Muscle Testing

*The post that follows came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.

When I first read Power vs. Force I had a negative reaction to the idea of muscle testing. I played with it, briefly, but without a fuller understanding of why it's supposed to work, I simply ignored it.

With this book, getting to it a year after I read the former, I've finally got an idea of why it works, and how. First off, the technique cannot be understood from the point of view of ( the level of consciousness) Reason. If you're at Reason or lower, then you'll need a degree of faith to use the technique. But once you transcend Reason, dropping completely the ego's claim to ultimate truth, then with a spiritual eye you can begin to grasp what's going on. 

First off, one has to understand and live the fact that standards of ethics are universal, and that they flow from God, Truth, the Source, not from our own pithy minds. 

Second, one has to understand and live the fact that mind cannot distinguish truth from falsity. Think about that. Human beings cannot distinguish the two. The ego rebels, it wants to believe that it can. But the ego is imperfect, wild, and temperamental. Anyone seriously interested in understanding the true from the false needs some other way of figuring things out. The mind has devised it's own solution, that of science.

Experimentation, carried out and repeated by others interested in knowing the truth. But how far can science take us? The limitations of science are breathtaking in scope if one takes the time to honestly ponder. Whereas faith-based institutions are often very excellent at filling in the gaps. Religious people are simply happier than non-religious people. Alcoholics Anonymous still succeeds where no scientific therapy can hope for.

So, in order to tell the true from the false in the questions that really matter in life, human beings have to have a way of doing so. It turns out that all of consciousness is linked, and that a sufficiently advanced consciousness has access to the universal records. But not consciously!! If we hadn't, we'd be extinct already, our animal natures consuming us.

We test things in a similar way to muscle testing all the time. We've all gotten "feelings from our gut," that urge us to act in ways that are for our best interest, even if the ego doesn't see it. Those gut feelings stem directly from this linked field of consciousness, subconsciously urging all of us to grow and transcend, onward and upward.

What muscle testing allows us is the opportunity to "ask God," and receive an answer from this linked field, granting us conscious access to what has historically been only the province of highly intuitive beings. It uses the same mechanism we do when we access our intuition. There's more than one way to muscle test, including a method to self-test. 

Thing about muscle testing by yourself is, you have to have faith in your abilities. And you have to exercise them often. You're building up a skill. Faith comes into play because unless you're trusting the linked field of consciousness to give you the answer, your ego will substitute one instead. You have to have faith in the technique, or in the above exposition, or you have to witness for yourself muscle testing in action.

The method to muscle test by yourself is to press your left thumb and middle finger together tightly resembling an 'O'. Then hold the statement to be tested in your mind, and then try to pull them apart with the thumb and index finger of your right hand. If they break apart, then you've gotten a negative answer. If they hold, then you've gotten a positive answer. You'll have to do it a lot before you'll start to get firm answers, as the ego doesn't want to believe it doesn't hold all the answers in itself.

Another tip: release any attachment you have to the outcome before you do the test. That's the only way to be sure that your ego isn't misleading you, if you're truly non-attached to the outcome, merely witnessing.