Reprinted from A Conscious Persons Guide to Relationships by Ken Keyes Jr. Copyright 1979 by Living Love Publications
Our Way to Happiness
Our way to happiness is open
when emotion-backed demands are mastered.
The automatic triggering
of fear, frustration and anger
make us robots
instead of creative causes
in the changing energies of life.
The ego and intellect combine,
demanding more, more-and yet more,
and our experience of life is wanting.
We strive and toil and scheme,
and shove and complain and resent.
But pleasure and satisfaction are temporary
and our illusion of separateness seems real.
As we learn how our consciousness works,
we discover the opening key.
Our desires and demands and requirements
act as a distorting screen
filtering what is happening
to warp our experience of now.
The beauty~~the ugliness
the safe and the threatening
the good and the bad
the fame and the shame
the loss and the gain
the pleasure and the pain
are merely what we're programmed
to reject or accept.
The wide gulf
beween these polarities of life
lies not in the world outside
but only in our heads.
Was addictive or preferential programming
used to create our experience
of the here-and-now?
To demand what we don't have,
is to waste what we do have.
To take offense from what's happened
can destroy our happiness.
In the changing world of people and things,
we win some and we lose some~~
regardless of knowledge, fame or money.
As we free ourselves of addictions,
the winning and losing
become only a game
in which we can
LOVE IT ALL.
Security, sensation, and power demands~~
these create the deepest illusions.
They waste our insight and energy,
and destroy our ability to love.
When at last we understand
how we do it to ourselves
and create the world we experience,
we can live an awakening life.
As cause and effect,
we link our insistent addictions
with all our suffering.
When we're clear about this
an enjoyable life is possible.
Demanding and rejecting,
criticizing and judging,
"righting" and "wronging"
are the sicknesses of the mind.
To be free of distorted perceptions,
see the chains of addictive patterns
that dominate our consciousness
and make our lives a battle.
Our perceptions of others
is only our projection
of fears and desires for ourselves.
By seeing our models as not needed,
the people we meet are not spewed
with our fears, frustrations, and angers.
We know them more consciously as "us"~~
not separtely as "him," "her," or "them."
Two steps are crucial
to live a life of love:
First, see our self-imposed prison,
and then, resolve to be free.
Everyone is now a teacher
and all of your life is a teaching~~
this is the fastest route.
Everybody and everything
helps us on our way.
When we experience offence,
life offers us our next step
in doing the inner work.
When we create feelings of joy,
life is giving us a taste
of living in a world of love
that ever beckons us onward.
The day-to-day practice
of the method of your choice
opens the way to freedom
and a life of living love.
To continue reading and shopping
only builds ego's defenses
and stops you short in your growth.
Beyond a certain point,
more knowledge is only fettering.
Placing a price tag on love,
or bartering one demand for another,
keeps us shaky, and always vunerable
to irritation, resentment and anger.
But when love is unconditional
our experience is transformed~~
and a life of bliss is ours.
For nothing that is said or done,
can make us feel separate again.
And love without strings
applies also to oneself,
for we are always lovable
and the world has a place for us
exactly as we are.
Always accept and love oneself~~
without conditions
without judgments
without condemning
without hiding.
We are O.K. the way we are~~
even with our attachments.
We won't be "better"
if we reprogram our addictive models.
It's just that we'll enjoy our lives
much more when we do.
To live in this new world
of continuous wisdom and love,
we must change our expectations
and love ourselves and others
just as we are
or as we are not.
We may wish to avoid people's games
but we always know their hearts~~
which are just like ours.
Involvement may be conditional;
but love is never withheld.
In the dramas of life,
we may throw someone out of our territory,
but never out of our heart.
Thus love is a bridge
from heart to heart
from being to being
while the games of life play on.
So we learn to flow
in harmony with all around
as we fully attune to the Law~~
the Law of Higher Consciousness:
Love Everone Unconditionally~~
Including Yourself.
As our heavy load
of demands is lightened,
we increasingly experience
the perfection of life.
In our essence we're always perfect,
though the programs we play out
may yield pain and separation.
The world around us is perfect, too~~
offering us either a perfect teaching
or the perfect opportunity
to enjoy our here-and-now.
See how the intellct
acts as a "yes man."
It helps us play out
the roles of personality
with which we have learned
to blindly identify ourselves.
These roles are only habits;
the are not who we really are.
For behind the drama of our lives~~
father, mother, child,
boss, worker, doctor or cook~~
there lies the awareness
of our conscousness.
Behind all our drama~~
HERE WE ARE!
If you would transform the world,
start within yourself.
Let the Pathways be your guide~
unfolding beyond the sterility
of unapplied knowledge.
In the give-and-take of life,
saying these Pathways whenever upset
gives us a space
to transcend our hang-ups.
They tune us in
to our inner wisdom
that we continuously smother
by our alarms and our fears.
How simple this is!
Just to say the Pathways
when we make ourselves feel separate.
But notice how the ego~~
abetted by the rational mind~~
stops us in this easy practice
and keeps us trapped in acting out
the tragedy of our lives.
We get the most from our days
when we change our tortuous demands.
Upleveling addictions to preferences
leaves us invunerable to suffering
yet open to joy and happiness.
Becoming more deeply confirmed
as we surrender our desires,
we experience the "cornucopia" of life.
We discover at last
what eluded us before:
insight, perceptiveness, wisdom,
joy, fulfillment and happiness,
a calm mind,
tuning in to our higer self,
and the contiuous experience
of loving ourselves and others.
We are now invunerable
to the changing drama,
and we no longer alienate ourselves.
We have suffered enough.
We no longer choose
to create and inhabit
a world of separateness.
We will free ourselves~~
and our brothers and sisters~~
not by force, but by example,
by working on ourselves,
and loving and serving the world.
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