Ken Keyes Jr.: Encyclopedia II - Ken Keyes Jr. - Living Love years

Ken Keyes Jr. - Living Love years

Ken Keyes Jr. - Going west and the Living Love Center in Berkeley

He outfitted a bus for living, sold his yacht and shed most of his possessions, and began traveling westward with a group of like-minded people in mid-1972, visiting places like Taos, New Mexico and the Rainbow Gathering at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, traveling for about a year and eventually ending up in Berkeley, California. While traveling he began holding sessions utilizing the Living Love methods. While the group he had traveled with dispersed, new people arrived and took their place. He gave his first formal workshop on the Living Love methods at the Esalen Institute. He settled in Berkeley in 1973 and began giving regular workshops, establishing the Living Love Center there in June 1973 in an old fraternity house. The workshops were attended by as many as fifty people, and 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 point 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 he banned drug use from the Center. He wrote additional books and they began to sell rapidly. His staff, which included people like Shakti Gawain, Tolly Burkan, and Summer Raven, busied itself with the workshops and activities like writing songs to go along with them.

Ken Keyes Jr. - Cornucopia in Kentucky

Having outgrown the Berkeley center, the organization in mid-1977 bought a 150 acre (607,000 m²) property in St. Mary, Kentucky that had been a Catholic seminary. The organization moved to the new property, which it renamed "Cornucopia."

Soon after the move, conflict developed between Keyes and the organizations head administrator and training director. Keyes had hired her in Berkeley, and had at some point begun to believe she was influencing the staff in unhelpful directions. She refused to allocate staff to him for the workshops he led, and he felt she was trying to edge him out of teaching and into the financial side of the operation.

Ken Keyes Jr. - On retreat in Santa Cruz

Keyes reacted to the fractious situation with his administrator by leaving Cornucopia in her charge and heading back to Santa Cruz, California in March 1978 with six people, a decision he later characterized as an unskillful withdrawal from the problem. He characterized the level of teaching quality at Cornucopia after his departure as lowered and uneven. Debts at Cornucopia began to mount.

On a visit back to Cornucopia in November 1978, he became involved with Penny Hannig, a much-younger acquaintance of several years and a worker at the center, and she joined him in Santa Cruz in 1979. They were married in September 1984.

Keyes remained in Santa Cruz for three years, which period he characterized as being "on retreat." During these years, the couple "lived in a pattern of voluntary simplicity"; he received Social Security disability benefits and received room, board, medical care, and a vacation from the organization, but took no salary and received no royalties from his books. He received an inheritance from his mother's estate, which he donated in large part to the organization. He continued to write books, some of which Penny co-wrote. Penny cared for his physical needs, and they were quite close, remaining in each other's company almost continually. Bouts of depression and hostility Penny experienced over a period of about two years during this time were initially mysterious, but were eventually diagnosed through the couple's experimentation as being the result of food allergies, and were brought under control with a change in her diet.

Ken Keyes Jr. - Coos Bay Oregon and the Ken Keyes College

In 1982, the leader with whom Keyes had clashed left Cornucopia, taking much of the staff with her. The organization sold the Cornucopia property and relocated along with Keyes to Coos Bay, Oregon, in an old four-story hospital building. There they continued to give workshops and write books for about four years, before deciding to opening a formal training school for the Living Love method, to be called the Ken Keyes College. The first enrolled group numbered almost a hundred.

Late in 1986, during the first nine-month training course, Keyes experienced a medical crisis, developing pneumonia. He was rushed to the hospital and eventually put on a respirator. He credited his use of the Living Love methods with enabling him to summon the strength and serenity to remain calm and upbeat about his situation and to visualize healing for his lungs. Although there had initially been some doubt about his physical viability, he was able to come off the respirator and breathe again on his own. He left the hospital and was able to resume training the inaugural group of students at the college, who graduated in May 1987. Keyes turned to writing, with international lawyer Benjamin Ferencz, another book on world politics, PlanetHood.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Living Love years", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki