Power vs. Force

David R. Hawkins’s Power vs. Force is one of those books that makes you pause, tilt your head, and think: Did I just stumble across a secret manual for decoding reality? Or is this spiritual snake oil with footnotes?

Hawkins claims to have discovered a way to objectively distinguish truth from falsehood using nothing more than the body’s response to statements. The tool is Applied Kinesiology, a technique where a subject’s muscle strength is tested while holding a thought, statement, or stimulus in mind. If the statement is true, the muscle “goes strong.” If it is false, the muscle “goes weak.”

That's right, you can test the veracity of anything about the present or past (did your mind immediately jump to how you might use this to make money?)

That may sound like pseudoscience. To be fair, it often is dismissed as such. But Hawkins builds an entire cosmology around it: a Map of Consciousness spanning levels from shame (20) to enlightenment (1,000), with courage (200) as the threshold that separates destructive “force” from life-enhancing “power.”

The book blends metaphysics, psychology, spirituality, and sociology in a dense and sometimes meandering way. It is half spiritual guidebook, half philosophical treatise, and half bold scientific claim (yes, that is three halves, Hawkins’s math is not always tight either).

I conceived of an N of 1 experiment to test the bold claim that Applied Kinesiology makes: Since I have my whole genome sequenced, I can muscle test specific statements about my DNA and then check them against the raw report. If my body can consistently verify the truth or falsity of genetic facts, I can verify by checking my own genes, which would be a powerful confirmation of Hawkins’s central claim. 

But first, let's unpack Power Vs. Force...

The Essential Message

Early in the book, Hawkins drops what he sees as his most fertile discovery: human consciousness is like a terminal plugged into a universal database. Everyone, by birthright, has access to this infinite store of truth and genius.

The individual human mind is like a computer terminal connected to a giant database. The database is human consciousness itself, of which our own consciousness is merely an individual expression, but with its roots in the common consciousness of all mankind. This database is the realm of genius; because to be human is to participate in the database, everyone, by virtue of his birth, has access to genius. The unlimited information contained in the database has now been shown to be readily available to anyone in a few seconds, at any time and in any place. This is indeed an astonishing discovery, bearing the power to change lives, both individually and collectively, to a degree never yet anticipated. (p.37)

This is the essential message of Power vs. Force: truth is accessible to all, instantly, through a simple technique. If you believe Hawkins, this is a revolutionary breakthrough, a kind of “spiritual technology” that could guide not just individuals but whole societies toward higher consciousness.

The Testing Technique

The mechanics are deceptively simple. One person extends their arm, another applies light pressure, and asks the subject to “resist.” A true statement produces strength, a false one produces weakness.

Two persons are required. One acts as test subject by holding out one arm laterally, parallel to the ground. The second person then presses down with two fingers on the wrist of the extended arm and says, “Resist.” The subject then resists the downward pressure with all his strength. That is all there is to it. A statement may be made by either party. While the subject holds it in mind, his arm’s strength is tested by the tester’s downward pressure. If the statement is negative, false, or reflects a calibration below 200 (see “Map of Consciousness,” Chapter 3), the test subject will “go weak.” If the answer is yes or calibrates over 200, he will “go strong.” (p.58)

If you are raising an eyebrow, you are not alone. Hawkins insists this has been tested across cultures, across decades, with “millions of calibrations on thousands of test subjects.” He claims perfect reproducibility, the gold standard of science.

Subjects were tested individually and in groups by many different testers and groups of testers. In general, the results were identical and reproducible, fulfilling the fundamental requirement of the scientific method: perfect experimental replicability.

As a biohacker, I love the idea of this. Imagine being able to instantly verify whether a supplement is good for you, or whether a person is trustworthy, or whether your current business deal is integrous. Hawkins even notes it can be used to diagnose current life problems, which is especially appealing to an audience of personal growth enthusiasts.

The test procedure, the reader will note, is to use the muscle test to verify the truth or falsity of a declarative statement. Unreliable responses will be obtained if the question has not been put into this form. Nor can a reliable result be obtained from inquiry into the future; only statements regarding existent conditions or events in the past or present will produce consistent answers. (p.59)

But here is where skepticism creeps in: where are the PubMed links? Hawkins provides almost no peer-reviewed citations, and his footnotes are thin.

A claim this extraordinary demands extraordinary evidence, not just anecdotes.

The Map of Consciousness

One of Hawkins’s most influential contributions is his Map of Consciousness. It charts levels of energy and awareness, from the destructive (shame, guilt, fear) up through neutrality, love, joy, peace, and enlightenment. The critical tipping point is 200, courage.

The critical response point in the scale of consciousness calibrates at level 200, which is the level associated with integrity and courage. All attitudes, thoughts, feelings, associations, entities, or historical figures below that level of calibration make a person go weak—those that calibrate higher make subjects go strong. This is the balance point between weak and strong attractors, between negative and positive influence. (p.68)

Below 200, life is draining and destructive. Above 200, life becomes expansive and empowering. Hawkins notes that courage enables us to face challenges, grow, and embody integrity. Maya Angelou put it even more bluntly: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”

Courage implies the willingness to try new things and deal with the changes and challenges of life. At this level of empowerment, one is able to cope with and effectively handle the opportunities of life. At 200, for instance, the energy to learn new job skills is available. Growth and education become attainable goals. There’s the capacity to face fears or character defects and to grow despite them; anxiety also does not cripple endeavor as it would at lower stages of evolution. Obstacles that defeat people whose consciousness is below 200 act as stimulants to those who have evolved into the first level of true power. (p.79)

But the higher levels raise questions. How exactly does one define love, peace, joy, or enlightenment? Hawkins does not offer precise definitions, and the vagueness here weakens the framework. It is inspirational, yes, but slippery in practice.

And then there is the level of 600, peace. Supposedly attained by only one in ten million people. Which makes it sound less like a personal growth target and more like a spiritual lottery ticket. If your odds are worse than becoming a billionaire, is it really useful as a benchmark?

Bad news: Apparently, you're probably "stuck" at around the consciousness level you were born at...

it’s uncommon for people to move from one level to another during their lifetimes. The energy field that is calibrated for an individual at birth only increases, on the average, by about five points. That an individual’s level of consciousness is already in effect at birth is a sobering idea with profound implications. (p.91)

This is interesting. Mirroring politically incorrect IQ research that indicates that your capacity is largely set at birth - BUT there's a Biohack for this: Dual N-Back brain training.

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Level 250 - Neutrality - stood out to me...

People of Neutrality have a sense of well-being; the mark of this level is a confident capability to live in the world. This is the level of safety—people at this level are easy to get along with and safe to be around and associate with because they’re not interested in conflict, competition, or guilt. They’re comfortable and basically undisturbed emotionally. This attitude is nonjudgmental and doesn’t lead to any need to control other people’s behaviors. Correspondingly, due to Neutral people’s value of freedom, they’re difficult to control. (p.80)

At this level of awareness, a major transformation takes place, with the understanding that one is both the source and creator of the experience of one’s life. (p.81)

Sounds like me!

Philosophical Takeaways

On truth

Man’s dilemma—now and always—has been that he misidentifies his own intellectual artifacts as reality.

the most critical realization of all

Mankind lacks the capacity to recognize the difference between truth and falsehood. (p.237)

This passage made me think of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand...

But of all of the arts, architecture is the most tangible and influential in the lives of men everywhere. We live, shop, go to work, and seek our entertainment in buildings; thus, the form of the structure itself deserves the utmost attention, because its influence is a background to so much human activity. (p.162)

and made me reflect fondly on the time I lived in Valencia, Spain...

On love

Love that is unconditional, unchanging, and permanent. It doesn’t fluctuate—its source isn’t dependent on external factors. Loving is a state of being. It’s a forgiving, nurturing, and supportive way of relating to the world. Love isn’t intellectual and doesn’t proceed from the mind; Love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of its purity of motive. (p.83)

Hmm... I'm a bit skeptical of "love" as the greatest ideal. I explain why in this podcast and article, Against "Love" 🧐 Musings on the inadequacy of our favorite word...

On the title of the book, Power vs. Force

we’ll see that power arises from meaning. It has to do with motive, and it has to do with principle. Power is always associated with that which supports the significance of life itself. It appeals to that part of human nature that we call noble—in contrast to force, which appeals to that which we call crass. Power appeals to what uplifts, dignifies, and ennobles. (p.116)

The author sounds a bit sour on this point...

False gurus also make people go weak in a dramatic fashion. It’s as though the universe considers spiritual rape an especially grave error. (p.112)

Hawkins’s Biases

Hawkins claims every statement in the book was tested for truth using applied kinesiology. If that is true, then some of his results are… curious.

Take capital punishment. Hawkins frames it as the symptom of a guilt-ridden, unforgiving American society. Fair enough. But at times his commentary lapses into what I would call “Cat-Lady-In-1999 liberalism.” It is hard to imagine that every statement, especially ones that read like op-eds, was literally tested through arm strength. This strains credulity.

And then there are his heroes. Hawkins lionizes Mikhail Gorbachev as a humble, high-consciousness leader.

For example, Mikhail Gorbachev was the subject of enormous worldwide attention, but at the same time, the world never really did acknowledge his genius: Single-handedly, and in only a few short years, he completely revolutionized one of the greatest empires on Earth, and his only sources of power were his inspiration and vision. (Had the communist regime been based on power, nothing could have overturned it; because it was based on force, it was destined to come to an end under the hand of a charismatic leader who was aligned with power.) (p.167)

But David Remnick’s The Tomb of Lenin paints a more complicated picture: Gorbachev was motivated by expanding communism globally under the guise of environmentalist causes (you could argue, he succeeded), hardly the pure spiritual reformer Hawkins makes him out to be.

Even more eyebrow-raising is his praise of Sam Walton and Walmart. According to Hawkins, Walmart is aligned with high-consciousness service and compassion. But anyone who has seen the documentaries on Walmart’s predatory business practices might disagree. This characterization feels, frankly, like corporate hagiography.

Dense Language, Big Ideas

One of the biggest challenges of Power vs. Force is Hawkins’s writing style. It is Byzantine, full of abstract language, complicated sentences, and the kind of vocabulary that makes you want to reach for a dictionary.

The moral code thus functions as a rationalized exploitation of the life energy of the masses, through a calculated distortion of values. The illusion proffered is that the more hellish one’s life is, the more heavenly the reward will be. This distorted coupling of pleasure with suffering has produced a morally perverse social milieu, in which pain becomes associated with pleasure. In this atmosphere, the insane alternation of suffering and euphoria that typifies addiction becomes at least provisionally defensible in a deadly antisocial game of winning and losing the forbidden high. (p.98)

A bit more storytelling and clarity would have gone a long way.

Still, beneath the tangled prose, the core ideas are compelling:

• Humanity has only recently (since the 1980s) shifted above the collective consciousness level of 200. Why? I speculate that media technology began beaming enough edifying messages to billions of humans in the last 40 years for us to reach this tipping point.
• Most people do not truly exercise free will, since they are trapped in energy fields that shape behavior. This is the conclusion I also arrived at in my book about philosophy.
• Depression, addiction, and even illness may have roots in consciousness rather than just biology.
• Culture, music, and media have measurable energetic impacts on our well-being. Here's an interesting takeaway..

Just as the entrainment or influence of the higher energy fields has an anabolic, or growth-enhancing, effect on a subject, entrainment by lower attractor fields has a catabolic, or destructive, effect; the most widespread example in today’s culture is the influence of some forms of violent pop music. Among our test subjects, punk rock, death rock, and gangster rap music made every subject go weak, confirming earlier observations made by Dr. John Diamond. 7 In a more recent study of students (reported in The Arizona Republic, July 4, 1994), Dr. James Johnson of the University of North Carolina found rap music to increase tolerance for and predisposition to violence while promoting materialism and reducing immediate interest in academics and long-term success. A common experience observed in therapy groups and clinics is that drug abusers don’t recover if they continue to listen to heavy metal rock music—in fact, a one-year follow-up of inpatient and outpatient cocaine addicts from Sedona Villa, a branch of Camelback Hospital of Phoenix, Arizona, indicated that not a single cocaine abuser who continued to listen to this violent and negative music recovered. (p.217)

Some of these points resonate with Jung’s “collective unconscious” or Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic fields.” Others sound like wishful metaphysics. But Hawkins’s framework is broad enough that readers can find both inspiration and fuel for skepticism.

My N of One Muscle Testing Experiments

To fairly test Hawkins’s claim, I ran my own blind experiments. Since I have my whole genome sequenced, I can make statements about specific genes or SNPs that I do not already know the truth of. I will then muscle test those statements and later pull up the results in my Sequencing.com genome explorer.

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If the muscle testing correctly identifies true and false statements about my DNA, without me knowing the answers in advance, that would provide strong evidence that Hawkins’s method is not just placebo or imagination. On the other hand, if it fails to track with objective genetic data, that would be a serious strike against the validity of applied kinesiology.

We followed the technique described in the book...

Questions should always be posed as a declaration of fact; it’s useless to ask questions about the future, as the test results will have no reliability. Always preface the investigation with the statement, “I have permission to make inquiry into ____________________ [the specific topic].” (Y/N?) The line of questioning itself can be checked by stating, “This is the correct form for the question.” (Y/N?) The statement—such as “The accused committed the burglary” (Y/N?)—may be made by either the questioner or the test subject. Each time a question is stated, the test subject is told to resist and the tester  presses down quickly with two fingers on the test subject’s extended wrist. (p.245)

Before testing genomics, I made several testing statements - a mix of truths and lies...

I went weak on all the lies. Interesting.

I proceeded with truth-testing my genes on three dates with my wife...

Here are the results...

After recording the data, I looked up the results in my Sequencing.com Genome Explorer...

For two gene variants, my genome explorer did not provide those variants, so I marked them N/A as these results or unconfirmable threw the results out. I then had Gemini AI perform a statistical analysis, and the results were disappointing...

The analysis was performed on the 18 statements that had a confirmed "Yes" or "No" result. The two statements with "N/A" for the Confirmed? column were excluded.

• September 5: Your muscle testing had 13 correct matches out of 18 total trials, which is an accuracy of 72.2%. The probability of achieving this result by random chance is only 9.6%, which is statistically significant.
• September 13: Your muscle testing had 8 correct matches out of 18 total trials, which is an accuracy of 44.4%. The probability of this occurring by random chance is 81.5%, which is not statistically significant.
• September 23: This result is a stark contrast to your own testing on September 5th, where your accuracy was 72.2% with a p-value of 0.096, which was statistically significant. The results from your wife's test are much more in line with your own September 13th test, which had a 44.4% accuracy and a p-value of 0.815. This is not statistically significant and suggests that the results are consistent with what you would expect from random guessing.

Based on the re-analysis of your updated data, the results of your muscle testing were significantly more accurate than random chance on September 5, but not on September 13 or September 23.

So it would seem that muscle truth-testing is BS.

We did our best to follow the instructions in Power vs Force, where he describes muscle testing as something that works reliably, that anyone can do simply. And only one of our tests produced statistically significant results. If it worked as Hawkins describes, I would expect at least one test to approach 100% accuracy.

It seemed like a silly waste of time, but holding out a little hope in muscle testing as "spiritual technology" that I might have some aptitude for, I decided to muscle test declarative statements about the Goldbach Conjecture. The greatest unsolved mystery in mathematics. I'm not a mathematician, but I featured the  - the greatest unsolved mystery in mathematics - in my recent SciFi novel, Hourglass, so I was curious if muscle testing would work in the domain of math or history. I had AI create this list of truths and falsehoods about it...

And the muscle-testing results were again disappointing, Gemini AI concluded:

Your muscle testing experiment on the Goldbach Conjecture resulted in an accuracy of 60%, which is not statistically significant when compared to random chance. In this experiment, the muscle testing did not outperform a simple coin flip.

But...

Here's the really interesting thing, though: muscle truth-testing was pretty close to 100% accurate when it came to the lies and truths we uttered in our testing statements.

Deception is a topic I've long been interested in. Muscle-testing seems to work well as a lie detector, which could be useful! In the recently released second edition of my book for men, I have a chapter, Seducing a Virgin, where I describe how this deception detection tool could serve virtuous seduction.

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Skepticism is Well-Warranted

Reading Power vs. Force is like walking through a flea market of metaphysics. You will find brilliant gems, dubious trinkets, and the occasional “WOKE” bumper sticker.

On one hand, the idea of a testable, objective measure of truth is intoxicating. Imagine a world where falsehood can be exposed instantly, where politicians, gurus, and corporations can no longer hide behind words. Hawkins’s vision of a consciousness-based future is inspiring.

On the other hand, the evidence is thin, the writing is dense, and the conclusions sometimes feel like they were made to fit a preexisting worldview. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Hawkins does not always deliver. Nor did the four N of 1 experiments I ran. Muscle-truth testing was something I really wanted to believe in, so it's a reminder to be skeptical of wu-wu fantastic claims.

Still, as a piece of spiritual self-help literature, it is worth grappling with. If nothing else, the Map of Consciousness provides a useful metaphor: courage really is the fulcrum between stagnation and growth. And the reminder to orient toward truth, integrity, and love, however we define them, is valuable.

The practical takeaway is this: do not swallow Hawkins whole, but do not dismiss him either. Test the ideas, experiment with applied kinesiology (here's a demonstration by Hawkins himself), and see what resonates. If nothing else, you will sharpen your BS detector.

And that, in itself, is a form of power.