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

Discernment of reality and truth has always been problematic to the human mind, whether it was aware of it or not (i.e., the subject of epistemology). The process is now made even more difficult by the overall impact of the media, the effect of which is both subtle and unconscious as well as visible and apparent. The most obvious influence of the media is by virtue of the selection itself, as well as the time devoted to its reporting, all of which are enhanced on television by visual as well as musical pictorial additions. Emotional and political distortions and dramatizations add to the editing impact reinforced by the sequence and style of presentation. … The overall impact of the media is the production of a ‘virtual reality’ that includes distorted values.

While the modern, sophisticated viewer is subliminally aware of the foregoing, persons of lower levels of consciousness are not so aware and, like children, they tend to believe fiction is truth and live in an “alternate reality”… Thus, falsehood dominates the thinking and reality testing of the majority of people in today’s world. As the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels observed, if a lie is told frequently enough, it is eventually believed to be factual (a virtual reality) because the population lacks the capacity to discern truth from falsehood.”

From Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man p. 137-138

Q: How can contemplation be instituted, started, or learned? It is a decision?

A: It is only a matter of awareness.  It is really nothing new and therefore does not need to be learned but only given attention.  A useful decision or choice is to decide to stop mentally talking about everything and refrain from interjecting comments, opinions, preferences, and value statements.  It is therefore a discipline to just watch without evaluating, investing worth in, or editorializing, commenting, and having preferences about what is witnessed.  One then sees the rising and falling away of phenomena and the transitory nature of appearance, which, with ordinary mentation, is conceptualized as a sequence of cause and effect.  It is an informative practice to ‘pretend’ to be stupid, and by the invocation of radical humility, Essence shines forth.  All thinking, from a spiritual viewpoint, is merely vanity, illusion, and pomposity.  The less one thinks, the more delightful life becomes.  Thinkingness eventually becomes replaced by knowingness.  That one ‘is’ does not really need any thought at all.  It is helpful, therefore, to make a decision to stop mental conversation and useless babbling.

From Discovery of the Presence of God, ch. 4, pg. 88-89

The separation from the source of happiness is not only in space, but it is also in time, so it is something that is going to come into our life tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week, or the year after, or when we finally graduate, or when we reach middle age, or when we get that big house or Cadillac. Because it is always in the future, we are always separated from the source of our happiness and never feel complete. The realization that we are the source of our happiness, and that we can create it at any second, gives us a sense of completion.

… Joyfulness accompanies the experience. There is no tomorrow about it because of the sense of completion. If someone enjoys the presentation, so much the better. That is only frosting on the cake because it is not essential.

What one does in the world has to be accompanied by the sense of completion in the doing of the thing itself. The payoff is not something that is an aside, something that is outside or separate from the doingness; it is the experience of it in this moment. The completion is with the experiencing right now, not something separate from it. In that, one is then aware of the lovingness of all experience. That is the way one is with experience. It is the loving of life in all its expressions, including its disappointments. It is the ups and downs, the continual learning process of making the mistake and learning from it, so it is nothing but a mistake.

One might say that depression is nature’s way, God’s way, and our own psychology’s way of saying to us that the way we look at our life is not okay. It is our psychological, biological, and spiritual way; it is our body, mind, and spirit saying, “Look at what is out; look at what needs to be fixed. Please understand me out of your compassion; heal me; heal all of it.” The defect is an inner sense of separation that we will not be complete and whole unless we become united with something ‘out there’ or in the future. The ego moves from incomplete to complete. In contrast, the Self moves from complete to complete. True happiness is always in the ‘right now’ of this moment. The ego is always anticipating completion and satisfaction in the future “when a desire gets fulfilled.”

From Healing and Recovery p. 385-387