The Living Love Way/The Twelve Pathways

I like this article because it can read with ease by anyone at any stage of their life or enlightenment...

Because of it's size I could not post all of it here but you may view the rest at this link:

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THE LIVING LOVE WAY

"The Handbook to Higher Consciousness" by Ken Keyes, Jr.

"Most of us," said the cosmic humorist, "go through life not knowing what we want, but feeling darned sure this isn't it"
Over 99% of the people in the western world live on lower consciousness levels characterized by trying to find enough security, sex, pleasant sensations, ego rushes, prestige, money, power, and status. This endless struggle yields lives of constant resentment, worry, suspicion, anger, jealousy, shyness, and fear.

Everything people tell themselves they must do to be happy ends up yielding more frustration than joy. The more successful a person is in making money, collecting skills and possessions, developing exciting sexual relationships, acquiring knowledge and degrees, and achieving positions of status, power, and prestige, the less loving, peaceful, and contented he may find himself or herself.

And yet it is not these things in and of themselves that create an unhappy life. It is the internal mental addiction or desire for them that minute-by-minute keeps one from enjoying life. Addictions (or emotion-backed demands) bring fear of non-fulfillment; jealousy that someone may steal our source of fulfillment; anger when someone thwarts us; cynicism if constantly under supplied; paranoia if constantly threatened; boredom if we're making no progress toward satisfying our addictions; worry if we can't see a steady supply; anxiety if we're worried about being worried; and unhappiness when the outside world does not supply us with whatever it is we are addicted to. Since the nature of life is such that we win some and lose some, an addicted person has no chance of living a happy, loving, peaceful, conscious, wise, and effective life. And the addictive programming is not necessary to find and enjoy that which we prefer in life.

You are ready for growth into the happiness of higher consciousness when you realize the utter futility of trying to live a beautiful life by your efforts to rearrange or change the world of people and things outside of you to fit your addictions and desires. You will find you have only to rearrange your own personal, automatically programmed responses to life situations, most of which are childhood hang-ups.

As you work toward higher levels of consciousness, you will find that you have always had enough to be happy. It is the patterns in your head that make you unhappy, although you usually blame the people and conditions outside you for your unhappiness. Your journey into higher consciousness can enable you to be loving, peaceful, wise, and free of a constant barrage of unpleasant emotional feelings.

Living Love offers you four advantages in your adventure into higher consciousness:

1. For many people it can be one of the most powerful and rapid ways for growth into higher consciousness that has ever been available to mankind.

2. It does not require you to detach yourself from your present life. Living Love can be used most effectively if you stay with your present business, personal life, and other conditions until you have grown to a high enough state of consciousness to be fully perceptive of the arbitrary mores, folkways, and social roles you are guarding and living out.

3. Once you thoroughly understand the system, it is not essential to have a teacher for continuing your growth. Your life will be your best teacher, for you will discover that you are always pulling yourself into learning situations that are ideal for your growth. The programming that you most need to change has an unerring way of pulling you into life situations that can make you aware of the exact inner work you should be doing.

4. When you use the Living Love Way to find the love, inner peace, wisdom, and effectiveness of higher consciousness, your inner work on yourself immediately adds to your enjoyment of life. With the Living Love Way, happiness is not a distant goal-it is an ever-growing part of your here and now.

Think of the energy you now put into the up-and-down hour- by-hour coping with your feelings while you continually try to re-arrange the people and situations in your life so that you can then be loving, serene, effective, and happy. And yet year by year your quest for happiness is as elusive as finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Since almost everyone around you seems to be having similar trouble in becoming a happy, loving being, you may have lowered your standards and decided that continuous happiness is probably not realistic.

The Living Love Way invites you to set the highest imaginable standards of love, serenity, peace, wisdom, effectiveness, and continuous happiness for your life. And then you are ready to begin your journey into higher consciousness. Return to Top

Secrets of Happiness

We constantly tell ourselves such things as, "If I could just go back to school and acquire more knowledge-perhaps get a Master's degree-then I will be happy." But are people with Master's degrees or Ph.D.'s any happier than the rest of us? It is beautiful to acquire knowledge but it is misleading to expect it to bring us peace, love, and happiness. We tell ourselves, "If I could only find the right person to love, then I would be happy." So we search for someone who our addictions tell us is the right person-and we experience some pleasurable moments. But since we don't know how to love, the relationship gradually deteriorates. Then we decide we didn't have the right person after all! As we grow into higher consciousness, we discover that it is more important to be the right person than to find the right person.

We must deeply understand why all of our negative emotions are misleading guides to effective action in life situations. Our negative emotions are simply the result of an extensive pattern of scars and wounds that we have experienced. And these emotional wounds lead us to perceive differences that make us uptight instead of similarities that enable us to understand and love. The present programming of our emotions makes us perceive other people (and the conditions of the world around us) as threats-potentially dangerous to our well-being. We then respond with adrenaline, faster heart beat, increased blood sugar, and other jungle survival responses that prepare us for fight or flight. We are trapped in our ways of perceiving the world around us.

But no one (or no situation) need be felt as an emotional threat or danger when we see things with the clearer perception of higher consciousness. Think of the most threatening situation you have felt in the last day or two. Are you about to lose your job? Is the person for whom you feel the most love paying more attention to someone else than to you? Do you have unpaid bills that you cannot take care of? Do you have a pain that could be cancer? Now, these problems either have solutions-or they don't. Either you can do something about them here and now-or you can't. if you can do something here and now about them, then do it-even if it's just a first step. It saps your energy to be worried or anxious about a problem. Do what you can do-but don't be addicted to the results.

As we reach physical maturity and our biocomputer (or brain) is able to function more perceptively, we have all the power we need. But our biocomputer (backed up by the full repertory of our emotions) is still programmed to compensate for the power deficiency we experienced when we were infants and young children. We now need to learn to flow with the people and things around us. But our power addiction keeps us from loving people because we perceive them as objects that may threaten our power, prestige, or pecking order. If we want to love and be loved, we can't be addicted to power-or to anything else.

As conscious beings the only thing we need to find happiness in life is to perceive clearly who we are (we are pure consciousness and not the social roles we are acting out), and exactly what are the real conditions; here and now, of our lives. How basically simple is our problem! But to achieve this clear perception of ourselves and the world around us takes constant inner work. And this means developing the habit of emotionally accepting whatever is here and now in our lives. For only an emotionally calm biocomputer can see clearly and wisely, and come up with effective ways to interact with people and situations.

Our power addiction is only one example of the happiness- destroying programming that we put into our biocomputers when we were too young to perceive the realities of the world in which we lived. Although we now have the basic capacity for clear perception, the operating instructions we gave our biocomputer anchor us to the lower levels. And so we're unconsciously trapped.

Here and now is the reality in our lives - and it is only from the conditions of the present that our future can be generated. But our present addictions, demands, and expectations (the programming of our biocomputer) dominate our consciousness and force us to spend most of the time we are awake (and most of the time we are dreaming) in protesting and pouting about the here and now situation in our lives. This lowers our perceptiveness and keeps us from finding effective solutions to our problems. The Living Love Way to Higher Consciousness shows us how to break through this trap, to free ourselves, and to find our full potential as human beings.



THE LAW of HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

Your growth into higher consciousness should begin by fully understanding the importance of becoming one with the Law of Higher Consciousness:

Love everyone unconditionally- including yourself.

This law can enable you to find the hidden splendor within yourself and others. Unfortunately, we have never been taught how to love unconditionally. Almost all of our loving has been motivated by emotional desires programmed into us at an early age Most of our love experiences have taught us we must earn or serve love before we can have it-and that others must deserve our love. This is conditional love-it is like a barter or a business transaction. It is no wonder that our well-meaning but unskilled at- tempts to love usually end up in separation and alienation. We have been taught to place conditions on our love: "If you really loved me you would.. "-and then we use one of our addictions to finish the sentence. This is an exchange-it is not unconditional love.

What is unconditional love? It is not, "I can love you if you do what my emotional programming-my addiction-says I want you to do." It is just love. just, "I love you because you are there. I love you because you are part of the nowness of my life. I love you because although our bodies and minds may be on different trips, on the consciousness level all of us are alike in our humanness. We are one."

Real love is simply accepting another person. Completely and unconditionally! We experience things from his or her psychic space. It is like seeing the world through his or her eyes. Whatever he or she is going through-whatever he or she is feeling-we have been there, too-at some time in our lives.

When we love, we view others as unfolding beings in their journey toward higher consciousness. We realize that no matter how intensely we strive for worldly attainments, we all seek love and oneness on the consciousness level. We are all on the journey to higher consciousness. Some of us are hearing the messages life offers us and are working consciously to eliminate our addictions. Others are not progressing rapidly because they do not yet know how to consciously work on themselves.

We must also learn to love ourselves - right here and now. We need to feel that no matter how horrible we have judged our past actions, each day our life begins anew. We have at all times been lovable. A child may be naughty, but he is always lovable. And so we are all children as long as we are programmed with our lower consciousness addictions. So we must accept the melodramas we get involved in as we live out our current crop of addictions. This, too, is a part of life and growth.

Every part of the system of Living Love is designed to help you learn to love everyone unconditionally-including yourself. You only need to plant the Living Love seeds in your consciousness and they will automatically sprout. Do not berate yourself because you are not enlightened by the third Tuesday of next month. The more you learn to love and accept yourself, the more you will realize that you are doing exactly what you need to do to provide yourself with experiences to grow into higher consciousness.

How can you love others if you do not love yourself? The love you have for yourself and the love you have for "another" are building blocks joining together within you to create the beautiful edifice of real love.

Learning to love unconditionally means getting free of interference from our programmed addictions-those emotion-backed demanding instructions to our biocomputer. This enables us to perceive clearly what is here and now - to evaluate wisely-and to act effectively to do whatever we want to do about it. The key to this is the instant emotional acceptance of the here and now - the
emotional acceptance of the previously unacceptable.

When our emotions are triggered, we cannot perceive clearly our actual life situation. Our biocomputer then sends a flow of information to our consciousness in which separation and alienation are emphasized. We create a horribly warped evaluation of the here and now based on our addictive programming. When this happens, we magnify differences and suppress similarities between ourselves and "others." And this destroys our ability to love unconditionally.

We all know that just having the desire to love is not enough. As far back as we can remember we have been aware of the importance of love in our lives. We know that lack of love is responsible for most of the unhappiness in the world - for difficulties in getting along with other people, for pollution, prejudice, wars, and other individual and group crimes against humanity. But what can we do about it?

The Law of Higher Consciousness suggests a practical guide for the Aquarian Age:

You add suffering to the world
just as much when you take offense
as when you give offense.

The Living Love Way to Higher Consciousness can show you step by step why you find it so difficult to love and exactly what to do about it. The Twelve Pathways given in the following chapter tell you what you need to do to live in the Oneness Ocean of Love all of the time. Return to Top




THE TWELVE PATHWAYS

(read here)
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