Rise: the evidence review
Rise was briefed as a mood app built on Dr. David Hawkins' Map of Consciousness, a scale that assigns human consciousness a number from 1 to 1000. This research programme set out to answer one question, what should we build?, and in a single day it retired the briefed version on three independent grounds. Legal (the name is trademarked and unlicensable). Evidentiary: the framework has never been tested in thirty years. And simple kindness to the user, since a scale that ranks a depressed person at "20 out of 1000" is a harm, not a feature).[1][2]
The useful discovery was that one change resolved all three problems at once: remove the number. That subtracts the trademark exposure, the psychological harm, and the need for a pseudo-science disclaimer together. What remains is a smaller, defensible product: a two-tap check-in that reports how much room you have to move, not what you are worth. This article organises the findings by topic; the argument-driven version lives in the Rise dossier.
1The framework
The Map of Consciousness asserts that human consciousness can be placed on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 1000. Below 200 sit "force" states (Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride). At 200 sits Courage, the threshold. Above it rise the "power" states — Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, Love, Joy, Peace, up to Enlightenment at the top.[9]
Hawkins held that these values came from muscle testing (applied kinesiology): that a binary arm-strength response could index any proposition against a universal database of consciousness. His publisher states the Map draws on over 250,000 calibrations across 30 years.[9]
Why the shape matters
This is not a vague spiritual metaphor. It is specific, quantitative, and cheaply falsifiable: seal an envelope, have a practitioner calibrate what is inside, check. An afternoon's work. A claim this testable, left untested for three decades, is not merely unproven. The non-testing is itself the finding.
One structural feature explains the silence: Hawkins held that skepticism itself calibrates below 200. The system classifies the very disposition required to test it as a low-consciousness state: an epistemically closed loop, and a designed one.
2The proponent
David Hawkins was a real psychiatrist. MD, Medical College of Wisconsin, 1953; Medical Director of the North Nassau Mental Health Center, 1956–1980; roughly fifty years of licensed clinical practice. He genuinely co-edited Orthomolecular Psychiatry with Linus Pauling in 1973.[10] None of that is in dispute, and any analysis that fudges it deserves dismissal. The problem is not the man's career; it is the provenance of this one claim.
The credential ledger
| Claim | Status | What is actually true |
|---|---|---|
| MD, psychiatrist | Verified | Medical College of Wisconsin, 1953. ~50-year practice. |
| Co-authored with Pauling | Qualified | Real, but co-edited a volume, not a joint paper. Orthomolecular psychiatry was rejected by the APA the same year (Task Force Report 7, 1973).[13] |
| PhD | Diploma mill | Columbia Pacific University, 1995. Permanent injunction, Marin County Superior Court, 2 Dec 1999. Deputy AG: "a diploma mill … preying on California consumers."[7] |
| "Sir" David Hawkins | Not a knighthood | Conferred by a body outside the five mutually recognised Orders of St John, which describe all others as "self-styled." No state recognises it.[14] |
| Nobel nomination | Does not exist | Nobody claims one. The publisher claims a Templeton nomination, unverifiable in principle. |
| AMA award, APA fellowship | Misleading | The AMA "award" is a continuing-education certificate; the APA fellowship is a tenure-based membership grade. |
The provenance chain
The "research" behind the Map is the Columbia Pacific dissertation.[8] Power vs. Force was published the same year, 1995, by Veritas, Hawkins' own imprint. So the complete evidentiary base is a dissertation from a court-closed diploma mill plus a self-published book. No independent party appears anywhere in that chain. You do not have to adjudicate a single question about muscle testing to see the problem.
3Evidentiary assessment
Muscle testing has been studied. The literature is clear, and it draws a sharp line between two conditions.
The 60/50 contrast
When the subject knows the answer: about 60%. Anne Jensen's Oxford work, a blinded and randomised DPhil replicated across a decade, found practitioners judged whether a person's own spoken statement was false at 65.9% and 59.4%, versus ~50% for intuition (p<.01).[4] Replicated in PLoS One 2025 at 61.6%.[5] This is the real steelman and must be reported.
When nobody knows the answer: exactly chance. Sealed vials, saline versus a toxin, everyone blinded. 51 participants, 151 test sets, correct 80/151, p = .258.[3] The authors were sympathetic to muscle testing and built the study to find the effect, which forecloses the "skeptics rigged it" reply.
The wider AK literature
| Study | Design | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Lüdtke et al. 2001[6] | 7 allergy patients, blinded, 800 test events | κ = 0.03: no better than guessing against a real ground truth. |
| Soares et al. 2025[12] | Systematic review, 8,720 records → 7 studies | "Nonexistent reliability" for non-musculoskeletal challenges. Published in a chiropractic journal. |
| Haas, Cooperstein & Peterson 2007[15] | Critical analysis | The key distinction. Ordinary muscle testing is valid for strength; AK borrows that credibility for diagnostic claims it has not earned. |
| Professional bodies | Position statements | Unanimous rejection (ACAAI, AAAAI, EAACI, NICE). The Danish Chiropractic Association formally disowned it in 1998. |
Mechanism, and the right disposition
The ideomotor effect, named by Carpenter in 1852 to explain dowsing rods and table-turning, 112 years before AK existed, is the mechanism.[16] Faraday settled it by slipping a card between the sitters' hands and the table: the hands moved first. They were pushing, sincerely and unconsciously. The closest modern analogue is facilitated communication: sincere, credentialed facilitators produced fluent speech from non-verbal people; controlled testing showed the facilitators authored every word, unaware.[17]
The disposition throughout should be Faraday's, not a debunker's: the practitioners are sincere, the arm really does go weak, and the attribution is still wrong.
4Intellectual property
The name is owned, and the owner has said no.
| Element | Status | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| "Map of Consciousness" | Trademarked | US Reg. 4,086,310, registered 2012, renewed 2021. Keep it out of app, marketing, and store listing.[1] |
| The chart & visual form | Copyrighted | Registered work (TX 8-895-484).[9] |
| Per-level prose | Copyrighted | Paraphrasing is still infringement: the trap the brief walked into asking for "typical behaviours" per level. |
| The 18 numbers as a set | Grey | Facts are not copyrightable, but selection/arrangement can be protected as a compilation. Uncertain, and Veritas litigates. |
| The idea of a threshold of agency | Free | Ideas and systems are excluded from copyright. |
| "Letting go" | Free | Predates Hawkins in Buddhism, ACT, and Gendlin's Focusing. |
Veritas' published licensing position is not a price but a refusal: permission will not be granted.[2] The decision to de-emphasise the number had already been made on design grounds. It turned out to do almost all of the legal work too. The numbers are simultaneously the most legally exposed, the most psychologically harmful, and the least necessary element.
5The design critique
A ladder always judges. Shame at the bottom, Enlightenment at the top, the depressed user on the bottom rung. No amount of soft typography changes what that structure says. And 18 options is not "extremely simple": the brief asked for a scrollable map of 18 levels and maximum four buttons, huge targets, usable in deep apathy. Those constraints rule out the brief's own structure.
The reframe: stop measuring the person, start measuring their room to move. Not worth, not elevation, just how much room do you have right now, from none to wide. That is a weather report, not a verdict, and weather changes, which is the premise of the app. It even keeps the one genuinely useful idea in the source material: a threshold where you stop feeling life is happening to you (see §1).
6Does mood tracking even work?
This was the section left open in v1.0 (originally "pending research"). Resolved, it produced the most important finding in the programme.
That shape is exactly the §7 model: a check-in that triggers one small practice, not a tracker that only records. It turns the weekend question from "should we build a mood tracker?" (answer: the data says no) into a specific, answerable one: does our check-in reduce rumination while it triggers the practice? Nobody has run that study. It may be the wedge.
Two related mechanisms were checked and corrected against my own first take (see §10): affect labelling ("name it to tame it") is not merely oversold; under some designs it impedes regulation (d = −1.21, replicated) [agent]; and the danger of daily tracking is real for a population prone to self-focus, which is why the trigger, not the log, has to be the product.
7The resolved product
Four zones, twelve states, two taps. Never more than four buttons on screen.
| Zone | States | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 🌑 Heavy | Numb · Weighed down · Grieving | Low energy, low room |
| 🔥 Churning | Afraid · Wanting · Angry | Energy back, aimed badly |
| — the line — | Hands back on the wheel | |
| 🌊 Steady | Willing · Level · Accepting | Room opening |
| ☀️ Open | Clear · Warm · Still | Wide |
Each state carries one micro-practice, scaled to the energy actually available. Three alternatives were rejected: a two-axis mood field (Russell's circumplex, empirically strongest, but no ordering means no "one small shift," and the tagline dies); a flat list of twelve (back to a ladder); and keeping the numbers in a smaller font (keeps every problem).
8Market & competition
We expected a red ocean of funded competitors. We found the opposite: a brand moat, not a resource moat. Moodfit has one employee and no verified funding and has shipped for a decade on that.[22] Stoic is nine people in Kraków on a single $150K YC seed from 2019.[23] These incumbents hold position through ratings and time, not capital.
| Moodfit | Stoic | |
|---|---|---|
| Team | 1 person | 9 people |
| Funding | None verified | $150K YC seed, 2019 |
| iOS rating | 4.7 · 2,209 | 4.8 · 35,007 |
| Lifetime price | $119.99 (off-store, dodges Apple 30%) | $199.99 (est.) |
| Killer risk | Bus factor of 1 | Data loss, no recovery path |
The wedge: both are squeezing their free tiers. Moodfit moved Gratitude out of Free into Premium in early 2026 (provable from Wayback) under release notes reading only "bug fixes." Stoic paywalls backup and syncs iCloud-only, so Android subscribers pay full price for a product missing its flagship feature by design; their own docs state they "cannot access or recover your data." A credible, stable, honest free tier is a real opening, and Rise being offline-first and local-only must not inherit Stoic's data-loss failure mode.
9Safety & regulatory
Every rule below is verified against the primary source. Two widely repeated claims are false.
Myth: "the App Store requires crisis resources." It does not. Three versions of the App Review Guidelines across a year return zero occurrences of "suicide," "self-harm," "crisis," or "hotline."[18] Of 302 mental-health apps, only 15% referred users to 988, and 14 apps with 3.5M+ downloads shipped broken hotlines and stayed live.[11] Ship 988 because it is right, and if you ship it, keep it working.
Myth: "mental-health apps are 17+." 17+ no longer exists; Apple replaced the tiers in 2025. A pure mood log is defensibly 4+; self-care tips push a 9+ floor.[19]
FDA: Rise is general wellness. Under the re-issued General Wellness policy (Jan 2026), FDA does not intend to examine low-risk wellness products; their own worked example is an app that "may help living well with anxiety."[20][21] The line, verbatim from FDA's exclusion list:
"A claim that a product helps treat an anxiety disorder."
The trigger is claims, not subject matter. Rise may track, name, and support; Rise may not treat, diagnose, or score. The real risk edge is a scored clinical instrument (a PHQ-9 with cutoffs), exactly where the original 1–1000 score was drifting. It must not ship without a deliberate, recorded decision.
10Corrections to first assumptions
The research corrected the analyst, not only the brief. Recorded here because a research programme that never overturns its author's priors is not doing its job.
| Initial claim (mine) | What the evidence said |
|---|---|
| The crisis trigger is too slow | Over-escalation is the documented harm; it trains users to lie. |
| Affect labelling is "oversold" | Worse: under some designs it impedes regulation (d = −1.21, replicated). [agent] |
| Mental-health apps retain terribly (3.3%) | 3.3% ≈ the all-app median; trackers do 6.1%. My argument, and it was false. [agent] |
| "Anger is recovery" (Churning above Heavy) | A 31-year prospective study (N=536) found anger marks a more severe, more chronic course. Cut. [agent] |
| §6 is shelve-or-proceed | Answerable: tracking alone is null; tracking that triggers works (176 RCTs). [agent] |
11Open questions & follow-ups
- Who is this actually for? "People in deep apathy" is a population that, almost by definition, does not download self-improvement apps. Daily users are probably already above the line. Not fatal, but it changes the marketing entirely.
- Does Rise need an agentic layer? House rule says every product is agentic-AI-first with a voice widget. This brief says offline, no login, no AI, and for someone in apathy, silence may be the feature. A flagged conflict, not a resolved one.
- Clear the Apify billing hold, which unblocks Reddit and bulk Play scraping in one move; highest ROI for closing §8.
- Obtain Hawkins' CPU dissertation (ISBN 0964326183). Its methods section is the single most valuable primary source available.
- Verify the student-disagreement claim against Hawkins' own books; if he concedes it in his own words it is the strongest internal-contradiction citation available.
12Glossary
- Applied kinesiology (AK)
- A practice claiming muscle strength varies with the truth or "energy" of a stimulus. Distinct from ordinary manual muscle testing, which validly measures strength.
- Calibration
- Hawkins' term for assigning a 1–1000 value to a person, idea, or object via muscle testing.
- Ideomotor effect
- Unconscious, involuntary muscle movement driven by expectation. The mechanism behind dowsing, Ouija boards, and (the evidence indicates) AK. Named by Carpenter, 1852.
- Affect labelling
- Putting feelings into words ("name it to tame it"). Real but design-dependent; can help or, in some setups, impede regulation.
- General wellness (FDA)
- A low-risk product category FDA does not intend to regulate, provided it makes no disease-treatment claims.
- DiGA
- Germany's "digital health applications": prescribable, reimbursed apps. The one channel with real per-user revenue, gated on clinical evidence.
- Rumination
- Repetitive self-focused dwelling on distress. The specific risk daily mood tracking can amplify in the target population.
13References
Accessed 16 July 2026. Entries 24–25 (highlighted) are from the salvaged research-agent work; cited as reported, full URLs not captured.
- USPTO Reg. 4,086,310 — MAP OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Serial 85172946. Registered 2012-01-17, renewed 2021-07-01. Justia
- Veritas Publishing — Copyright & Trademark Policy. veritaspub.com/copyright
- Schwartz SA, Utts J, Spottiswoode SJP, et al. (2014) "A double-blind, randomized study to assess the validity of applied kinesiology." Explore (NY) 10(2):99–108. PubMed 24607076
- Jensen AM, Stevens RJ, Burls AJ. (2016) "Estimating the accuracy of muscle response testing." BMC Complement Altern Med 16:492. PMC5131520
- Jensen AM, Stevens RJ, Burls AJ. (2025) "Exploring the variation in muscle response testing accuracy." PLoS One 20(7):e0326208. PMC12237029
- Lüdtke R, Kunz B, Seeber N, Ring J. (2001) "Test-retest-reliability and validity of the Kinesiology muscle test." Complement Ther Med 9(3):141–145. PubMed 11926427
- Columbia Pacific University — permanent injunction, Marin County Superior Court, 2 Dec 1999. Wikipedia · GAO-04-771T
- Hawkins DR. (1995) Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis and Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia Pacific University. Open Library
- Veritas Publishing — Map of Consciousness®. veritaspub.com
- Hawkins D, Pauling L, eds. (1973) Orthomolecular Psychiatry. W.H. Freeman. Internet Archive
- Dwyer B, Mikkelson J, Burns J, et al. (2025) "Mental Health Apps and Crisis Support: the Impact of 988." Psychiatric Services, Oct 2025. n=302. PubMed 40836663
- Soares JR, Stieven FF, Rocha CSS, Miranda IF. (2025) "Reliability of Manual Muscle Testing in Applied Kinesiology: A Systematic Review." J Manipulative Physiol Ther 48(6-9):862–870. PubMed 41236460
- APA (1973) Task Force Report 7: Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry. APA PDF
- Alliance of the Orders of Saint John of Jerusalem — the five mutually recognised orders. Self-styled order
- Haas M, Cooperstein R, Peterson D. (2007) "Disentangling manual muscle testing and Applied Kinesiology." Chiropractic & Osteopathy 15:11. PMC2000870
- Ideomotor effect — Carpenter WB (1852); Faraday M (1853). Modern: Shin, Proctor & Capaldi (2010), Psychological Bulletin 136(6):943–974. Overview
- Burgess CA, Kirsch I, Shane H, et al. (1998) "Facilitated communication as an ideomotor response." Psychological Science 9(1):71–74.
- Apple App Store Review Guidelines — verified across June 2025, Feb 2026, and live (8 June 2026). developer.apple.com
- Apple — updated age ratings, announced 24 Jul 2025; deadline 31 Jan 2026. Announcement
- FDA (2026) General Wellness: Policy for Low Risk Devices. Issued 6 Jan 2026. PDF
- FDA (2022) Policy for Device Software Functions and Mobile Medical Applications. Appendix B. PDF
- Moodfit (Roble Ridge Software LLC). Metrics via Apple lookup; free-tier change via Wayback. The widely-cited "$780K raised" belongs to an unrelated company of the same name.
- Stoic (Stoic app inc., Kraków, YC S19). Metrics via Apple lookup; iCloud-only sync and "cannot access or recover your data" from their help docs. "3M+ users" is a self-reported marketing claim.
- [agent] Meta-analysis of mental-health app RCTs (Linardon et al., 2024) — 176 RCTs; overall g ≈ 0.28; mood-monitoring features associated with larger effects. From salvaged agent research; citation as reported.
- [agent] Review of mood-monitoring-only interventions (Wright et al., 2026) — ~8 RCTs; null effect for tracking without a triggered practice. From salvaged agent research; citation as reported.