Handbook to Higher Consciousness (Ken Keyes Jr.)

Millions of years ago when our animal ancestors had to survive in the jungle, it was necessary to have an instantly effective fight or flight mechanism. When a tiger was about to spring, an automatic emotional response was a life saver. A nervous shock was needed to squirt adrenalin into the blood so that muscles became jet powered. Emotional alarms were needed to command full attention. When a tiger was ready to jump, there was no time to admire the beautiful sunset. As a jungle survival mechanism, our animal ancestors were programmed for automatic duality—automatic feelings of otherness, threat, and paranoia. Survival required instant domination of consciousness to meet the perils of the jungle.

We are the pioneers in the evolution of human consciousness. It was only about 10,000 years ago that our ancestors built the first cities. As civilization grew, survival no longer depended on the instant fight or flight of the jungle. Survival and happiness now depend on tuning in to the overall situation involving ourselves, the people around us, and the total environment of the here and now. Perceptiveness, wisdom, and oneness are now the ingredients of effective and happy living. But our biocomputers are still programmed for jungle fight or flight—for a fast release of adrenalin into the blood stream, and for rapid heartbeat—for automatic anger and fear. In our social interactions, our consciousness magnifies molehills and makes them into mountains—and this constant distortion destroys our energy, our insight, and our ability to love.


Thus survival in the jungle meant that we had to be programmed for instant paranoia—instant fear—instant anger—instant perception of duality. Survival in our world today means that we must have instant perceptions of oneness—of love—of compassion with everyone and understanding of everything around us. When we learn to cut through our paranoid jungle programming, we are on our way to higher consciousness and happiness.

Evolution is now working to remedy this primitive jungle alarm wiring in our brain that tends to hold us on lower consciousness levels. Paranoid, dualistic individuals who cannot love themselves and others tend to get heart trouble, ulcers, other psychosomatic diseases, are accident-prone, etc. Perhaps in 100,000 years, through the ruthless survival of the fittest, humans may have nervous systems that are automatically structured to produce instant insights that facilitate love and oneness. But that doesn’t help you and me. We need the Living Love Way to show us how to live in higher consciousness as soon as possible—to override our jungle programming so that we can enjoy living here and now.

We have escaped from the domination of instincts (inflexible unlearned behavior) that guides animals through their daily life situations. Since the young human is not provided with a full repertoire of automatic fixed responses, we are unable to independently cope with life for a number of years after birth. This long period of plasticity and openness to learning complex life guidance patterns helps us avoid fixed preprogrammed behavior. For example, this long nurturing period lets us learn complex language systems—and our flexibility is such that we can learn to communicate in Swahili as easily as in English or any other language.

Instead of a complete pattern of animal-type instincts to provide survival responses to life situations, the young child uses ego mechanisms backed by hair-trigger emotions to develop security, sensation, and power magnification of the moment-to-moment sensory inputs. Our personal development into fulfilling, happy lives (as well as the progression of civilization beyond the dangerous power consciousness) depends on our getting free of our ego-backed, subject-object, me-them, security-sensation-power hang-ups.

It may be helpful to see this progression of consciousness in outline form as follows:

The biocomputer with which you are equipped is the most remarkable instrument in the universe. Your only problem is to learn to use it properly. It is capable of handling two million visual inputs and one hundred thousand auditory inputs at any one time. Your biocomputer operates continually throughout all of its parts and is capable of making millions of simultaneous computations. It operates with enormous power primarily on unconscious levels—with only a tiny proportion of its activity rising to the level of consciousness. The conscious level of your biocomputer is analogous to the print-out of the man-made computers. Your journey into higher consciousness is a matter of your learning how to properly program your remarkable biocomputer. When you really learn to operate your exquisite mechanism, you will be able to fully realize your potential for a happy life.

A wonderful thing about life is that it is naturally good. Life is set up to work—to produce love, fulfillment, and happiness continuously. However, various situations during your first years of life conditioned you in the methods of consciousness which continually generate unhappiness in your life. Yet every current experience can aid you in your growth toward higher consciousness if you know how to use it.

This Handbook will explain how you have been creating the experiences that you have. It will show you exactly what to do to break out of the traps in your mind that are the cause of all the unhappiness that you have experienced in your life! When you apply the Methods in the Handbook you will be able to turn your life around. The continuous experience of love, serenity, happiness, joy, effectiveness, perceptiveness, and wisdom that you have had only in bits and pieces can now be available to you all of the time.

You will learn how to experience the world as a friendly, loving place that has been designed to give you everything that you need. You will develop a “miraculous” quality in your life. Beautiful things will happen so continuously that you can no longer ascribe it to mere “coincidence.” You will experience that you can create more love, happiness, and serenity than you need for living a thoroughly fulfilled and enjoyable life.

While this was certainly not your intention, you will become aware of how you have been turning yourself off to the energies of the world around you. Your mind has been programmed to process incoming visual, auditory, and other information in ways that continuously alienate and separate you from people. You will realize that you have been unconscious of what you have been doing to yourself. it is as though you have been born with eyes that see only with great distortion—but which give the illusion of seeing sharply and clearly. This handbook will help you become aware that the only real problem in your life involves how consciously you use your mind—and it gives you clear instructions for carrying out the inner work necessary to become an energetic, perceptive, loving being.

Living Love is a positive cure for all of the suffering and unhappiness in your life and that of all humanity. The Living Love Way offers mankind one of the most powerful tools for emerging victorious in the race between higher consciousness and the suffering of atomic annihilation, ecological degradation, prejudice, and the thousand-fold ways we separate ourselves from each other.