Book: Handbook to Higher Consciousness

Sep 26, 2013

This book is instrumental in teaching me how to live my life in a conscious, loving way, free from addictions of power, security and sensation.

Handbook to Higher Consciousness:

Keyes, Jr, Ken, Handbook to Higher Consciousness: The Science of Happiness, 1975, Living Love Books. ISBN 0-9600688-8-0 (pbk). BJ1581.2.K45 1986 158’.1 86-27785.

Main Precept:

Love everyone unconditionally, including yourself.

Excerpts:

From The Twelve Pathways To the Higher Consciousness Planes of Unconditional Love and Oneness

  1. Freeing Myself

    • I am Freeing Myself from security, sensation, and power addictions that make me try to forcefully control situations in my life, and thus destroy my serenity and keep me from loving myself and others.

    • I am discovering how my consciousness-dominating addictions create my illusory version of the changing world of people and situations around me.

    • I welcome the opportunity (even if painful) that my minute-to-minute experience offers me to become aware of the addictions I must reprogram to be liberated from my robot-like emotional patterns.

  2. Being Here Now

    • I always remember that I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now – unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectation based on the dead past or the imagined future.

    • I take full responsibility here and now for everything I experience, for it is my own programming that creates my actions and also influences the reaction of people around me.

    • I accept myself completely here and now and consciously experience everything I feel, think, say, and do (including my emotion-backed addictions) as a necessary part of my growth into higher consciousness.

  3. Interacting With Others

    • I open myself genuinely to all people by being willing to fully communicate my deepest feelings, since hiding in any degree keeps me stuck in my illusion of separteness from other people.

    • I feel with loving compassion the problems of others without getting caught up emotionally in their predicaments that are offering them messages they need for their growth.

    • I act freely when I am tuned in, centered, and loving, but if possible I avoid acting when I am emotionally upset and depriving myself of the wisdom that flows from love and expanded consciousness.

  4. Discovering My Conscious-Awareness

    • I am continually calming the restless scanning of my rational mind in order to perceive the finer energies that enable me to unitively merge with everything around me.

    • I am constantly aware of which of the SevenCentersOfConsciousness I am using, and I feel my energy, perceptiveness, Love and inner peace growing as I open all the seven centers of consciousness.

    • I am perceiving everyone, including myself, as an awakening being who is here to claim his or her birthright to the higher consciousness planes of unconditional love and oneness.

pp 14-15, Handbook to Higher Consciousness, Ken Keyes, Jr, 1975 Living Love Books.

The Seven Centers of Consciousness

  1. THE SECURITY CENTER. This center makes you preoccupied with food, shleter, or whatever you equate with your personal secuirty. This programming forces your consciousness to be dominated by your continuous battle to get “enough” from the world in order to feel secure.

  2. THE SENSATION CENTER. This Center is concerned with finding happieness in life by providing yourself with more and better pleasurable sensations and activities. For many people, sex is the most appealing of all sensations. Other addictive sensations may include the sound of music, the taste of food, etc.

  3. THE POWER CENTER. When your consciousness is focused on this Center, you are concerned with dominating people and situations and increasing your prestige, wealth, and pride – in addition to thousands of more subtle forms of hierarchy, manipulation, and control.

  4. THE LOVE CENTER. At this Center you are transcending subject-object relationships and are learning to see the world with the feelings and harmonies of flowing acceptatnce. You see yourself in everyone – and everyone in yourself. You feel compassion for the suffering of those caught in the dramams of security, sensation and power. You are beginning to love and accept everyone unconditionally – even yourself.

  5. The CORNUCOPIA CENTER. When your consciousness is illuminated by this Center, you experience the friendliness of the world you are creating. You begin to realize that you’ve always lived in a perfect world. To the degree that you still have addictions, the perfection lies in giving you the experience you need to get free of your emotion-backed demands. As you reprogram your addictions, the perfection will be experienced as a continuous enjoyment of the here and now in your life. As you become more loving and accepting, the world becomes a “horn of plenty” that gives you more than you need to be happy.

  6. THE CONSCIOUS-AWARENESS CENTER. It is liberating to have a Center from which your Conscious-awareness watches your body and mind perform on the lower five centers. This is a meta-center from which you non-judgmentally witness the drama of your body and mind. From this Center of Centeres, you learn to impartially observe your social roles and life games from a place that is free from fear and vulnerability.

  7. THE COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS CENTER. When you live fully in the Sixth Center of Consciousness, you are ready to transcend self-awareness and become pure awareness. At this ulitmate level, you are one with everything – you love, peace, energy, beauty, wisdom, clarity, effectiveness, and oneness.

pp 48-49, Handbook to Higher Consciousness, Ken Keyes, Jr, 1975 Living Love Books.