Category: Thoughts & quotes from Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. & Susan Hawkins

This beautiful story moves me to tears every time I hear it.

Q: Why is the ego so difficult to overcome?

A: One becomes addicted to the ego and preoccupied with its contents. It attracts all of one’s attention so that one becomes obsessed with the mind and its feelings. If the person believes that the mind and its contents are the real ‘me’, then the focus is certainly understandable. Basically, this error is due to naiveté. The mind is an amusement park, full of thrills and spills and curiosities. It is also a theater of the absurd for the drama of feelings and social identifications. It is an ‘act’ in that it is a personal characterization, dramatization, and display.

I: Reality and Subjectivity, ch. 18, pg. 416

Susan: Today we’re going to speak on what is meant by spiritual.

Dr. Hawkins: Oh my, that’s a tough one. Religion is easy. Spiritual is the essence of religion. Spiritual means the realization that one’s reality is beyond the physical, that it involves other realms. These other realms are different qualities, nonphysicality, nonlocality. To feel the presence of God is so overwhelming, but there’s no way of explaining it. If a person has never had the experience of the presence of divinity, it’s very hard to explain to them. But you can attempt that a great feeling of beatitude and beauty and you’re aware that there is an infinite presence.

The infinite presence becomes overwhelming and dominates all that exists. And then as one’s talking at you, you realize that that same spirit is what is speaking through you, what is speaking through me right now, is of divine origin. The spiritual energy of the Ultimate Reality segments down, you might say, to the time, the place and the individual. But it’s ruled by intention. Intention is to rise to the highest possible level of awareness for the purpose of communication and because that level has a certain energy. So what I’m saying right now is comprehensible to many people who calibrate above a certain level and incomprehensible to people who calibrate below that level.

What is Meant by Spiritual streaming

Q: Is the ego ‘wrong’?

A: The problem with the ego is not that it is wrong; it is just that it is limited and distorted. To conceive of the ego as an enemy is to become polarized, bringing forth conflict, guilt, anger, and shame. Positionalities support the ego. By enlarging context, opposites are transcended and problems are dissolved. Humility removes the ego’s underpinnings of judgmentalism, positionality, and moralizing. In Reality, there can no longer be opposites any more than there can be winners or losers.
The Eye of the I, ch. 12, pg. 244

I thought that this exchange between Dave and I was a good example of the difference between forgiveness and actually surrendering your perception of the event or person.

Susan: When you say to pray to the Holy Spirit for a miracle to see the truth about a situation or a person, are we to forgive that person if there was a conflict or just accept them for what it is?

Dr. Hawkins: No, because you’re still seeing them the same way or you wouldn’t be forgiving them. Through “The Course in Miracles” for instance,  the miraculous occurs, but not as the consequence of how you’re seeing it, because you may still see it the same way and yet it happens. So when I ask for a miracle, I’m surrendering my perception of how I see it and then it’s transformed. And when it’s transformed, I see that it still is loveable, yeah. I see that somebody I’m angry at cannot help but be that way. So now instead of hating them or being angry, I feel sorry for them and I say it’s too bad that they can’t see it the way I’m seeing it. Because I know their life is painful the way they are seeing the world and when they see it my way, the world stops being painful. Yes, uh, huh.

Susan: OK

“Love” Lecture, Sept 2011 through streaming