I don't know how many of you heard about, or took interest in the
world wide web event -started about 2 months ago- of Echart
Tolle and Oprah Winfrey, during which Echart's book
"A New Earth" is being taught. I have been taking the classes, faithfully,
every Monday evening at 6 pm. I could not have missed this
for the world. And so did millions of other people around the world.
What topic, you might ask, is generating such widespread interest?
Well. Echart Tolle writes (and writes "about") truth.

I discovered him several years ago after I was given his first book,
"The Power of Now" as a gift by a friend. He was a revelation,
a new humble Instrument of Knowledge, a teacher of Enlightenment,
to be experienced trough living in the now. Reading his words was and is
like drinking fresh water from a mountain spring; such is their
simpleness, directness, and unmistakable essential value.

Then, while facilitating an Echart/Oprah web event-related book club last month,
at a local Borders, something more happened. A newly-made friend
(I met her at another of the same book club' meeting, the one in midtown),
arrived after the group and put a book on the table in front of me,
saying: "You need to read this". I took the book into my hands and
looked at it. The title stood up first, and it said "Power vs. Force, the
hidden determinants of behavior". The author: David Hawkins, MD, PhD? .

The book "felt" so good in my hands that I could not wait to read it.
So, in the following couple of days I finished "A New Earth", and eagerly began
the new one I was given. I actually wanted to read Tolle's book a second,
and perhaps a third, time, but the powerful attraction exerted by Hawkins' did not let me.
And so I began the new reading. And with it, a new transformation of consciousness.

Now, you know, I have been meditating regularly for over 26 years, so you can say
I have been on a spiritual path for a while. Searching has not always been easy, on
the contrary, I often felt stuck and even hopeless in my development, as a person and as
a soul, and have known not where to look for help in getting "unstuck".
Apparently, Hawkins soon revealed, we can develop a spiritual ego,
which I found to be the source of such developmental impasse.

A spiritual ego is developed when your ego "leaks" into the consciousness-
development work which is being done, so that what you think is true spiritual work is
nothing but another ego-form that has taken shape and is tricking you into knowing.
However, there is no real knowing being experienced, only the illusion of it.
Some of the "symptoms" of a spiritual ego could be feeling spiritually superior,
project unconscious spiritual needs on others, feeling impatient or annoyed with people
"not getting" what one knows to be the most important purpose of being a human on earth.

Awareness of ego's traps and demands is amazingly powerful in setting me free
from it. Awareness, in all senses and at all levels, seems to be the magic word indeed.
Awakening would be the process I am engaged into. Awareness is the most precious tool
I have to use. Tolle says that awareness of this moment, all there is, really, can have
consciousness-expanding, even "samadhic" (I made up this word) qualities.

David Hawkins, like Echart Tolle, spontaneously underwent the experience of
enlightenment after intense emotional suffering. He too, after years of
"incapacitating bliss", returned to the world as a spiritual teacher, as he
felt that he needed to do anything he could to ease the suffering present
in people. His discipline (if you want to call it so) is based on the ability
to discern truth from error. He does so by the use of kinesiology, the
technique of muscle-testing (as developed and applied by Dr. John Diamond)
based on the assumption that the body does not lie, and will "answer" a clear yes or not
when presented with something that is either good (life-supporting) or bad
(life-discouraging). When presented with something good, or "truth", the
muscle tested will "go strong". When presented with something bad, "false",
the muscle will "go weak". Simple as that.

So, Hawkins's work is focused on teaching the world how to discern
truth from falsehood, because this very issue, he says, the inability to discern
what is good for one (and if is good for one is good for the world) from what is bad,
has been the big tragedy facing humanity for the longest time, as well as the
source of uncounted problems. Having previously disclosed this knowledge to only
a few people, Hawkins now enlightens the spiritual masses with his fantastic books.
To discover his work has been the cause of tremendous intellectual understanding
of the nature of enlightenment, for me, as well as an even more tremendous actual
consciousness development's spurt. Oh, I am grateful!