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...
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