The Physics of Truth: An Interview with Eric Burlingame

Part 2: Dissecting the Mad Hatters

This is the second installment of this three-part interview series. If you haven't read the first post yet, please start there! :)

Part one of this series ended right as we were about to discuss the energetic matrix of Donald Trump and some of the particularly destructive people he’s surrounded himself with. While it can be very valuable to look back on past events and dissect what contributed to their having occurred, it’s even more valuable to be able to identify the essential qualities of people before they’re installed in positions where they can harm others.

What we’ve seen since Donald Trump became President-elect is the outpouring of the level of consciousness he is operating at. Those essential qualities were identified by Eric Burlingame back in October 2016 for my Hug the Universe series on the hidden determinants of human behavior, long before the election took place. That isn’t a “told you so!” moment or an attempt to say Eric is a magical soothsayer, just reiterating the fact that humanity now has a reliable method for revealing what has historically been unidentifiable until someone acted out their current energetic state in the observable world.

While this interview was designed to be accessible to anyone regardless of where they’re at in their understanding of consciousness research, if you’d like to broaden your understanding of this emerging field that fundamentally changes everything we know about human behavior and consciousness itself, read my series about David R. Hawkins’ work, and the excellent series Eric wrote for Inception Publishing about many of the people who currently make up the 2017 White House administration.

But, for convenience’s sake, here are the recent calibrations Eric performed to reveal the qualities of consciousness (LOC and EQL) that Donald Trump has been operating from:

Donald J. Trump: 116 LOC; 322 EQL

Explanation from Eric: “DJT thinks that telling the truth, being aware of self, and responsible for his words is not helpful in any real way. At this level, there is complete self-delusion and chronic lying. There is a strong resistance to surrendering fantastical thinking, which can be seen in his acceptance of ridiculous and disprovable conspiracies. His thoughts are also essentially dominated by fear and a craving of attention that is effectively pathological.”

Now, on to part two of this interview:

Hug the Universe: So, looking at the calibrations you put together regarding Donald Trump, it all makes him sound like he’s not far from being a homicidal maniac. If he’s so dangerous and holds so little value for others, what’s stopping him from being a full-on serial killer or something?

Eric Burlingame: That is a funny but interesting question. Humans are always more effective when they have a sense of purpose. An individual’s purpose can be beneficial to humanity, or counterproductive. With a clearly, or even vaguely, defined purpose, the brain (and “the mind” at the more broad level) then seeks to define what choices and actions will move one toward the fulfillment of that purpose. This assessment process is very complex, but the main question the process seeks to define at a destructive level of consciousness energy (like we're seeing in these folks) is: “What am I going to do to get what I think I need?” At a healthier consciousness energy level, the question is more like: "What can I choose that—to the best of my knowledge—will put me a step closer to the fulfillment of my purpose and also be beneficial to all concerned?”

Trump (and others like him) have an awareness that his purpose is more likely fulfilled by involving lots of people. In business, he needed investors, employees, construction workers, etc. He can’t just tootle about, killing or physically harming people, because he needs them to fulfill his self-aggrandizement and hoarding tendencies.

Stated differently: you can’t con a lot of money out of a dead person (and dead people don’t tell you how great you are while you are deceiving them). Also, Trump has some awareness that hurting people severely is inconvenient and would require him to put out a lot of effort to cover up the ultimate crime. That’s really too much work for his liking.

Here are a couple of verification statements I confirmed using C.V.:

C.V. Test Statement: Donald Trump has an interest in physically harming anyone.
Result: Not yes.

C.V. Test Statement: Donald Trump would prefer that people revere him, rather than fear him.
Result: Yes.

The best learning we can do here is to recognize that energetic and moral deficiency—as we see in Trump—does not necessarily lead to social incompetency or a total lack of judgment. Someone at extremely low consciousness energy levels can still make goal-specific decisions that fulfill their purposes.

Hug the Universe: Wow. A total disregard for the wellbeing of others seems so common in people who reach high positions in business and politics. How is the world able to function at all with so many “leaders” operating at such destructive levels?

Eric Burlingame: Wow, that is a very practical question that could be answered in many accurate ways. Let me see if I can get to the heart of it.

Two words: buy-in.

Leaders (whether beneficial or counterproductive to the world) require followers to be the activation part of their plans. In other words, one guy or gal can’t do it alone—there must be many people buying in to the same consciousness and ideology. And it doesn’t really matter if the ideology is truthful or completely crazy. Once there is large-scale buy-in, the leader has the requisite people necessary to execute their program.

Without others at similarly low levels of fear and function, the counterproductive leader is just some person screaming doom on the street corner.

Leaders functioning at low consciousness energy levels seek out others at the same or similar levels to back them. Once they have their needed army of functionaries, they can then move into the phase where they trick others at slightly higher (but still very fear-based) consciousness levels, through lying, promising, threatening, and manipulation. In the recent election of Trump, about 63 million Americans were either ones who wanted to become functionaries of a destructive program that Trump vaguely hinted at, or else they were duped into thinking that Trump was a good guy who wanted to help them out. Without others at similarly low levels of fear and function, the counterproductive leader is just some person screaming doom on the street corner.

The people that keep things running with any level of consistency are those who continue to function in a healthy fashion, and those who are just trying to survive. These people will show up for work on time, do their jobs, and care for their families and friends. Life moves on for them while they keep their heads down and stay off the radar of the destructive folks. They may eventually demand change, but that does require attaining a new level of courage, or else absolute desperation. We are already seeing these groups in the US and elsewhere coming together to fight against what they perceive to be injustices.

Hug the Universe: How do people actually create meaningful change in situations where destructive folks are wreaking havoc? There's no shortage of anger or outrage in the world, but there seems to be a lack of awareness around how people truly resolve issues.

Eric Burlingame: That’s a tricky question for sure, and one that needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. However, I have a couple thoughts that can apply generally.

First, insistence on complete truthfulness is vital. The more intense the chaos and attempt to destroy, the more complete truthfulness in all cases is required. Step away from fallacy. Leave assumption behind. Abandon baseless opinion that isn’t mutually supportive of all people. Stick to the truth and you’ll find that destructive folks will go find somewhere else to make a mess.

Second, focus on cultivating a contextual viewpoint. This requires waiting to respond to the momentary craziness imposed by others and looking toward the big picture. Destructive people thrive on the freak-outs of others. They make messes for others to become distracted by, and then do their worst. When the rest of us forego the limits of emotional reaction and create effective plans, it becomes nearly impossible for us to be fooled by those that want to pillage and undermine.

Third, eliminate fear-based thinking. Fear is always a uselessly self-limiting factor and makes it so we become concerned with our imagined problems instead of dealing with real, current ones. Fear also limits creativity and intelligence—that’s just a biological fact. When we are faced with challenges, we need all the capacity we can muster, so the elimination of fears is essential.

Finally, if you are being consistently truthful, focusing on creative, contextual plans, and operating fearlessly, then you can take action based in clearly defined, universally beneficial values. The particular actions are not nearly as important as the values in which they are based.

You might have noticed how social and political revolutions often become the very destructive forces they once fought against. This is due to a lack of understanding of the criticality of values maintenance, and the tendency to base action in reactionary emotions, not consistently applied universal values. Any movement, whether a small local political effort or an international human rights organization, must maintain fidelity to universal values and truths. Otherwise, the efforts will slip into a hostile, fear-based anger-fest instead of a thoughtfully creative push toward social perfection. Put these together persistently as guiding principles, and the exact actions taken in any situation will yield positive results over time.

Hug the Universe: Damn. I wish I had a mic handy for you to drop.

That seems like a nice segue into another question I have: why are you doing the work that you’re doing? To you personally, why does this all matter?

Eric Burlingame: Gee whiz, where do I start? I guess the most important part to me is that the small "t" truths (like people communicating truthfully and justice issues) and the big "T" Truths (like how to best direct our thoughts and actions for the greater good) matter.

This is going to sound a little weird, but I reached a point in my life in the late ’90s where I just got bored with opinions, guessing, fear-based beliefs, and ignorance. I wanted value, and I wanted clarity. I definitely did not want dogma. To me, dogma is intellectually lame and morally repellant. There is an objective universe, and I really didn’t see the point in floundering any longer in the middle between not giving a damn about anything, and absolutism based on fears like we see in religions. As the phrase goes, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, and didn’t really want to go back.

The Truth is objectivity and mutual benefit, and for the first time in human history, CV allows us to mutually define the Truths free of human fear and ignorance. That is the central factor for me, and all the other specific and general benefits of the ubiquitous use of CV flow from the Truth.

Hug the Universe: That's beautiful. I know that part of what you’re doing with Inception Publishing is creating opportunities for people to learn to use Coherence Verification themselves in their own lives. I think that’s a brilliant concept with a ton of practical purposes, but the one that’s been on my mind a lot recently goes back to politics and what happened in the 2016 presidential race (I've spent a lot of time thinking about this recently).

Without widespread awareness that objective reality exists and that it can be consistently identified, most people just choose the news and perspectives that validate what they already think and believe. I mean, I get it. They’re doing their best to make sense of what they’re experiencing, but they’re limited to what they’re able to see from their current vantage point. It’s the whole “circle vs. square” issue:

And that makes things really messy when people participate in a system like a democracy but aren’t coming to the table armed with the same truthful information.

Eric Burlingame: There’s no doubt that people need to know the rules whenever they're participating in any kind of system together. They also need to know that things aren't stacked against them in such a fashion that they’ll definitely lose. In other words, for a game to be played, everyone has to be playing the same game.

In a democracy (or at least the representative version of a democracy like we have in the US) there is an assumption by most that we are all playing the same, and reasonably fair, game. We also nearly all know that some are trying to cheat or rig the game in their own favor, which has always been true. So, we have this crafty set of allowances that balances the field out somewhat.

Those allowances are the key freedoms that provide for a free exchange of information. When information contortion becomes so prevalent and perverse in the system, we have a fundamental problem. This is, in essence, where we are now, and we've been here before.

The only fundamental way to grapple with the current challenges is to democratize information validation.

We’re currently in a phase where distortion of facts and the truth has become commonplace. This is something we’ve seen before. (If you want to see a really egregious example of news distortion, read about W. R. Hearst, purveyor of “yellow journalism.”) However, there’s a difference now: instead of recognizing the need to just root out some bad players, many people have begun to question the value of fact and the need for a consistent search for the truth. The only fundamental way to grapple with the current challenges is to democratize information validation.

Setting up an unquestionable information validator, like we have historically seen in some religions and destructive governments, won’t do. This kind of structure lends itself to becoming the horror show exhibited in “The Ministry of Truth” in the Orwell book 1984. You might recall in that book, “The Ministry of Truth” is actually a propaganda department that routinely adds and erases facts from history to provide the narrative that supports the government’s preferred agenda. While this may seem fantastical to some, this is exactly what has been done in North Korea for decades.

There must be decentralization of the validation of news, facts, stories, gossip, claims, sciences, political promises—all of it. The eventual mass implementation of Coherence Verification allows for this democratization of information validation. It can become the ultimate leveling force in human history.

Hug the Universe: Sign me up for residency in that world, please! Thank you again, Eric, for taking the time to chat with me about all of this extremely important work that you’re doing. It’s an honor.

Coming up next...

So, is it becoming clear how the use of Coherence Verification can provide priceless insights into the invisible essence of the visible phenomena in the world? This is the whole separation of “appearance and essence” that I’m a little obsessed with. The factors behind human behavior that have historically been invisible are no longer out of our reach, and the implications of this development are staggering.

But what if we want to look inward and better understand our own motivations and growth? I mean, where am I at in the evolution of my own consciousness? Am I genuinely making choices that are constructive and moving me toward increased happiness and health? And what things am I misidentifying because my subjective impressions are inherently limited?

The third and final part of this interview looks at this topic in-depth and explores one of the many, many ways that this work has been invaluable in my own journey through some really challenging and ugly life circumstances. We’ll look at a detailed chart that shows my own evolution of consciousness, year-by-year, throughout my life. The chart references both David R. Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness (i.e., LOC calibrations) and Eric Burlingame’s Energy Quality Level scale (i.e., EQL calibrations) with descriptions of what it all reveals.

You won’t want to miss this peek into my energetic underwear drawer.