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

Q: How does humor fit in with devotion? Are they not diverse?

A: Devotion is the dedication to Truth and Love by which humor becomes a handmaiden to assist in realizing the goal.  It diminishes the value of fallacy by contrasting truth with falsehood by putting them into juxtaposition.  The underlying intention of humor is actually quite serious and dedicated to liberation from illusion, fear, hatred, and guilt.  It unmasks the ego, thereby decreasing its dominance.  It leads away from the self to the Self.

From Transcending the Levels of Consciousness, ch. 22, pg. 366

Moralistic polarity is traditionally the greatest conflicted area of civilization. It is responsible for the killing of more people than any of nature’s catastrophes for it segments mankind into hate, guilt, revenge, murder, suicide, and more. It also sets up the ideological basis for all the pseudo-religious wars that parade under the banner of some religion, yet it completely disregards and violates all the premises of the religion under which the persecutions and terrorist attacks are conducted, ostensibly in the name of God.

Even ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are not opposites but merely quite different spiritual regions. The same phenomena occur in political ideologies, such as communism versus democracy, totalitarianism versus freedom, and communism versus socialism. If we examine much of what the world traditionally calls evil, what we discover is not evil, which is an abstraction, epithet, and label; instead, we see behaviors that could be described as primitive, infantile, egotistical, narcissistic, selfish, and ignorant, complicated by the psychological mechanisms of denial, projection, and paranoia in order to justify hatred.

From I: Reality and Subjectivity p. 174

Choices determine consequences, which is a mechanism that is really impersonal and operates automatically because energy fields are invited in as a consequence of choice.  The individual, as a consequence of choices, is like an iron filing whose position in the field is the direct consequence of its own decisions.  To accept this reality is simultaneously uplifting and freeing.  At the same time, it is frightening and brings about some degree of consternation.  Therefore, the only true freedom in the universe is the freedom of choice, which is the gift received by mankind.  One then realizes that there is no hand on the tiller but one’s own and that “I myself am heaven and hell” (cal. 700+). The acceptance of this overall truth brings the strength of resolve instead of futile wishing.

What really frightens people about spiritual reality is that it confronts one with the reality that their destiny is solely within the power of their own hands.  Heaven, like hell, is the result and consequence of one’s own choices; therefore, the key to freedom is by the grace of the given karmic inheritance of all mankind by Divine ordinance.

From Truth vs Falsehood, ch.13, pg. 253-254

The technique of purposely presenting propagandized falsehood has been progressively and professionally refined. One strategy calls for first intentionally creating shock by a purposefully extreme statement, subsequent to which the public will be less likely to protest the false program, which is the propagandized rhetoric that has been carefully prepared and then sold via the media to the public by perpetrators who seek control. Another favorite ruse is ‘salting the mine’ with fallacious statements to be later quoted. The ‘straw man’ attack is also common.

The current media barrage, as would be expected, calibrates at only 160, which represents fallacy as a consequence of prevalent philosophical systems that declare all truth to be merely arbitrary, subjective bias. Inasmuch as there is supposedly no such thing as objective truth, distorted and biased subjective value judgments are purported to be of equal merit. These then often become memes (slogans) that convince listeners of their purported truth by sheer repetition…The net result of the above programming is an actual diminution in the human capacity and capability for reality testing. Thus, there is the actual destruction of the very ability to discern truth from falsehood at even the most basic levels.

The rationalization for moral anarchy is termed ‘ethical relativism’ (cal. 155) by which good and evil become equated. By epistemological slight-of-hand, however, this reversal of good and evil itself is viewed as ‘good’, and traditional ethics then become a ‘bad’. Fallacy is fashionable but its calibration at 155 indicates a more serious violation of truth than does philosophical relativism (cal.190), which is operationally primarily intellectual error.

From Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man pg. 202-3