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Ken Keyes, Jr. (January 19, 1921, Atlanta, Georgia
– December 20, 1995, Coos Bay, Oregon) was a
personal growth author and lecturer, and the
creator of a self-help system named the Living
Love method. Keyes authored fifteen books on
person growth and social consciousness issues,
representing about four million copies distributed
overall.

==Early years==
It was the final third of his life in which Keyes
became famous for his personal growth system and
books. Although he had published his first book by
age thirty, the first fifty years of his life were
dedicated to the mundane activities of making a
living, raising a family, dealing with
relationships, and adapting to the disease that
crippled his body.

===Childhood and adolescence===
Keyes was born an only child to an affluent family
in Atlanta. He found closeness and support from
his father and especially his mother, despite her
eventual abuse of alcohol, and he remained close
to both of them but especially to her, throughout
their lives. He suffered from chronic bronchitis
and croup in his infant years, and in 1925 his
family moved to Miami Beach, Florida in hopes of
his benefiting from its sunny climate. There, his
father became successful in real estate
development, and active in the evangelical wing of
the Presbyterian Church. Keyes was not very
athletic as a child, but excelled in academics and
developed many hobbies, such as photography. While
in high school, his father bought him a small
boat, which began his lifelong affection for
sailing.

He attributed the seeds of the personal growth
system he would later develop to an experience he
had with a stern English teacher in ninth grade.
Despite her reputation as a strict teacher and
hard grader, Keyes made an effort to be personally
caring toward her, which led to her giving him a
slight break in grading. He took the lesson from
this experience to be "that when I express caring
and friendliness, they are reflected back to me in
life." 

===College, military service, and a new family===
Keyes entered Duke University in 1938 and spent
two years there. He then studied voice and music
at the University of Miami, and helped to found
the Miami Opera Guild. In 1941, with World War II
brewing, Keyes enlisted in a naval intelligence
unit set up to censor cablegrams entering and
leaving the United States. 

At age of 20, Keyes met his first wife, Roberta
Rymer, at the University of Miami, and they were
married in December 1941, just days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Their first child, Ken
III, was born in December 1942 and the second
child, Clara Lu, was born in April 1944. Keyes was
discharged from the service in October 1945, and
entered the real estate business with his father.

===Polio and quadriplegia===
In February 1946, at age 25, Keyes contracted
polio and became paralyzed in his legs and hands.
His paralysis developed into quadriplegia and was
sufficiently severe that, for example, he was
unable to turn himself over in bed. He was to
retain attendants for bodily care for several
decades. He was sent to the Warm Springs
Foundation, a convalescent hospital in Georgia
(U.S. state)|Georgia. After a year in the
hospital, he and his wife moved to a nearby house
and continued for three more years of
rehabilitation, during which time he adjusted to
life in a wheelchair. He invented a
switch-activated powered bed that would turn his
body over when desired. He related he "began to
develop the feeling that I did not have to be so
totally dependent on other people" and "still
wanted to feel that I was a capable and lovable
person." To that end, he obtained a
lever-controlled electric wheelchair, a new
invention at the time.

===The first book===
Keyes engaged himself in many activities to
overcome the notion of dependence and uselessness
brought on by his disability, among which
activities he wrote a book on thinking techniques
for increasing effectiveness in daily life. His
first book, entitled How to Develop Your Thinking
Ability, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1950 and
contained illustrations by cartoonist Ted Key. He
would later reacquire the publishing rights to it
and re-release it as Taming Your Mind.

===Resuming life===
Upon completion of therapy in 1949, Keyes returned
to South Miami, Florida where he resumed work in
real estate and bought a specially equipped
speedboat for racing. He reported that during this
period he was able to let his wheelchair disappear
as a concern in his life. He would later also come
to view his experience with polio as actually
beneficial in a way, questioning whether he would
have developed the personal growth methods he
loved and taught had he not contracted the disease
and become disabled.

By 1950, Keyes had become general manager of a
radio station owned by his father, but became
increasing successful in his own commercial real
estate business. He completed his schooling and
obtained a B.A. in Psychology from the University
of Miami. He planned and built a series of
personal residences, and in 1956 bought a 71-foot
yacht, the Caprice, capable of serving as a
floating residence.

===Divorce and remarriage===
Over these years Keyes and his wife were drifting
apart, and he occasionally dallied with other
women. They were separated and then divorced in
1959, after eighteen years of marriage. He
received the yacht in the property settlement and
moved his residence and office there. His second
book, on the topic of nutrition and entitled, How
to Live Longer–Stronger–Slimmer (later
to be retitled, Loving Your Body), was published
by Fredrick Fell during this period.

Around 1964, Keyes resumed working for his father,
in a real estate company targeted at foreign
investors. At age 44 he met and married his second
wife, Bonita, who was sixteen years his junior.
During this period he wrote his third book with
Jacque Fresco, a book on futurism entitled Looking
Forward.

His wife's jealousy and clinical
depression|depression became major stumbling
blocks in their relationship, and looking back
Keyes would later fault himself for his unskillful
methods of reacting to these issues. They divorced
after a year of marriage, and Keyes grieved the
loss of the relationship. 

Keyes threw himself into his business, and in 1968
established a national commercial real estate
sales operation, with revenues of $25 million
during its first year of operation. Despite his
financial success, he remained restless and
personally unfulfilled. He maintained romantic
relationships with various women, and would later
comment that his sexual appetite had been an
impediment to his personal growth.

==Awakening==
The last third of Keyes' life took him deeply into
spirituality and the personal growth arena. He was
older than many of those around him and many of
those he influenced. He spoke in a younger idiom
than might be expected of one who was born in
1921, expressing many of his concepts using terms
such as "uptight" and "headspace" that those of
the time might have considered "hippie" in nature.

In 1970, just shy of his 50th birthday, he
traveled to the Esalen Institute in California and
enrolled in two workshops there. He then returned
to Florida, became involved with the Humanistic
Psychology Association, and was exposed to
teachings such as those of Chogyam Trungpa and
Alan Watts. He also experimented briefly with
mescaline, which induced in him a continuously
orgasmic experience he found distasteful. He
credited this experience with allowing him to
begin overcoming his obsession with sex, although
he would remain sexually active and continue
erotic activities throughout his life such as
watching adult movies with his lovers. 

Keyes lived for a few months with two students who
had been influenced by Trungpa and Ram Dass. These
students challenged him about his attachments to
money and sex. He traveled with them to a commune
and a trappist monastery in Virginia and a
spiritual center in Connecticut, which spurred him
to explore further. A turningpoint came for Keyes
when he visited Trungpa at his center in Barnet,
Vermont at Christmas 1970 and explored the
Buddhist notion that the mind's reaction rather
than external circumstances creates personal
unhappiness. Keyes felt this to be the solution to
the life problems he had experienced.

Over the next year, Keyes lived with a small group
of people on his yacht, and prepared to turn his
business over to an employee and found a nonprofit
organization with his other assets. At this time
he had a brief experience he described as
transcendent, "like the pure energy of
God—radiant, indescribable—and I felt
a part of it all." During this period he used his
new learning to cope more successfully with issues
of jealousy and deception regarding his romantic
relationship with a woman named Jane. During an
episode in which Jane brought another lover onto
his yacht, Keyes in desperation stumbled onto a
form of mental reprogramming process that
alleviated his jealously without repressing it, a
method he would later teach. Within a few days, he
formulated his "Twelve Pathways" that would
constitute the core of his "Living Love" method of
personal growth. Within a month he had drafted the
core of his book, Handbook to Higher
Consciousness, which would, despite being only
self-published, sell in excess of a million
copies.

==Living Love years==
===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.

===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. 

==="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 allergy|food allergies, and were brought
under control with a change in her diet.

===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.

==Final years==
Keyes and Penny eventually were divorced and the
Ken Keyes College closed. In 1990, Keyes began
exploring inner-child healing and a
rapid-eye-movement technology developed by
Francine Shapiro. He established the Caring Rapid
Healing Center in Coos Bay to do private multi-day
counseling workshops in this area, and wrote his
final book, Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness,
on these topics.

Keyes married a third wife, Lydia, who survived
him upon his death. He died of kidney failure in
1995. 

==Influence and legacy==
In his life Keyes did many things that potentially
could have bred a lasting influence on the larger
world—he sold or distributed millions of
books, lectured to many people, spoke to
dignitaries at political gatherings, and knew and
moved among the self-help elite, including Wayne
Dyer who credited, "Ken Keyes literally got me
started on this glorious transformational
journey." Yet Keyes' organization did not endure
but rather essentially died with him. Whether his
personal growth system will endure in wide usage
is unknown and whether his influence on the
personal growth area will continue to be directly
felt is highly questionable, although his books
are still available ten years after his death and
a small group of his students maintain ties and
carry on his methods.

Rather than hallmarking a personal or strategic
failure on Keyes' part, however, the lack of
institutional persistence beyond his lifetime may
have been by design. Keyes employed no explicit
strategies to ensure his organization would
continue or grow without him, and he did not focus
on promotion or promulgation of any ensconced
organization or personal legacy. Rather, at the
expense of organizational continuity he seems to
have been more focused on his own personal efforts
in teaching and sharing his methods. Instead of
seeking out a major publisher for his books, he
self published them all, and even brought back
in-house one book that had been placed with a
major publisher, which retrenchment was apparently
a deliberate choice. Of the three teaching centers
he founded, only the last was eponymous, that
perhaps as a reaction to the schism he had
suffered with the head of his second center. It is
clear Keyes did not leave his former occupation
for personal growth teaching in order to increase
his wealth, and he built no empire. Perhaps he did
what he did because he loved to do it.

Keyes claimed that through the use of his methods
he spent almost all of his later life in a state
of nearly constant happiness. A fair number of
people claimed that he and his methods helped them
to move in that same direction. Perhaps his only
lasting legacy, and perhaps the only one that he
himself would care to claim, is that he developed
a system that enabled himself and other people to
live their lives more happily.

==Published works==
===Autobiography===
*1989: Discovering the Secrets of Happiness: My
Intimate Story. ISBN 0-915972-15-8.

===Nutrition===
*1974: Loving Your Body. ISBN 0-9600688-4-8.

===Personal growth===
====Living Love method====
*1972: Handbook to Higher Consciousness. ISBN
0-9600688-8-0.

*With Tolly Burkan and Bruce T. Keyes, 1974: How
to Make Your Life Work, or, Why Aren't You Happy?
ISBN 0-915972-08-5

*1982: Prescriptions for Happiness. ISBN
0-915972-02-6.

*1984: How To Enjoy Your Life In Spite Of It All.
ISBN 0-915972-01-8.

*With Penny Keyes, 1984: The Power of
Unconditional Love: 21 Guidelines for Beginning,
Improving, and Changing Your Most Meaningful
Relationships. ISBN 0-915972-19-0

*1987: Your Life Is A Gift: So Make the Most of
It! ISBN 0-915972-12-3.

*With Penny Keyes, 1988: Gathering Power Through
Insight and Love. ISBN 0-915972-13-1.

*With Penny Keyes, 1989: Handbook to Higher
Consciousness: The Workbook. ISBN 0-915972-16-6.

====Other methods====
*1970: Taming Your Mind. ISBN 0-915972-18-2.

*1995: Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness: A
Guide to the Life You Want. ISBN 0-915972-22-0.

===Politics and futurism===
*With Jacque Fresco, 1969: Looking Forward. ISBN
0-498-06752-1.

*1984: The Hundredth Monkey. ISBN 0-942024-01-X.
about preventing the dangers of nuclear war. He
moved to Coos Bay because it was said to be a
place least likely to be attacked in a nuclear
war.

*With Benjamin B. Ferencz, 1991: Planethood: The
Key to Your Future. ISBN 0-915972-21-2.