Happy Father’s Day!

I once attended a weekend retreat led by Ken Keyes. He is the founder of the Living Love method and author of Handbook to Higher Consciousness.

Vernal Falls – Yosemite National Park
Near where we got married in 1981
Photo by Kaitlin Miskel

It was at that retreat in 1974 that I first set eyes on Mala, my wife now of 32 years. Mala was the chef at the Living Love Center.

She has often repeated this quote from the Handbook to Higher Consciousness to our children as they were growing up:

“To desire what you don’t have is to waste what you do have!”

My son and my girls are grown now and I am truly grateful for them and who they are as human beings.

I am also extremely grateful to Mala for everything she has done for me and for them.

Another set of teachings of the Living Love method are The Twelve Pathways to the Higher Consciousness Planes of Unconditional Love and Oneness. The Twelve Pathways are:

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. l 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 ior 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.

I remember memorizing these just before my second summer in Arkansas with Father Eli. They were guiding lights for me during a trying time in my life.

On this Father’s Day, what are you grateful for? Please share.

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