Ram Dass. He traveled with them to a commune and a Trappist monastery in Virginia and a spiritual center in Connecticut. A turning point came for Keyes when he visited Trungpa at his center in Barnet, Vermont at Christmas 1970 and discussed with Trungpa the Buddhist notion that the mind's reaction rather than external circumstances creates personal unhappiness. Keyes has said that he 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." According to Keyes, during this period he used his new learning to cope more successfully with issues of jealousy and deception in his romantic relationship with a woman named Jane. During an episode in which Jane brought another lover onto his yacht, he used a form of mental reprogramming process that, he says, alleviated his jealously without repressing it, a method he would later teach. During this time he formulated the "Twelve Pathways", which would constitute the core of his "Living Love" method of personal growth. Within a month he had drafted the core of a new book, Handbook to Higher Consciousness. This self-published book sold more than one million copies. Living Love years Going west, and the Living Love Center in Berkeley In mid-1972, Keyes outfitted a bus for living, sold his yacht, disposed of most of his possessions, and began traveling west with a group of other people, visiting places such as Taos, New Mexico and the Rainbow Gathering at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. He traveled for about a year, and while traveling began holding sessions using the Living Love methods. Keyes gave his first formal workshop on the Living Love methods at the Esalen Institute. He settled in Berkeley, California in 1973 and began giving regular workshops, establishing the Living Love Center there in June 1973 in a former fraternity house. The workshops were attended by as many as fifty people at a time. 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.