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[jroseland]

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. 

My N of One Muscle Testing Experiments

To fairly test Hawkins’s claim, I ran my own blind experiments. Since I have my whole genome sequenced, I can make statements about specific genes or SNPs that I do not already know the truth of. I will then muscle test those statements and later pull up the results in my Sequencing.com genome explorer.

If the muscle testing correctly identifies true and false statements about my DNA, without me knowing the answers in advance, that would provide strong evidence that Hawkins’s method is not just placebo or imagination. On the other hand, if it fails to track with objective genetic data, that would be a serious strike against the validity of applied kinesiology.

We followed the technique described in the book...

Questions should always be posed as a declaration of fact; it’s useless to ask questions about the future, as the test results will have no reliability. Always preface the investigation with the statement, “I have permission to make inquiry into ____________________ [the specific topic].” (Y/N?) The line of questioning itself can be checked by stating, “This is the correct form for the question.” (Y/N?) The statement—such as “The accused committed the burglary” (Y/N?)—may be made by either the questioner or the test subject. Each time a question is stated, the test subject is told to resist and the tester  presses down quickly with two fingers on the test subject’s extended wrist. (p.245)

Before testing genomics, I made several testing statements - a mix of truths and lies...

I went weak on all the lies. Interesting.

I proceeded with truth-testing my genes on three dates with my wife...

Here are the results. After recording the data, I looked up the results in my Sequencing.com Genome Explorer...

For two gene variants, my genome explorer did not provide those variants, so I marked them N/A as these results or unconfirmable threw the results out. I then had Gemini AI perform a statistical analysis, and the results were disappointing...

The analysis was performed on the 18 statements that had a confirmed "Yes" or "No" result. The two statements with "N/A" for the Confirmed? column were excluded.

• September 5: Your muscle testing had 13 correct matches out of 18 total trials, which is an accuracy of 72.2%. The probability of achieving this result by random chance is only 9.6%, which is statistically significant.
• September 13: Your muscle testing had 8 correct matches out of 18 total trials, which is an accuracy of 44.4%. The probability of this occurring by random chance is 81.5%, which is not statistically significant.
• September 23: This result is a stark contrast to your own testing on September 5th, where your accuracy was 72.2% with a p-value of 0.096, which was statistically significant. The results from your wife's test are much more in line with your own September 13th test, which had a 44.4% accuracy and a p-value of 0.815. This is not statistically significant and suggests that the results are consistent with what you would expect from random guessing.

Based on the re-analysis of your updated data, the results of your muscle testing were significantly more accurate than random chance on September 5, but not on September 13 or September 23.

So it would seem that muscle truth-testing is BS.

We did our best to follow the instructions in Power vs Force, where he describes muscle testing as something that works reliably, that anyone can do simply. And only one of our tests produced statistically significant results. If it worked as Hawkins describes, I would expect at least one test to approach 100% accuracy.

It seemed like a silly waste of time, but holding out a little hope in muscle testing as "spiritual technology" that I might have some aptitude for, I decided to muscle test declarative statements about the Goldbach Conjecture. The greatest unsolved mystery in mathematics. I'm not a mathematician, but I featured the  - the greatest unsolved mystery in mathematics - in my recent SciFi novel, Hourglass, so I was curious if muscle testing would work in the domain of math or history. I had AI create this list of truths and falsehoods about it...

And the muscle-testing results were again disappointing, Gemini AI concluded:

Your muscle testing experiment on the Goldbach Conjecture resulted in an accuracy of 60%, which is not statistically significant when compared to random chance. In this experiment, the muscle testing did not outperform a simple coin flip.

But...

Here's the really interesting thing, though: muscle truth-testing was pretty close to 100% accurate when it came to the lies and truths we uttered in our testing statements.

Deception is a topic I've long been interested in. Muscle-testing seems to work well as a lie detector, which could be useful! 

Skepticism is Well-Warranted

Reading Power vs. Force is like walking through a flea market of metaphysics. You will find brilliant gems, dubious trinkets, and the occasional “WOKE” bumper sticker.

On one hand, the idea of a testable, objective measure of truth is intoxicating. Imagine a world where falsehood can be exposed instantly, where politicians, gurus, and corporations can no longer hide behind words. Hawkins’s vision of a consciousness-based future is inspiring.

On the other hand, the evidence is thin, the writing is dense, and the conclusions sometimes feel like they were made to fit a preexisting worldview. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Hawkins does not always deliver. Nor did the four N of 1 experiments I ran. Muscle-truth testing was something I really wanted to believe in, so it's a reminder to be skeptical of wu-wu fantastic claims.

Still, as a piece of spiritual self-help literature, it is worth grappling with. If nothing else, the Map of Consciousness provides a useful metaphor: courage really is the fulcrum between stagnation and growth. And the reminder to orient toward truth, integrity, and love, however we define them, is valuable.

The practical takeaway is this: do not swallow Hawkins whole, but do not dismiss him either. Test the ideas, experiment with applied kinesiology (here's a demonstration by Hawkins himself), and see what resonates. If nothing else, you will sharpen your BS detector.

And that, in itself, is a form of power.