Math News — A Scale of Emotions
So apparently, we need to read the book Power vs. Force to understand what we’re about to talk about here, but the best entryway into the David Hawkins universe (according to my buddy who is neck-deep in that universe) is Letting Go, so that’s what I’m quoting from here. David Hawkins was “renowned as a pioneering researcher in the field of consciousness” who served as an advisor to monasteries and wrote more than a few books. The subtitle to Letting Go is The Pathway of Surrender and it seems damned reasonable.
A main idea of the book is that most of us operate more on feelings than on reason, and the only way to get out of being a slave to one’s emotions is to surrender to them. This idea is so simple that I would almost tell you no need to read the book, you can just get the idea from this blog post from me, but for whatever reason these 300 pages don’t seem repetitive or unnecessary, and they’re pretty fun to read for the most part. But getting back to that main idea — instead of resisting an emotion when it comes, accept it, feel it, and by having allowed yourself to do so, you will find eventually that you have transcended it.
The idea especially is to transcend the negative feelings so as to begin to operate more amongst the positive ones. And here is where the Math come in for today! Hawkins has created “a linear, logarithmic view of this nonlinear energetic terrain.” Now, if you’re not into math, that might send you running for the hills. What the hell is he talking about?
Well, it has to do with the numbers that he uses when “calibrating” these emotional energies. He assigns numbers to each emotion, with a scale that goes from 20 at the very bottom to 1,000 at the top. Which has something to do with its being logarithmic. I guess I want to explain all that — get into those math terms.
Like, linear versus nonlinear should be a little less cryptic to understand. To say something is linear is to say it is predictable, that it marches along in a straight line. So his scale giving a linear view to nonlinear terrain — that means he’s basically simplifying things by using his scale. But then the logarithmic part.
Well, logarithms are mathematical functions that take numbers that are very far apart and makes them look less far apart. So for example, the Richter scale that we use to measure earthquakes. You’ve probably heard of earthquakes registering at 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0. The thing about the logarithmic Richter scale is that those earthquakes are very far apart — a linear scale would probably change those measures to 1, 10, 100, and 1,000. The logarithmic scale takes these far-apart things and pushes them into the same arena so they can be viewed together.
Now exactly how Hawkins’ map of emotions is logarithmic I’m not exactly sure. If it’s similar to earthquakes, then when we see that Apathy is at 50, Fear is at 100, Anger is at 150, and Courage is at 200, maybe we should imagine that in fact Fear is five times higher an energy level than Apathy, and anger is in turn five times higher, and then courage five times higher again. I’m making up the “five” part. But then by the time we get to Reason at 400 or Peace at 600, well, the difference is miles. The nonlinear energetic terrain is vast. But we jam these things together on this logarithmic scale.
The calibration that I spoke of early is done with “muscle testing,” where you hold your arm up in the air, think about a thing, and see whether your muscle is strengthened or weakened by the mention or thought of the thing. It’s hard to believe the muscle testing done by Hawkins and his buddies weren’t plagued with confirmation bias — but that’s just the kind of doubting thing that someone would say if they hadn’t read Power vs. Force, which I have not read. Anyway, it doesn’t seem so terrible to try to come up with measurements for positive energy. In fact, it seems right up my alley — I really ought to get more into this. This is using math for great and profound good.
The Math News is a newsletter-type communication filled with stories that strive to be measurable or mathematical in one way or another.