Ken Keyes Jr.
Ken Keyes Jr. was an American personal growth author and lecturer, and the creator of the Living Love method, a self-help system. Keyes wrote fifteen books on personal growth and social consciousness issues, representing about four million copies distributed overall.
Early life
Childhood and adolescence
Keyes was born an only child to an affluent family in Atlanta. Throughout their lives, he was close to his father and especially to his mother, despite her eventual abuse of alcohol. He suffered from chronic bronchitis and croup in his infant years, and in 1925 his family moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in hopes of his benefiting from its sunny climate. His father, Kenneth Keyes Sr., became successful in real estate development there and active in the conservative evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church. Keyes was not very athletic as a child, but excelled in academics and developed hobbies, such as photography. When he was in high school, his father bought him a small boat, which began his lifelong interest in sailing.Keyes attributed the seeds of the personal growth system he would later develop to an experience he had with a stern English teacher in ninth grade. Despite her reputation as a strict teacher and hard grader, he made an effort to be personally caring toward her, which led to her giving him a slight break in grading. He took the lesson from this experience to be "that when I express caring and friendliness, they are reflected back to me in life."
College, military service, and a new family
Keyes entered Duke University in 1938 and spent two years there. He then studied voice and music at the University of Miami, and helped to found the Miami Opera Guild. In 1941, during the World War II era, Keyes enlisted in a naval intelligence unit set up to censor cablegrams entering and leaving the United States.At age of 20, Keyes met his first wife, Roberta Rymer, at the University of Miami. They were married in December 1941, a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their first child, Ken III, was born in December 1942, and their second child, Clara Lu, was born in April 1944. Keyes was discharged from the service in October 1945, and entered the real estate business with his father.
When he was around 23, he photographed and filmed Alfred Korzybski at the Institute of General Semantics, helping to document Korzybski's life. Apparently he was already greatly involved in the logical aspects of self-help.
Polio and quadriplegia
In February 1946, at age 25, Keyes contracted polio and became paralyzed in his legs and hands. His paralysis developed into quadriplegia and was sufficiently severe that, for example, he was unable to turn himself over in bed. He was admitted to the Warm Springs Foundation, a convalescent hospital in Georgia. After a year in the hospital, he moved with his wife to a nearby house for three more years of rehabilitation, during which time he adjusted to life as a wheelchair user. He invented a switch-activated powered bed that would turn his body over. He said he "began to develop the feeling that I did not have to be so totally dependent on other people" and "still wanted to feel that I was a capable and lovable person." To that end, he obtained a lever-controlled electric wheelchair, a new invention at the time.Keyes required aides for bodily care for several decades.
First book
According to Keyes, he became involved in many activities to overcome the feeling of dependence and uselessness brought on by his disability. He wrote a book on mental techniques for increasing effectiveness in daily life. This book, entitled How to Develop Your Thinking Ability, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1950, and contained illustrations by cartoonist Ted Key. Keyes later reacquired the publishing rights to the book and re-released it as Taming Your Mind.In a subsequent book, Discovering The Secrets of Happiness, Keyes commented, about this period of his life, that his disability may have been a disguised blessing:
"Perhaps I would have been so caught up in the business and social rat race that I wouldn't have sat still long enough to study my security, sensation and power illusions — and then discover how to deal with them so I could open up my heart to loving more. My reality is that I am far too busy and involved in my life activities to have time to concern myself with self-consciousness in the wheelchair department. Today I view my so-called 'handicap' as another gift my life has offered me."
Life after polio therapy
Upon completion of therapy in 1949, Keyes returned to South Miami, Florida, where he resumed work in real estate and bought a specially equipped speedboat for racing.By 1950, Keyes was the general manager of a radio station owned by his father, and started his own commercial real estate business. Completing his schooling, he received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Miami. He planned and built a series of personal residences, and in 1956 bought a 71-foot yacht, the Caprice, capable of serving as a floating residence.
Divorce and remarriage
Over these years, Keyes indicates that he and his wife were drifting apart, and he had affairs with other women. He and Rymer separated and then divorced in 1959, after eighteen years of marriage. He received the yacht in the property settlement and moved his residence and office there. His second book, on the topic of nutrition and entitled, How to Live Longer-Stronger-Slimmer, was published by Fredrick Fell during this period.Around 1964, Keyes resumed working for his father in a real estate company targeted at foreign investors. At age 44, he met and married his second wife, Bonita, who was sixteen years his junior. During this period he wrote his third book with Jacque Fresco, a book on futurism entitled Looking Forward.
According to Keyes, his wife Bonita's jealousy and depression became major stumbling blocks in their relationship, and Keyes would later fault himself for what he describes as his unskilled responses to these issues. Keyes and Bonita divorced after a year of marriage, and Keyes grieved the loss of the relationship.
In 1968, Keyes established a national commercial real estate sales operation, with revenues of $25 million during its first year of operation. He maintained romantic relationships with various women, and would later comment that his sexual appetite had been an impediment to his personal growth.
Spirituality and personal growth
In 1970, just before his 50th birthday, Keyes traveled to the Esalen Institute in California and enrolled in two workshops there. He then returned to Florida, became involved with the Humanistic Psychology Association and was exposed to teachings such as those of Chogyam Trungpa and Alan Watts. He also experimented briefly with mescaline, which, he reported, induced in him a continuously orgasmic experience he found distasteful. He credited this experience with allowing him to begin overcoming his obsession with sex, although he would remain sexually active throughout his life.Keyes lived for a few months with two students who had been influenced by Trungpa and Ram Dass. He traveled with them to a commune and a Trappist monastery in Virginia and a spiritual center in Connecticut. A turning point came for Keyes when he visited Trungpa at his center in Barnet, Vermont at Christmas 1970 and discussed with Trungpa the Buddhist notion that the mind's reaction rather than external circumstances creates personal unhappiness. Keyes has said that he felt this to be the solution to the life problems he had experienced.
Over the next year, Keyes lived with a small group of people on his yacht, and prepared to turn his business over to an employee and found a nonprofit organization with his other assets. At this time he had a brief experience he described as transcendent, "like the pure energy of God—radiant, indescribable—and I felt a part of it all."
According to Keyes, during this period he used his new learning to cope more successfully with issues of jealousy and deception in his romantic relationship with a woman named Jane. During an episode in which Jane brought another lover onto his yacht, he used a form of mental reprogramming process that, he says, alleviated his jealously without repressing it, a method he would later teach. During this time he formulated the "Twelve Pathways", which would constitute the core of his "Living Love" method of personal growth. Within a month he had drafted the core of a new book, Handbook to Higher Consciousness. This self-published book sold more than one million copies.
Living Love years
Going west, and the Living Love Center in Berkeley
In mid-1972, Keyes outfitted a bus for living, sold his yacht, disposed of most of his possessions, and began traveling west with a group of other people, visiting places such as Taos, New Mexico, and the Rainbow Gathering at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. He traveled for about a year, and while traveling began holding sessions using the Living Love methods.Keyes gave his first formal workshop on the Living Love methods at the Esalen Institute. He settled in Berkeley, California, in 1973 and began giving regular workshops, establishing the Living Love Center there in June 1973 in a former fraternity house. The workshops were attended by as many as fifty people at a time. Keyes recruited a staff from the streets of Berkeley at essentially volunteer wages to support the workshops, which he also began giving in Los Angeles. At this time, the Handbook to Higher Consciousness was selling about fifty thousand copies a year, and his workshops attracted students from all over the country. In 1974, Keyes banned drug use from the Center. He wrote more books and they began to sell rapidly. His staff, which included Shakti Gawain, Tolly Burkan, and Summer Raven, worked on the workshops and activities such as writing songs to go along with them.