked by reason, is likely to lead to possessive behaviour, suspicion, and ultimately to the very abandonment they feared in the first place.

Not all emotions are irrational, however. If the person in this example rationally considers their feelings and finds solid evidence that the other person is uncommitted to them, then ending the relationship may be a reasonable option. Our emotions, good and bad, are all there to tell us something, after all. The only problem is that they don’t always tell us what we need to know at the time, because we often feel old emotions in new situations due to stuck emotions and resonances. We may be in an objectively great relationship, but the fact of being in a relationship may have a certain resonance that brings up old negative emotions from past experiences, which we then blame on our current partner.

Anger can be justified sometimes, too. For example, feeling anger at a grave injustice is known in Christian theology as righteous anger. The classic example of righteous anger is Christ’s overturning of the merchants’ tables in the temple. Ultimately Christ taught love and forgiveness as the highest principles, but there were certain circumstances where swift action against an injustice was called for. But we must use our rational faculty and be certain that what we are feeling is truly righteous anger, and not mere self righteousness.  Spoiler alert: it is almost always the latter.

As helpful as the intellectual faculty can be, we should not stop at rationally analysing our emotions. There is an even higher principle than the mind, which begins at level 500 on the Hawkins scale – the level of Love. The vast majority of people spend their lives in the bottom half of the scale, and comparatively very few ever make it past the level of Reason. But even though it is rare for people to move their entire consciousness past 500, most people still use the principle of love in their lives, either by expressing love for other people, or through an appreciation of the concept of universal love.

True love is not the same as infatuation, nor attraction, nor like. Indeed, you can love a person without even liking them – though one should probably not get into a relationship with such a person. But rather than being a feeling, true love is the beginning of the direct experience of the goodness of the Universal Spirit, either by direct contemplation of the Spirit, or by appreciating the positive qualities of the Spirit reflected in another person. Very often this experience is accompanied by tangible positive feelings in the heart, but it does not have to be. As we open ourselves up to a deeper and deeper experience of the goodness of the Spirit, we move beyond the mere human understanding of love into the higher divine experiences of it, designated by Hawkins as Joy (calibrated at 540), Peace (600) and Enlightenment (700+).

When we experience true love or any of the states beyond it, the feeling does not need to be analysed. It is above reason, and analysing it with the mind can only weaken or destroy it. But even if we are not permanently in a high spiritual state, we can still evoke the power of these states to deal with negative emotions or any other problems in our life whatsoever. How? It’s simple – cease worrying and refer the problem to God.

This is the principle that makes Emmet Fox’s The Golden Key so powerful. Don’t think about the problem – think about God instead. By raising our consciousness above the base fears we feel about a problem, to the higher divine principles of God – we raise our consciousness on that particular matter to a higher state even than reason. Even if we only experience a faint grasp of a true spiritual knowing – or to say it another way, if we have faith; if we believe in the true spiritual principles without yet having experienced them directly and palpably – this is enough to get results.

Bring God to all your problems; bring love into all your relationships – these principles are higher than your fears and shame. These principles are higher even than the clearest reasoning in the world could ever be. You will discover that there is no knot in the world that can’t be untied if God is put on the case, and no relationship that cannot be redeemed at least in some way by bringing faith and love to the table.

It cannot be said often enough that a successful relationship must be based on true love, rather than infatuation or mere sexual attraction. But too many people give up on relationships where true love exists, simply because they go through a period of boredom or conflict. In his wonderful book on the Sermon on the Mount, Emmet Fox laments this defeatist approach, reiterates Christ’s statements against divorce, and then writes:

“As none of us is perfect, and the complainant is certain to have his or her own faults no less than the delinquent, he or she should endeavor, if it can possibly be done, to make the present marriage a success by persistently knowing the Spiritual Truth about both parties. If the aggrieved partner will steadfastly see the Christ Truth about the other one, then, in nearly every case a happy solution will be the outcome. I have known a number of instances where marriages which were on the point of being dissolved were saved in this way with the most satisfactory results. One woman said, after a few months of handling her problem spiritually, ‘The man I was going to divorce has disappeared; and the man whom I married has come back. We are perfectly happy again.’”

As Fox implies, there are some cases where separation may be necessary – such as physical abuse or similar. But these marriages were unlikely to be based on true love in the first place. And it’s wise to remember that even these relationships could theoretically be redeemed, with enough faith.

So to return to the original question – should we follow the heart, or follow the head? If our heart is leading us to experience negative emotions, then we should follow our head and subject those emotions to reason. Then once the problem is clearer, we should invoke the higher principles of the heart by bringing faith and love to the situation.

So do we really need the mind at all? There is a place for both of them, but the more our consciousness expands, the more we will turn straight to the spirit. The intellectual phase, after all, is just that – a phase in the spiritual journey. We cannot become enlightened spiritual beings without it, but as we grow in the spiritual life, true spiritual knowing begins to take the place of intellectual knowledge.

But please do not underestimate the importance of the intellectual phase in the meantime. Whenever you turn to the Spirit, it is best to know exactly what your problem is, and the mind will help in understanding this. For example, if you are feeling shame, or the tangible expression of the belief that you are bad, it is better to contemplate God and say ‘please help me to understand that my true nature is the same as yours’ rather than to say ‘please let some of your goodness rub off onto my filth.’ Or if you unfairly suspect a partner of being uncommitted, it is better to contemplate God and say ‘please let me see all these wonderful divine qualities in my husband’ than to essentially say ‘please let me somehow see past all his lies and deception to the divine being he is obscuring with all his terrible behaviour.’

The mind and the higher heart principles both play an important role in our spiritual development. But as for the lower heart principles, or negative emotions – all of these calibrate below Hawkins’ crucial level of 200. The lower principle must always be subject to the higher.

How the Universe evolves the world using the path of least resistance

Posted on by James Rowse in Blog, Philosophy and Spirituality

Last week I wrote about the common spiritual understanding that the Law of Attraction will always follow the path of least resistance to manifest ideas into reality. I then expanded on this concept and showed that the Universal Spirit uses the path of least resistance to slowly evolve our souls into the perfection that he envisaged for us from the beginning of time. In this second part of the article, I will examine how the Spirit uses the same path of least resistance to evolve the physical world as a whole.

As I explained last week, God’s grand plan of perfected humanity and a glorious perfected physical world are, of course, nothing but his own perfect visualisation gradually unfolding into physical manifestation. There is no reason at all to assume that this divine power of creative visualisation operates any differently when it is used on the individual scale or on the universal scale. It is precisely the same faculty operating on a vastly different scale – as, after all, we are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, the creation of perfected human souls expressing the individualised glory of God, and the creation of a perfected world expressing the same both gradually unfold via the path of least resistance.

Once we understand this – and along with it, the impersonal indifference of God on the universal scale – it is impossible to view worldly circumstances as anything other than the slow but perfect unfolding of this grand plan. We are exactly where we ought to be at the present moment, and the world is exactly where it ought to be, also. A deep understanding of these truths will bring us peace and any worry or excitement about the state of the world will cease.

Worry or excitement about the state of the world are really just expressions of our own human preferences about how the world should be. Virtually since Jesus was crucified, Christians have been predicting that the end was nigh. And although New Thought, as a public and organised movement, goes back a far shorter period than dogmatic Christianity, New Thought writers have ever predicted that the Great Awakening was imminent.  Yet from the peak of the New Thought movement a century ago until now, society seems to have declined sharply in consciousness by most quantifiable measures – even the standard of spiritual thought seems to have taken a dive. Admittedly, even the early New Thought movement had its “get rich quick” set, who painted the Universe as nothing more than an infinite ATM – but intellectually solid, scholarly men like Thomas Troward also enjoyed a significant following, and true spiritual men like Joseph Benner were making an impact in their own way.

I can’t even begin to imagine how disheartened Troward would have been if he could’ve gazed into a crystal ball and seen the world that produced TikTok and Justin Bieber. He could only have wondered what on earth had gone wrong, and whatever happened to the glorious dawning of the New Age. And yet even in this disordered mess of a society, which at first glance appears to be crumbling into intellectual, spiritual and artistic ruin – many, many more people are getting a first taste of true spiritual principles than possibly ever before. So is it the great awakening, or is it the end times? Or are we simply witnessing a series of opposing trend forces, some of which are trending towards disintegration and others of which are slowly trending towards truth and consciousness?

We are witnessing the latter, and all of these trends are following the path of least resistance. It’s just like our example last week – the Universal Spirit guides an individual soul in its evolution by exploiting its weaknesses, waiting for the soul’s reaction after things become unbearable – relying on its hatred of suffering to ensure the soul claws its way out of the pit – then waiting for things to become unbearable again. Society is just a collection of individual souls, and so it works exactly the same way.

But of course, some people in society have more power than others, and therefore more influence over its direction. By the very nature of the case, the people who rise to positions of power tend to be in a relatively low state of evolution, where the lust for material and worldly gain are the first priority, and high-minded principles are a distant second, if they come into the equation at all. Being born into the right families and knowing the right people also helps a great deal to get along in this world, and it is a simple matter for the Spirit to ensure that only people at a worldly stage of evolution are born into these families.

The reason why the world must presently be governed by this class is because we have not yet evolved to a stage where it can be governed by a wise and benevolent power – the people simply would not co-operate with it. Witness the treatment of Jesus. Until we are at a point where we can consciously and fruitfully direct the evolution of the planet, we must be forcefully subject to the tides of the Universal Will, ever directing us on towards our perfection, and ever indifferent to the method employed.

The easiest way for the Universal Spirit to force society onward is to appeal to the base instincts of the worldly status seekers in positions of power. Hence, since the beginning of time virtually all political leaders with any significant influence in the world have been amoral kleptomaniacs, brazenly acting in self interest at all times and regarding the good of the people as a matter of secondary importance, at best. This has never been more obvious than at the present day, when governments all around the world are selling out their own countries to serve global financial interests, without a moment’s pause. In virtually all countries in the world, the betrayal of the citizens is now so thorough and egregious that politicians barely even maintain a facade of representing their own constituents.

Again, God is using their base instincts to lead the world in a certain direction – in this case, creating a global system which will in time be used to bring truth and freedom to the whole world. Whether we see this framework used for good within our own lifetime, or whether it takes centuries or millennia is none of our concern. It is all part of a Grand Plan that cannot fail – and whatever events take place within that Grand Plan – whether they be joys or sorrows – will be used to further our own soul’s evolution.

However, it cannot have failed to escape anyone with their eyes open that the pace of change seems to be rapidly accelerating, especially over the past two years. For the people in power, this appears to be a great tactical blunder, caused by their exponentially increasing greed and impatience. For it is true that they now have tighter controls over the population than ever before, but more people are awake to their true designs than ever, also. Hence, we see the first rays of light shining at the end of what perhaps may have looked like an endless tunnel of darkness. Again, it may be some time before any significant awakening occurs, but the mechanisms are clear. Presently, most people find that self-delusion and complacency are the paths of least resistance, but in the past two years, many complacent people have realised that it is more painful to continue to delude themselves than it is to admit the truth and begin to do something about it. For these people, self-honesty and action is now the path of least resistance. When the remainder of society decides the same thing, then change will come.

Yes, everything happening in the world, no matter how distasteful to human preferences it may seem, will eventually set in motion an opposite reaction that will change things for the better. Allow me to give a couple of random examples.

The sexual appetites of society used to be governed by religious dogma, and then later by societal conventions loosely based on these same dogmas. Thus, for most people the path of least resistance was to get married and live a respectable life – thereby enabling them to indulge their sexual appetites and remain in good standing with wider society. However, the sexual revolution in the mid 20th century changed all that, and made ungoverned sexual behaviour an acceptable fact of society. Without religious and societal expectations to govern people’s actions, the path of least resistance naturally became the path of indulgence. The result of this was that marriage and true love declined while divorce skyrocketed, as did STDs, unwanted pregnancies and shameless promiscuity. After high speed internet was invented, many people – mostly men – found themselves hopelessly addicted to porn and lacking motivation to form real relationships or do anything else with their lives, so all-consuming had the addiction become.

At this point, many men found that the path of indulgence had become too painful, and that the new path of least resistance was abstinence from pornography, since it seemed to carry with it many overall benefits to their lives. The number of abstainers may still be minuscule compared to the number of users, but it is significant, and growing. When such people learn to govern their sexual behaviour, they are doing so with a profound understanding of the reasons behind this self-restraint. Once this understanding becomes widespread, society as a whole will have a far greater reverence for sexual purity than blind obedience to a religious dogma could ever have taught it. Thus, the original descent into sexual anarchy was a stepping stone to society’s greater evolution.

Corporate greed gives us another great example of the shifting tide. Many large companies are now refusing to hire full time staff, preferring instead to use the services of contractors, as it absolves them of any legal obligation to provide benefits to their workforce, and makes cutbacks and layoffs much simpler. Many companies are even cutting back on office space to save on rent, and expecting staff to work from home on a regular basis. In the short term, this appears to be a gross infringement of worker’s rights, and work from home arrangements appear to be unhealthy, unnatural and potentially isolating.

For a great many people, being a wage slave to a corporation was the safest path to take in life – the path of least resistance.  But many contractors are now finding that is no longer the case, and as such they are beginning to awaken to the truth, which is that the corporations need them a lot more than they need the corporations. Many are beginning to see themselves as free agents, able to set their own conditions, and refusing to work with companies who cannot meet these conditions. Working from home has given them the first taste of flexible working arrangements, which can be beneficial to their mental health when proper precautions are taken and their social needs are met. Many are beginning to feel, for the first time, that they are not slaves to a corporation but businessmen, selling themselves as the product. This growing consciousness of their own power and worth will no doubt lead to even further circumventing of large corporations in the future. Thus, by following the path of least resistance – greed – these corporations have set trains of consequences in motion that will eventually bring their downfall.

I could go on and on with such examples, and probably will do so in a future article. But for the sake of brevity, I shall leave it at that and conclude with some comments about where we presently find society on the scale of consciousness, specifically the Hawkins scale of consciousness expounded in the book Power vs. Force.

Just as the evolution of a soul will always follow the path described by Hawkins’ scale, so will society follow the same course. The various levels below 200 on the scale are designated as “force”, or the stage where individuals are at the mercy of circumstances, and have not yet discovered their true inner power. On a societal level, this phase corresponds to all of human history up until this point. The majority of human history has been dominated by organised religion, and in a religious society, the path of least resistance is the path of obedience to dogma.

Christianity primarily used fear to control people’s behaviour. Of course there are many different levels of adherence to Christianity, and it would be unfair to deny that it inspired many into advanced spiritual states. But the predominant force that influenced most of its adherents was fear. Buddhism and Hinduism did the same in the east – inspiring many in total to great spiritual heights, and controlling the masses with superstitious threats about karmic consequences. After the wholesale abandonment of organised religion in the 20th century, we entered this brief, inevitable period of base indulgence, where sex, food and mindless entertainment seem to form the basis of most people’s happiness. But the resurgence of interest in New Thought principles in the last 20 years has shown that, as a society, we have evolved beyond that state. Most of us will not be content to derive meaning from base desires for very long. Most people are actually very unhappy living in this state, and many are seeking higher answers. For the first time in history, those answers are available.

Most will not seek the highest answers, as we are now only moving into the earliest stages of personal empowerment, where worldly achievements are the main goal.  But as people grow in power, their ascent up the scale of consciousness tends to accelerate, as powers add to powers and they begin to evolve more rapidly. Hence we have every reason to expect that the next phases of the world’s evolution will be more rapid than the first. But as we are perhaps only now breaking through the level of 200 – a process which will take some time in itself – be aware that we still have a long way to go before we even get to the intellectual level, or Reason, which begins at 400, let alone the advanced spiritual levels.

Many excited New Agers have already declared that the intellectual phase is over – it was tried during the Enlightenment phase, and was found wanting because it was not united to spirituality. But all true intellectualism is in harmony with spirituality, and any philosophical reasoning that denies spirituality or affirms the meaninglessness of life is a product of the levels below 200. The Enlightenment was an arrogant and vain intellectual movement that attempted to replace the laws of nature with laws of man’s own devising, instead of understanding and working with the natural order. No-one in the levels above 400 could have any possible use for it.

But wherever society happens to be on the scale of consciousness, let us always be at peace with what is happening in the world, even though many things may look dire to human preferences. No negative train of causation can remain long in the world before it generates a positive backlash, all leading us towards our destiny of a perfected society.

In next week’s article I will expand on this point, and show how living in a state of resignation can bring us peace.

Power vs. Force: the great level 500 barrier – getting past the mind

Posted on by James Rowse in Blog, Philosophy and Spirituality

This is the second article in a series on David Hawkins’ landmark work Power vs. Force. I’m assuming that all readers who continue past this point have a basic acquaintance with Hawkins’ scale of human consciousness, in which 1,000 represents the highest possible ascension of human spirituality, and 200 represents the critical line in the sand separating spiritual empowerment from slavery.

Last week I wrote about the most common barrier to spiritual ascension, which is the level of Pride – the final hurdle before the soul reaches spiritual empowerment. When a soul on a mission to raise their consciousness breaks through the pride barrier, progress through the 200s and 300s is relatively free and easy. I say “relatively”, because – of course – any progress still requires a tremendous amount of commitment. Learning, reading, listening, self-observing, meditating, clearing – all of these things are an essential part of the journey of a soul ascending upwards through the 300s and into the level of the 400s. Learning in particular becomes a very important part of the journey as the soul enters and ascends the 400s – the level of Reason. As the soul reaches the higher levels of Reason, it begins to appreciate spiritual truths on a deeper, soul level. This is what the Three Principles founder Sydney Banks was referring to when he drew a distinction between knowing and KNOWING. Knowing is simply an intellectual appreciation of spiritual truths. KNOWING is accepting these truths on a deeper soul level – understanding them to be so true that you almost feel them, you might say.

This second kind of knowing is the realm of the higher 400s – the apex of the human intellectual state. Of course, there is no limit to the amount of knowledge that we can acquire, spiritual or otherwise. But knowledge is simply not enough to ascend past the point of 500. In order to do that, we must begin to love. As St. Paul says:

“If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-2

In verses 4 – 7 he continues to describe what this charity consists of, and it is a perfect word portrait of someone at the level of the 500s:

“Charity is patient, is kind: charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up; Is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

So how do we begin to love? Part of it is quite practical: we work on the heart chakra through clearings, meditation, yoga and so on. This begins the process of activating and opening the heart and clearing the path for its full awakening. And then, for the fire to be ignited, we must actually begin to love. Heart chakra work sets this process in motion, but it does not necessarily complete it.

One of my yoga teachers recommended reading spiritually inspiring books of saints and holy people who lived their lives in a state of love. This is a highly beneficial practice that can help ignite the flame and help us get over the crucial barrier of knowledge based progress, and into higher states of spiritual ascension. Refraining from negative thoughts, criticisms or judgments of others is another part of the equation. Replacing these with positive, loving thoughts and doing good works for others all play their part. It is not difficult to do, but it is a different mode of operation to that which we have been using in the lower levels of the spiritual scale.

We simply can’t think our way into the 500s.  With that in mind, it’s not surprising that so many well-known intellectual figures top out at exactly 499 in Dr. Hawkins’ calibrations.  Although they may only have been one point of consciousness away, 500 is truly a spiritual Rubicon – difficult to cross, but once a soul has experienced life on the other side, there is no turning back.

Power vs. Force: The great pride barrier

Posted on by James Rowse in Blog, Philosophy and Spirituality

If you haven’t read Dr. David Hawkins’ seminal work Power vs. Force, I strongly encourage you to do so. Spoiler alert: using applied kinesiology (muscle testing) Hawkins discovered that the scale of human consciousness can be mathematically plotted on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 1,000. Therefore, for probably the first time in human history, we have a way of mathematically gauging a person’s level of spiritual understanding. The title of the book refers to the critical level of 200 – below which, a person is in the state of Force, or spiritual disempowerment – and above which, they are in varying degrees of Power.

In a series of articles over the next few weeks, I will be examining some of the crucial barriers that people hit as they attempt to ascend up the scale. We’ll start with the most common barrier, which is the level of 175, or pride. This is the highest level of Force, and a very, very common level that people in civilised countries find themselves in.

However, I must begin by pointing out that Power vs Force is an extraordinary work, but not an infallible one. It does contain numerous errors, which I will also be attempting to unwind in the course of this series. The first one concerns Hawkins’ reported calibration of the United States. Hawkins reports the country as a whole having an average consciousness in the 400s. My own testing confirms it. This is an absolutely extraordinary result, and one which seems at first glance to be an anomaly. Although someone at the level of 400 has barely even set up base camp on the mountain of spiritual growth, it is still a formidable level of consciousness, and implies that the person has gained at least an intellectual understanding of spiritual truths, and a great deal of self-control and personal power. I don’t know of any country where this describes the average person. Sadly, most people in most countries are despiritualised wage slaves, with aspirations to higher things, but who are shackled by their emotions and limiting beliefs.

This is perhaps a fair description of the level of pride (175 – 200). In fact if we recalibrate the question, we’ll find that the majority of people in the United States fall into this level. We also get the same result if we ask for the average level of consciousness, excluding people over the level of 500. This is a fair question given the extreme rarity of attaining the level of 500. If we exclude these extraordinary cases, we find that ordinary people are far more likely to top out at 180. So we’ve found a tremendously common “glass ceiling” of consciousness in the level of pride.

The first reason why people get stuck at this level is simply because it’s the first level that begins to feel in any way good. However, it is the false fleeting satisfaction of having achieved hollow, ego-based desires. It’s the level of material worth and worldly status – indeed, the level of pride, as the name indicates. It is the first level where the ego has some material with which to build its delusions of grandeur. These delusions severely impede the search for truth, and the ego is far more likely to make up stories about how great life is than to face up to the deep spiritual void that exists under the surface. These stories, however, are deeply unconvincing. They are like a paper moon on a cardboard sea. The decisive factor at this stage of evolution is whether the soul will continue to ask questions, go searching for the answers, and be honest in its own self-assessment, or whether it will choose to drown out the deafening silence of the great spiritual void with a chorus of self-congratulation.

When that inner voice of dissatisfaction is heeded, and the questions it raises are followed up with honest enquiries, new avenues begin to open. Fresh spiritual enquiries are made; new solutions are sought; old faulty assumptions are cast away.

Clinging to organised religion beyond its usefulness can also be a culprit here. Please note, I am no fan of the irrational criticisms of organised religion that are so common in today’s world, and I believe many aspects of organised religion are highly beneficial to society. Nay, I believe much of organised religion has played an extremely important role in the spiritual journey of the world. But eventually, most souls on the evolutionary journey cast it off like a cocoon. Given the threatened consequences of such apostasy, it’s no surprise that certain souls formed under its influence find it difficult to escape. The collection of limiting beliefs associated with organised religion – in other words, the “only if it’s God’s will” mindset – can make the shift from slavery to personal power – that crucial jump from Force into Power – a difficult one to make. Still, it is absolutely possible to ascend to tremendous spiritual heights within the bounds of religion. But the mind must recalibrate from “I’m not sure…Only if it’s God’s will” to “God absolutely wills great things for me.”

As Hawkins points out, very few people actually make such a shift. The soul’s journey is a slow evolutionary process requiring many lifetimes to complete, and if a soul is simply not ready for the next step, it cannot be forced. The understanding must be acquired through experience and a gradual unfolding of spiritual knowledge. However, Hawkins also points out that just becoming aware of the fact that the scale of consciousness exists often has a profound impact of a person’s ability to move forward through it. The pride barrier is a common one, and indeed a formidable one, but absolutely not an impenetrable one.

Next time: the barrier of the 400s – getting past the mind.