If anyone is curious about getting a 'feel' for Ken Keyes Jr.s material, here are some selections.
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There was discussion some time back about various authors who might have been influential for BK.

One named was Ken Keyes Jr.


[forum.culteducation.com]

Those interested can get a few samples of Keyes material here.


[www.google.com]

[community-2.webtv.net]

Reprinted from HANDBOOK TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS by Ken Keyes, Jr., Fifth Edition, Copyright 1975 by The Living Love Center



Addictions" always cause unhappiness sooner or later. "Preferences" never do. When an addiction is not satisfied, you feel upset or unhappy. When an addiction is satisfied, you feel momentary pleasure, relief, or indifference. When a preference is not satisfied, you simply feel indifferent ~ it was only a preference after all.
But when it
is satisfied, it adds to the texture and beauty of your life.


It is vital that you fully understand that growth lies wholly in reprogramming your automatic emotional programming~~it is not necessarily aimed at changing your external actions. You can do anything you prefer as long as you are not addicted. It is not the external circumstances that constitute your addiction~~it is only your inside emotional programming that must be changed. And the wonderful thing is that it is fully within your ability to do so~~where as up to now you may have been hopelessly trying to manipulate the outside world to conform to your addictions

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THIRD PATHWAY

( 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.)


~~~How do you spot your addictions? It's easy. You just notice the desires and expectations that you use to make yourself feel upset in various life situations. By tuning in to your minute-minute stream of consciousness, you discover the addictions that make you feel worried, anxious, resentful, frustrated, afraid, angry, bored, ect.
You thus use every uncomfortable emotion as an opportunity for consciousness growth.

Everyone and everything around you is your teacher. If your washing machine won't work, you are being checked out on your ability to peacefully accept the unacceptable. If you are addicted to your appliances always working, you will suffer. If you prefer them to operate well, you will not compound your problem by superimposing your uncomfortable emotions on the here-and-now realities of repairing them.

and

FOURTH PATHWAY

( 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. )

~~~If you are not enjoying every here-and-now moment in your life, it is because your addctions (otherwise known as desires, attachments, demands, expectations, emotional programming, models of how life should treat you) are making you dwell in the dead past or the imagined future. Thay are keeping you from "being here now." 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. If you wish to change something~fine. Do it. And you can make really effective changes when your mind is free of emotional turmoil.

We can always find things we can magnify to threaten our security, sensation, and power addictions. Or we can consciously perform whatever action is needed and then turn our attention to enjoying everthing we have to enjoy. And we always have enough to be happy if we are enjoying what we do have~~and not worrying about what we don't have.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FIFTH PATHWAY

( 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.)


~~~Whenever you feel unhappy, your emotions are telling you that people and things are not fulfilling the addiction patterns you have programmed into your biocomputer. But you usually do not talk to yourself in this realistic way. Instead, you blame your unhappiness on somebody or something outside of you. When you take full responsiblity here and now for all of your feelings and for everything that happens to you, you never again blame the people and situations in the world outside of you for any unhappy feelings that you have. You realize that is an evasion to blame "others." You've been doing it to yourself!

You can stop being a mechanical, computer-like person who views himself as "pushed around" by the world when you realize that only you can "push" yourself. You begin to see the connection
between your emotional programming and your suffering. You start doing something about it--which means reprogramming yourself.

Your mind creates your universe. Your perceptions are the "picture" you create from the energies you receive through your various senses from the people and things around you.
Your perceptions are thus a joint phenomenon
of observer and the observed.

You receive a feedback from the peole and things around you that continually modifies your processing of incoming sensory data.

Your predictions and expectations are thus self-fulfilling. Since your consciousness creates your universe, all you have to do to change your world is to change your consciousness! It's the only way to live in a beautiful, joyous world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SIXTH PATHWAY

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

The Living Love Way to Higher Consciousness is based on the instant emotional acceptance here and now of that which you previously regarded as unacceptable in your life. Acceptance simply means that you won't cause yourself emotional conflict because of your current perceptions. Emotional acceptance doesn't mean that you have to continue living the rest of your life with any particular person or situation.

To grow in the Living Love Way, you do not have to drill yourself and criticize yourself with military precision. Just experience everything in an accepting, relaxed, and conscious way - and realize that evey one of your experiences is perfect for your here-and-now growth into higher consciousness. Your addictions will gradually fade away when you use the Living Love Pathways to
consciously interpret your moment-to-moment stream of consciousness.

Don't push the river - just experience the river consciously from the vantage point of the Twelve Pathways.

A quick reference to Tolle.

Some are invoking Tolle's name so as to entice people into non-Tolle cults. Bait and Switch.

[robertearlburton.blogspot.com]

Robert Burton (Fellowship of Friends, The Ark, Oregon House, Renaissance, Apollo, Living Presence) has been running a personality cult centered on himself, a generation before Tolle came down the pike.

This is how complicated things become. Fact check, fact check, and if a group you start out with starts feeling weird to you, or begins changing its material, trust your instincts, get out and start finding out who their actual leader is.

Imagine you trustfully get in a car with a person who has promised to drive you to Chicago. Instead, you begin seeing the road signs listing cities and towns in Florida.

You're a long fricking way from the promised destination.

If anyone pulled that on you, you'd not like that.

But in the New Age cultic millieu where you're told to avoid making critical distinctions, and that all ideas are tied to one Ultimate Destination and that differerences only matter to negative and pedestrian minds--you can find yourself 1,500 miles from the original destination and conned into accepting it.

If its supposed to be a meetup for one guru and turns out to be sub rosa recruiting for another guru, that's a set up based on deceit. And it wont bode well for the rest of your time in the deceptive person's group.

From our newly registered member, Dr. Monasterio

(Corboy-I organized this into paragraphs)

[forum.culteducation.com]

Quote

Somebody was asking for some licensed psychoterapists to give their two cents over this most entertaining-and quite dangerous- subject. Here my review of of one of Katie's latest "pearls".



This review is from Amazon: A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are (Hardcover)

If Byron Katie weren't the successful business woman that she is I will be thinking that now she is definitely losing it.

But despite all her rants about "reality" and "acceptance of what is" and that "pain and pleasure" are the same; she is very precisely choosing to become a quite rich woman living surrounded by luxury and doing a lot of work to provoke something concrete in thousands of people. Therefore, I for one do not buy her "thing", whatever it is.

Her public sessions doing "her work", inviting people to disclose their more intimate thoughts and fears in front of an audience like a TV show is one of the most nauseating spectacles of the so called "new age" that we can get today (and we have a lot of revolting material to choose from at the "new age" circus).

The kind of enlightenment that she wants people to buy (YES, "to buy", because she charges a lot for her seminars and private courses) is just plain pathological ATARAXIA.

The lack of sensorial distinction between the city noise with claxons included and a beautiful music or the sound of a bird, is not enlightenment at all, or spiritual freedom or anything else but a sort of exotic and probably self-inflicted neurological disease.

You do not need to be an MD or a Licensed Psychologist with a 34 years practice - as I incidentally am- to perceive that most obvious fact.

Perhaps I am just having the advantage of hindsight, because when Byron Katie had her "cockroach epiphany" back in 1986, I had already been a lot around the most deep insides of Vedanta Advaita, Buddhism, and the Ancient Desert Fathers mysticism (without forgetting some long retirements in the Middle East under the Work- not Katie's- of a Sufi community.

Therefore, I am definitely a hard and skeptical customer for this kind of "bovine excreta" that many will take as The Real Stuff. I will just recall Scott Peck's words at the beginning of his excellent "The Road less travelled": "Life is difficult".

And Byron Katie is definitely not making it easier with her hypnotizing ravings that include, amongst other "awakenings", "to see a man having a stroke and feeling no concern at all for his wellbeing just because she is 'in love'...", "or to love cancer in order to love God", etc.etc.

She is very subtly -and quite insidiously- trying to change our compassion -which means a true empathy with other's suffering-into a sort of "joyous indifference" disguised as direct perception of reality or True Awareness; in Katie's New World there is really no good or evil...

If one analyzes this from a purely Scriptural perspective I would say that we may be even dealing here with something much more nefarious, which is directly explained at Ephesians 6:12, but just to stay at the so called "scientific level" I will refrain from that.

Whatever interesting may come from her approach comes just from her -denied-borrowing from Cognitive Psychology and "A Course in Miracles". Having being subjected to so many therapies in the course of her own psychological treatment, it is not so difficult for the trained observer to note several techniques that come from NLP, Ericksonian Hypnosis, Attack Therapy and Large Groups Awareness Training in particular.

Now, one thing must be acknowledged for certain, this lady has done a great job coming out from the eighties being a total wreck to this new self-created wealthy sexagenarian proclaimed everywhere as a New Age Master.

But Byron Katie proposition -poorly disguised under all the spiritual paraphernalia - is to disappear and become nothing and feel everything as the same undifferentiated "Joy".

We don't need Byron Katie or anyone else for that, plain death would eventually -and inevitably-do the trick.

Perhaps co-author Stephen Mitchell, could have suggested to his partner, a self-alleged religious savant, to remember an old Hindu maxim:"The wise one must avoid perturbing the mind of those who are not wise".

The discussion continues.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Read the material about 'crazy like a fox'

z

q

Some good resources here

Quote:
In the early 1980s I also saw a short film of excerpts from one of Rajneesh's talks, and was able to see first-hand his hypnotically slow, coy, seductive, and provocative manner of speech and body language, with his strange way of hissing the "s" sounds at the end of many of his words.

and

Quote:
Osho defrauded some of the most beautiful and intelligent people on the planet. Therefore his fraud had to be sophisticated. The best trick he used in his fraud was telling everybody “Use your mind in the world, but go beyond the mind in the spiritual”.
In other words, “Don’t use your mind around me. If you use your mind, you are in your head and you are missing out on the spiritual.” Osho mainly targeted and attracted very intelligent people who have strong minds. Osho here used the same strategy as the (many churches that have sex negative teachings) – create an unsolvable conflict within people and then they are easy to control. [...] The church demanded people feel guilty about perfectly natural things like sex and the church said that the only way to free yourself of this guilt is by adhering to the church’s commands.

Osho’s “Go beyond the mind to be spiritual” had exactly the same effect. It’s ok to point out that the mind has serious limitations and many mental habits cause misery.

However it is outright fraud to say that the only way to be spiritual is to ignore the mind. This creates a conflict with truth, because the mind is needed to recognize untruth. If the mind is ignored, the person becomes unable to distinguish between truth and lies. [...] The more intelligent the person, the stronger the mind and the stronger the conflict. Every time sannyasins used their intelligence, they felt guilty. The smarter they are the bigger the conflict.


A discussion of Tolle copied from Amazon.com

[forum.culteducation.com]

[www.enlightened-spirituality.org]

[www.enlightened-spirituality.org]

[www.enlightened-spirituality.org]


[www.enlightened-spirituality.org]

(note this person lists the work of Byron Katie as a resource. However, read these first.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Finally, analyses of a satasang by Tolle--a set up designed to induce anxiety and craving.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Beware of any satsang guru who pulls these stunts.

Its a game of marked cards and about as spiritual as a set up at a bad casino.

Trust Your Disgust

Cockroach Story Power--the Manipulation of Evolutionary Emotion

Hello dear readers.

How often have you loitered around the New Age, Dharma Lite, Human Potential scene, felt disgust, expressed disgust (even if only by frowning) and were scolded for being "judgemental"?

How often have you been urged to ingore your disgust as "bourgeois" "unevolved" "green meme" or "being too repressed" or "unradicalized" and told you needed to push past that disgust and accept or be neutral towards something or someone that disgusts you?

That can be the very first stage in having your boundaries eroded.

Cockroach Story Power--the Manipulation of Evolutionary Emotion

Cockroaches trigger disgust in most persons.

Turns out disgust is a very hot reaction and one that is of the utmost importance in maintaining our identity, our boundaries and it is hard wired into us. It is at last being studied closely a potential master emotion.

Any story that triggers disgust and links it to a narrative of salvation and mastery is going to be a powerful narrative, right there.

Here is the ULR for a story from The New York Times science section

"Survival's Ick Factor"

[www.nytimes.com]

An excerpt from someones blog

Quote

an article in the NYTimes explained our human reaction to disgusting things and how that reaction can be used politically:

Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention ofpsychologists, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes.

No longer.

Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.

[...]

Speaking last week from a conference on disgust in Germany, Valerie Curtis, a self-described “disgustologist” from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described her favorite emotion as “incredibly important.”

She continued: “It’s in our everyday life. It determines our hygiene behaviors. It determines how close we get to people. It determines who we’re going to kiss, who we’re going to mate with, who we’re going to sit next to. It determines the people that we shun, and that is something that we do a lot of.”

It begins early, she said: “Kids in the playground accuse other kids of having cooties. And it works, and people feel shame when disgust is turned on them.”

Some studies have suggested that political conservatives are more prone to disgust than liberals are. And it is clear that what people find disgusting they often find immoral, too.

It adds to the popularity of disgust as a subject of basic research that it is easier to elicit in an ethical manner than anger or fear. You don’t have to insult someone or make anyone afraid for his or her life — a bad smell will do the trick.

And disgust has been relatively easy to locate in the brain, where it frequents the insula, the amygdala and other regions.

My citizen's speculation is this:

Anything that undermines or neutralizes our disgust reactions is something that can, in the wrong hands, have the capacity to undermine boundaries that are important to our social, moral integrity--and identity.

Any suggestion that we ignore our disgust response and "stop being judgemental" can be hazardous--look at groups that push people to witness behavior they would otherwise refuse to look at.

Its like disabling the smoke alarms in your house.

Digust is, apparently an important 'early warning' reflex that assists in survival.

If we lose our ability to feel creeped out or disgusted--we lose boundaries needed for our personal integrity.

Look at people who have extracted themselves from cults, bad relationships or nasty political groups because, blessedly they felt disgust or felt 'creeped out' -- another manifestation of disgust.

They trusted that emotion and removed themselves from what turned out later to be harmful.

Secret is dont give up your disgust.

Remove yourself from the situation or person that triggers your disgust.

Then, at a safe distance, having removed yourself--investigate it.

A lot of bad indoctrination set-ups or bad relationships begin by manipulating us to distrust our disgust feelings--right when we need to trust those feelings the most

Do some research.

Some disgust is worth dismantling--such as social bigotry in which power groups exploit disgust so as to monopolize benefits and exclude others. You do this as a citizen.

But disgust or a subtle 'ick' response can save your butt if dealing with a potential date who creeps you out, someone who drags you to an intro workshop and the speaker and the social 'vibe' creep you out.

In such situations--trusting your disgust can be your life saver.

A very important matter is to do self investigation concerning disgust. Dont reject it or judge it, notice it and then keep track and see how often the situation turned out to be dangerous or worth avoiding or turned out just fine.

There are experiences of disgust that orginate from one's own depths and those are often the most trustworthy.

Digust that is implanted and manipulated by advertising -- that has a different feel.

Learn to know the difference--its continuing education at its best.

This is not official. Just my private, non professional, citizens hunch:

One criterion we might investigate which identifies if its cult or potentially abusive relationship:


Be very alert if someone tries to undermine disgust towards events in history that ARE disgusting, such as the Shoah/Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin's socially engineered famines, any notion that some groups deserve to vanish or die in misery.

If the 'ick factor' is removed from such domains of behavior as

Therapists socializing 'as friends' with clients instead of the therapist doing the proper thing such as maintaining boundaries--watch out.

Removing the 'ick factor' from sexual expression that you prefer not to engage in or going nude when you, personally PREFER to keep your clothes on--watch out.

You are subtley or not so subtly socialized, in some cases shamed, into ceasing to feel disgust where you actually are feeling disgust, appropriate disgust ('ick factor') towards such things as:

A date's or supervisor or bosses behavor such as harsh language, cruel arrogant attitude toward wait staff, housekeepers, janitors, underlings, bullying.

A guru or human potential leader's lust for wealth, being surrounded by an entourage of toadies who are revoltingly subservient, high prices for workshops, embarassingly self abasement by devotees that make you cringe, cruelty toward scapegoats, encouraging people to laugh at someone.

When the boundary preserving/self preserving voltage is removed from areas where your feelings of 'chills' 'ickyiness' 'creepiness' "disgust' are removed from stuff which should elicit disgust, such as genocide, the Shoah, Hitler, Stalin and his mass famines and the Gulags, Pol Pot---

Your own integrity/identity will be undermined. You risk under such influence allowing the ghastly and unacceptable to become "normalized".

In a bad group or cult, the disgust you are trained not to feel is routed away and onto desginated enemies and scapegoats. You can no longer see the guru as cruel or his or her behavior is nasty.

Instead, you are indoctrianted to react in disgust toward anything that questions the guru, your commitment to the guru.

And because disgust is a very hot emotion--these are powerful chains.

Never let anyone use your disgust against you. Never let anyone take ownership of your disgust emotions.

Get out of any such situation as soon as you can and investigate it.

Disgust is an area where we are, potentially most able to maintain boundaries yet also most vulnerable to cynical manipulation.

Remain a citizen dont be made a subject. Keep awareness of your emotion of disgust and dont let anyone manipulate it for you.

Dont let cruelty become normal for you.

Dont let anyone remove the charge of dismay or disgust from situations that SHOULD elicit dismay and disgust.

Get out and go home and investigate.

Disgust is a prime pressure point in the Emotional Aikido that a lot of market advertisers and mood manipulators utilize.

Dont let anyone use you as a puppet. Disgust is a major twitch string.

Disgust may be linked to 'cringe factor' 'ickiness' and dismay.

According to the NY Times article, the disgust pathways can be located in the amygdala region in the brain.

That which is merely unfamiliar or strange may be different from disgust.

In any case, watch OUT for anyone or anything trying to normalize what to you elicits disgust, creepiness, or dismay.

In private and at your own discretion, you can explore your own disgust patterns and ponder which ones are worth modifying and which ones not to tamper with.

But do not let anyone do this to you, especially in if they are charging big bucks and stand to gain by keeping you dependent on em.

Some situations are a threat to one's integrity as a citizen, a person, a living being and one must not lose dismay or disgust in relation to those.

And anyone tampering with digust and the Nazis is doing some heavy stuff and its best to keep a distance from 'em.