Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness: A Guide to the Life You Want

Rating:
Summary: Enlightenment ... erratic ...
Review: I only bought this book because I was curious to find out what happened to Ken at the end of his life. I immediately notice on the back flip cover that he was married to Lydia, much younger than Penny. In his autobiography "Discovering the Secrets of Happiness" Ken wrote on p.167 that "I felt that Penny's refusal to share adult films with me" was already the seed for future divorce.

In this book, as far as I can tell, he wrote only one paragraph about his 3rd ex-wife Penny on first page of ch.21 p.225: "Life still sends lots of 'hurricanes' to test me. My wife with whom I wanted to live the rest of my life decided she had another agenda. A training I had set up to teach the Living Love System fell apart. People I thought I could count on let me down. my personal curriculum at the University of Life is frequently enriched."

In his first Appendix subtitled "Inventory of Childhood Survival Strategies" he almost got the same conclusion Werner Erhard of EST and that I redefined as 'fall from heaven story' (see 'all my review' for examples and please find your own -- to find what's clipping your own happiness wing)

Although this is one of his fattest book, it's an easy read. He has some interesting & enlightened claims:

p.66 (again part of my #)- "Sex is a crucial area that is often complicated by a parent's false-self adaptations...

One out of every three women in the US have experienced some form of sexual abuse before age 18...

For childhood survival, we had to perfect our performance of the strategic, false-selves required by our caregivers...every five-year-old deserves an Oscar. We had to learn the 'right' lines provided by our caretakers. We had to convince everyone (including ourselves) as we automatically responded to life situations using our false-selves."

p.67 "Many of us, in varying degrees, have lost our aliveness and spontaneity. We have become depressed, unhappy, and desperate. We can become alive again and free from depression and anxiety when our self-esteem is based on the 'authenticity' and 'wholeness' of our true-self feelings-and not on the 'performance' of false-self adaptations that helped us survive childhood. When we reclaim the anaesthetized true-self parts we had to disown, WE FEEL WHOLE. We experience that we are ENOUGH. It is interesting to note that the enlightened state of consciousness is often described as transpersonal, timeless, and being aware of what's here and now."

His definition of childhood abuses from the list on p. 87 include parent(s) that - physically leave you - is so busy that you get little quality time together - don't model their own emotions for you - don't affirm that it is okay for to have strong emotions... - use you to take care of their own unmet needs or desires - use you to take care of their failing marriage - hide and deny their shameful secrets to the outside world, and you have to protect these hidden issues in order to keep the family balance - do not give you their time, attention, and direction - act shamelessly with physical violence, incest, verbal abuse, etc.

On both 2nd page of his introduction & p.85 Ken quoted "50% of female murders in the US are by husbands or ex-husbands!" and he wrote

"The MOST DANGEROUS place for any child IS THE AMERICAN FAMILY...every year in the US, about 2,000 children are killed yearly by their parents - and millions are psychologically crippled."

To be fair to the whole human world, I will take 'the' out of "in the US" out and replace that with simply "in US" to be closer to the truth.

On p.91 as example of LOVE-BASED PARENTING Ken only had one example of a lighted candle & small statue on a low table and a 1-year old moving toward the table 15-20 times and her mom rushing to lovingly pick him up and say something like "you could get burn by the candle". Ken was impressed by the mom's patience & skill.

That is a mistake, what the mom did was still based on fear of the child burning his hand, thus not unconditional love. I would either shift the candle & statue away or gently let my son touch the flame of the candle.

The latter is what I chose to do with my 1+year old son with the fire on the oven, his automatic reflex is to recoil his hand from the heat and I said 'hot, hot, hot'. So my son experienced and understood from then on, what 'hot' is, and at the same time he didn't get burn. That is growing with understanding & gentle guidance and is a very simple example of unconditional love.

The problem is that Ken is trying to 'do' unconditional love while I am coming from unconditional love or 'being'. That's why he's 'erratic' in happiness while I can be 'consistent' most of the time. A by-product of this is, he wasn't fully aware of his own 'fall from heaven story' as I do.

Ken in his autobiography "Discovering the Secrets of Happiness" didn't say anything negative about his childhood or parents and there was a lack of authenticity about it. In this present last book before he passed away on Dec. 1995, Ken only has one example beginning p. 177 subtitled LOVE IS BLIND about his mom & his 2nd wife Bonita as "My mother was a dramatic, fiery redhead who hurt me by either criticizing or becoming sullen and withdrawn to coerce me doing what she wanted".

He wrote only one story or a whole chapter 10 on Lydia. He was able to shift his perception of his wife Lydia as inconsiderate to considerate. That is a very good example of Jerry Jampolsky's 'Love is letting go of fear' or I would say "where fear exist, unconditional love can't exist".

The synchronicity in that story is that it had to do with an apple tree, just like in the garden of Eden.

Although I gave this book 5-star, there is simply NO ROAD MAP TO HAPPINESS since happiness can't be found out there, like unconditional LOVE it can only come FROM WITHIN every ONE.

Rating:
Summary: an improvement on an already perfected methodology
Review: This is the better mousetrap. In this last book by Ken Keyes, finished just before he died, Ken introduces EMDR, Harville Hendrix, Ron Kurtz's Hakomi, and other therapies as much faster ways of getting rid of addictions than using his classic methods (which themselves are efficacious at achieving positive results with zero side-effects)