Has anyone read any books by Dr. David Hawkins? I'm particularly curious of the map of consciousness from a perspective of both atheists and theists.

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I've read most of them. I explored the scale of consciousness and still use some of the concepts that go into it, but the scale itself I feel is too simplistic to actually capture the concept of consciousness meaningfully.

Hawkins talks about the possibility of ‘falling’ in consciousness. I feel this is meaningless moralizing. One of his examples of a so-called ‘falling guru’ is Osho, born Rajneesh. I happen to know a lot about Rajneesh, I’ve read one of the “Rajneesh Bibles”, studied his life, and the accounts of people who knew him in his “Big Muddy Ranch” days. To say that he ever fell in consciousness just really misses the mark. He was a complicated, conflicted person. He was so when he was Acharya Rajneesh, giving lectures throughout India, and he was so when he was Osho, the man whose followers executed the only bioterror attack to ever be conducted on US soil.

I’ve only ever been able to see consciousness as slowly rising throughout the course of a life. The ‘map’ of consciousness does not have a top end as far as I can see, and the highest levels, as he characterizes them, do not represent anything real. It’s possible to reach some very weird and very special states of consciousness through spiritual work and meditation, but they are only ever temporary, there are no big jumps, and no falls at all. We see what we want to see in life, and so we want to withhold “consciousness” from beings we see doing things we find morally wrong. But morality is a relative thing, not absolute at all.

Consciousness in this context is a tricky to define, because the thing doing the defining is the thing that is getting defined. Minds have blind spots that get in the way, and any words I would use to define it for someone would get twisted to mean things I didn’t intend for it to mean. It’s important for teachers to come up with big, sweeping ideas, but they can only ever give us a roadmap. Good to launch off of, but not as dogma.

But the ‘real’ consciousness is not nearly as interesting as Hawkins’ picture paints it as. Certain aspects of it are really good, such as his “attractor patterns,” and his “path of surrender” but a lot of it is just noise. I credit Hawkins with the biggest “night-and-day” moment of my spiritual journey, but I can’t pick up a book of his anymore without seeing a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.

That said, there’s really nothing else in the space he occupies. My programmer’s mind found his material exceedingly fascinating when I was ready for it, and I don’t want to discourage you from exploring it. Just keep an open mind.