Handbook to Higher Consciousness

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Do what you can Do
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Handbook to Higher ConsciousnessHandbook to Higher Consciousness – The Science of Happiness by Ken Keyes, JR.

This is a handbook that will explain how we have been creating the experiences we have and what to do to experience the world as a friendly, loving place designed to give you everything you need.

Here are my personal notes from the book that I don’t want to forget and parts that I want to be reminded of so that I too, can reach higher consciousness:

Progression of Consciousness:

  • Animal: Fixed lifestyle based on instinct / unlearned pre-programmed behaviour
  • Lower Consciousness Human: Ego-directed
  • Higher Consciousness Human: Insight & Deep Intuitive understanding


  • Living Love is a positive cure for all of the suffering and un-happiness in your life.
  • You have always had enough to be happy. It is the patterns in your head that make you un-happy.

 

Here and now

Think of the most threatening situation you have felt in the last day or two. Are you about to lose your job? Do you have unpaid bills you can’t take care of? Is the person you love paying more attention to someone else? 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 or you will create more worry for yourself.

  • We now need to learn to flow with the people and things around us.
  • If we want to love or 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, and exactly what are the real conditions, here and now, of our lives. (Which takes constant inner work).
  • Our negative emotions are simply the result of an extensive pattern of scars and wounds that we have experienced.
  • As long as you think these negative emotions have any function whatsoever, you will retard your growth into higher consciousness.
  • If you do not hassle yourself emotionally when the outside world does not conform with your inside programming (your desires, expectations, demands, or how the world should treat you) you will have so much energy, sleep less, you will be joyous and loving, and really appreciate each moment of your life – no matter what’s happening in the world of people and situations outside you.


The Law of Higher Consciousness

Love everyone unconditionally – including yourself.

You add suffering to the world just as much when you take offense as when you give offense.
Just love. “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!
  • Whatever he/she is going through – or 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.

The Twelve Pathways

A minute-to-minute guide for operating your consciousness while you interact with the world around you.

Life is warning you to get rid of an addiction every time you are emotionally uncomfortable in any way.

You were taught that happiness lies in getting people and things outside of you lined up exactly to suit your desires. The 12 pathways to Higher Consciousness can show you how to accelerate your spiritual development and enable you to being a new life of Living Love.

GIGO – Garbage In – Garbage Out

If you are not continuously loving everyone around you and continuously enjoying the here-and-now situations in your life, it means that your magnificent bio-computer (brain) has been operating from “garbage-type” programming. When you see yourself consciously and clearly, you realize that you are perfect – your only problem is to change some of the programming from which you are operating.

  • Your ego selects which of the thousands of programs will be used to generate your feelings and experience of what is happening – it is the master controller that directs which emotional feelings will be triggered (joy, pleasure, anger, grief, fear, disappointment, irritation, etc.).
  • You are only aware of what your ego permits you to be aware of.
  • Until you reprogram and change these inappropriate childhood programs, you will continually turn off the energy of the world around you that you need in order to live in a beautiful world of higher consciousness.


The Twelve Pathways

to the Higher Consciousness Planes of Unconditional Love and Oneness

Memorize these in order to implant them deeply into your consciousness. They can lead you straight into higher consciousness and enable you to find love, happiness, wisdom, and fulfillment.

FreedomHere NowInteractionAwareness

FREEING MYSELF

1. 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.

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

3. 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.

BEING HERE NOW

4. 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 expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future.

5. 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 reactions of people around me.

6. 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.

INTERACTING WITH OTHERS

7. 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 separateness from other people.

8. 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.

9. 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.

DISCOVERING MY CONSCIOUS-AWARENESS

10. 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.

11. I am constantly aware of which of the Seven Centers of Consciousness I am using, and I feel my energy, perceptiveness, love and inner peace growing as I open all of the Centers of Consciousness.

12. 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.

As you progress through the various stages of achieving Higher Consciousness, you begin to be aware of how the 12 pathways will produce beautiful and miraculous changes in your life, and if you start to get angry, which of the 12 pathways you need to work on. Once you have reached the final stage, you will have eliminated all of the lower consciousness programming which triggered your negative emotional responses and simply respond to whatever is happening here and now by using one of the Pathways (either consciously or unconsciously) in interpreting what is happening. You realize you are the master of your mind.

1st Stage2nd Stage3rd Stage4th Stage5th Stage6th Stage7th Stage8th Stage9th Stage10th Stage11th Stage12th Stage

  • That which you emotionally avoid is just as much an addiction as is something you desire.
  • Addictions always cause you unhappiness sooner or later, preferences never do. When an addiction is not satisfied, you are unhappy. When a preference is not satisfied, you are simply indifferent – it was only a preference after all.
  • Only your emotional programming determines whether something is an addiction or a preference.


  • We see things not as they are, but as we are.
  • Your head creates your world.


  • Use every uptight/uncomfortable feeling in life situations as an opportunity for conscious growth.
  • You will grow faster if you work on your addictions with someone you would’ve normally excluded from your life.
  • Everything and everyone around you is your teacher.
  • Your moment-to-moment stream of consciousness becomes interesting and real when you experience everything as a step in your growth towards higher consciousness. You will soon begin to feel peaceful and loving almost all of the time.


  • If you are not enjoying every here and now moment of your life, your additions are making you dwell in the dead past or the imagined future.
  • All there is in your life is the eternal now moment – and your experience of this moment is created by the programming in your head.
  • You can only be here now when you instantly accept emotionally whatever happens in your life.
  • We always have enough to be happy if we are enjoying what we do have – and not worrying about what we don’t have.


  • Your mind creates your universe.
  • A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world.
  • Your ‘actions’ create the ‘reactions’ of people around you.
  • The world is your mirror.
  • A peaceful person lives in a peaceful world. An angry person creates an angry world.
  • As you grow in consciousness, you begin to realize the hundreds of ways in which you create the consciousness of everyone around you.
  • Since your consciousness creates your universe, all you have to do to change your world, is to change your consciousness!


  • If someone does something that “hurts your ego,” you will grow fastest if you consciously regard him or her as your teacher who is enabling you to discover which addictions you will have to reprogram.
  • The real you is your Conscious-awareness. And your conscious-awareness is just digging the whole show from the audience. When you watch the entire drama of your life and that of other people from the safe vantage point of the audience, you begin to provide a distance that enables you to see your addictions more clearly.
  • Just experience everything in an accepting, relaxed, and conscious way – and realize that every one of your experiences is perfect for your here and now growth into higher consciousness.


  • You will discover that you no longer have anything to hide from other people. It then feels good to be able to communicate with each person exactly what you are experiencing.
  • When you are not completely open and truthful to all people – when you are trying to hide a part of your inner feelings – you continue the illusion of separateness from others.
  • It feels so good to be able to just open up and let people see all of you. You have every right to feel exactly as you feel.
  • You don’t need to lay judgments on people or prove them wrong. You just talk about your own consciousness.
  • You will realize that open communication of your innermost feelings helps your ego (and the egos of other people) to get free of addictive programming which in the long run only produces unhappiness and alienation.


  • When you interact with people who are still involved in their addictions, it is important that you learn to feel their problems with loving compassion, but without getting caught up emotionally in their predicaments.
  • Compassionate understanding – yes; pity and commiseration – no.
  • The best way to help others who are trapped in suffering and give them a chance to free themselves is for you to avoid getting caught up emotionally in the “stuff”.
  • Your life works best when you love, serve, and flow your loving energy – not from a lower consciousness motivation of “I am helping you,” or “I will save you,” but simply from the awareness that “the universe gave this energy to me and it feels good to pass it along.”


  • Bad vibrations are contagious, as are Good vibrations.
  • You are always ready to communicate your deepest feelings and ready to be completely open and to communicate with people, but if you are caught in the grip of a disturbing emotion, you delay communication to give yourself a little time to work on your addiction until you are perceptive, centered, and loving.


  • As you grow in awareness, you will begin to realize that the activity of your rational mind is generally sparked by your security, sensation, and power motivations.
  • You are trying to hold onto something you do have, get something you don’t have, or avoid something you don’t want.
  • You discover how your rational mind has become a pawn commanded by your ego to “rationalize” your security, sensation, and power demands and expectations.
  • You begin to see that many of the “clever” things your rational mind devises to say to other people just turn out to be separating and alienating responses that keep you out of the “us” space.


As you up-level your consciousness, you enjoy being able to unconditionally love and accept everyone.

  • Everyone you meet has the capacity for clear perception, wisdom, effectiveness, peace, and love. We are equal beings.
  • Even if someone yells at you or hits you, he is trying to manipulate you so that you can fit the pattern of his addictions – and thus permit him to love you in his conditional way.
  • When your ego permits you to see the here-and-now actions of people with perspective, you realize that there is practically nothing that anyone can do that you have not either done or wanted to do at some time in your life.
  • Our egos and our rational minds keep us continually judging other people so as to put them in the wrong and thus give us a supposed advantage.
  • A conscious being simply sees, with a compassion that is born of insight and perspective, that everyone is on the road to awakening. We learn to love others by accepting and loving ourselves – and vice-versa.
  • Whenever you are in doubt about whether to do something or not, just ask yourself whether it makes you feel more separate from people or more loving toward people.


I haven’t even scratched the surface of the knowledge that is contained in this book – recommend grabbing a copy to get the full understanding, these notes just serve to remind me of things that I want to be reminded about within the book. I’ll create another post shortly as a follow-up though as there are many more notes that I want to be reminded of :)

See also Part 2 Handbook to Higher Consciousness

Keyes, Ken. “Handbook to Higher Consciousness” 1975

Ken Keyes has also written the following books:

  • A Conscious Person’s Guide to Relationships
  • How to Enjoy Your Life in Spite of it All
  • Prescriptions for Happiness
  • Taming your Mind
  • The Hundredth Monkey
  • How to Make Your Life Work or Why Aren’t you Happy?
  • Your Heart’s Desire

Penny (PennyButler.com)
Penny (PennyButler.com)

Truth-seeker, ever-questioning, ever-learning, ever-researching, ever delving further and deeper, ever trying to 'figure it out'. This site is a legacy of sorts, a place to collect thoughts, notes, book summaries, & random points of interests.

One Comment

  1. Scott Stainbrook says:

    Penny B., I like what you’re doing and sharing with us.

    In Ken’s book, the comments regarding how the first five (egoic) centers all give something to do with each experience, a series of judgments, evaluations, strategizing…etc., reminds me of all the options in the flow of the utlimate reality of life, and that the illusions of the ego here reveal only the barest fragments of oneself.

    Also, I like your systematic approach to consciousness growth as that takes into account the fact of the Pathways working in an interlocking fashion, such as the suggestion in the Handbook that the 7th & 9th Pathways work centrally to the degree that you incorporate the other ten Pathways.

    You can look at how each truth of higher consciousness means a uniquely reassuring thing at each Center, and so on. All very automatically restorative and enlightening.

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