Early life

The fascinating story of Ken's father - an orphaned baby brought from New Zealand and living at the famous Daly Waters Station in the Northern Territory; then as a toddler being swept up and living with a nomadic aboriginal tribe; only to be discovered some years later in that tribe and taken back to Daly Waters Station - that story begins, in a way, the fascinating story of Ken and his extraordinary and inspiring life.

Ken Dyers was born in Sydney on 14 July 1922. He was the youngest of three siblings. Ken constantly acknowledged his father's influence on him. Charlie, his father, was a unique and true Australian Northern Territory bushman, of great character and repute, influenced deeply by his initial life with the aboriginal people. Ken was always taught that before you have dealings with any living thing, you must find the spirit of the thing, be it animal, plant or human, and this was your point of contact. The unique reality of the spiritual side of man was something he grew up with, and maintained, exploring throughout his life.

Coupled with this, was the understanding natural to all children, of the human spirit - that child-like part in ourselves that is the common denominator between us all.

Over and over again, we would hear the earliest realities Ken embraced. He still in his heart had that little Sunday School text "God is Love". He spoke about this all the time. As a child it gave him an understanding of 'God'. To Ken, God was love.

The human viewpoint is the one that loves. An evolved spirit will naturally take care of it's human. It was this constant reach into the nature of the spirit and the human - and their relationship to the life of the body, the genetic and the mind - that would personify Ken's life.

Ken was often to say "If the human viewpoint prevailed, there would never have been a war. If we remove that common factor between people, we invite insanity". Ken was reared with a mother and father of different religions, some might even say opposing religions. Yet he would state that he never heard a religious argument in the family. He would recount stories of his father standing up to the bigotry of others, but never saw it within his family. This gave him an understanding and acceptance of all religions.

A child during the ravages of the 1932 Great Depression, Ken grew up with his father working hard to survive, but caring for others as well. His father would slaughter a sheep once a week, and distribute it amongst the families in the street. To survive you take care of those around you, and your survival potential increases; they take care of you. With initiative, hard work and caring for others, his family survived the Depression.

Ken could vividly recount his experiences in the depression coming to terms with the reality of the inhumanity of man to man. He called on the awareness his father had encouraged, of the spirit and human. He survived and grew and flourished. Those principles served him well and worked - his anecdotes of this time always contained strong human qualities. The human is so necessary for survival. He talked of the relationship he had with an old retired nun at a college he worked at - they both used to go hunting possums in the roof of the college, and bag them. However the other nuns finally deemed possum hunting inappropriate for an ageing nun!

Ken worked in many fields during this period, including as an overseer, overseeing much older men, steaming the soil in a tomato growing venture, and working as a butcher. Every young photo of Ken shows him surrounded by people.

He lived a full social life in this period. He was an avid participant in YMCA activities. He played in their basketball teams, did gymnastics there along with many other sports.

His father had taught him to box from a very early age. In fact, his father paid the famous McQuillan to train Ken, and paid him extra so he wouldn't put Ken into professional boxing. Although Ken sparred and trained with many professionals of the period, he only ever fought as an amateur.

The war experience

The Second World War was the next defining influence for Ken.

In 1941, Ken joined the Australian Army. He was sent overseas within a month of his enlistment, assigned to an artillery unit and occupational garrison duty in Palestine. But Ken, a young man seeking action, volunteered and then transferred to the Australian 9th Division. The division went to Lebanon, where Ken was seconded for a time to British counter-intelligence. Ken then saw action at El Alamein. In 1943, after returning to Australia he saw action in New Guinea, including the landings at Lae and Finschhafen.

He was with a forward scout party at both landings. At Finschhafen, encountering heavy fire, his bodyguard took a grenade in the chest and died in Ken's arms. The bodyguard was married with children. This action affected the rest of Ken's life. He decided that his life had to be worthy of something very special to justify this man's action.

This incident was always a powerful, deeply rooted motivation which fuelled Ken's desire to help people enhance their own lives. He attributed much of his survival throughout the War to the knowingness, and spiritual and human realities, made real to him by his father. And well he knew that to survive, you had to take care of each other. To survive great insanity, one must understand great love.

He was honourably discharged from the Army in 1946.

Return to civilian life

Returning to peace time, Ken came up against a different war, as he began to realise that the honour, friendship, honesty, decency, love and commitment to the survival of your mates - so necessary for survival during a life and death conflict - was not always present in peace time. In fact a different sort of war raged; one where socially acceptable hatred and bigotry could substitute for spirit-human consciousness.

In war, to not be aware of oneself spiritually greatly diminished one's chances of survival. To be aware of oneself spiritually is to be aware of the spiritual universe and its rules, and to be cause over the physical universe. In a life and death situation, we often naturally detach from the body and become aware of ourselves spiritually, and this enables us to survive.

When we make the mistake of thinking we do not need that awareness, we lose it. In losing awareness of who we are, we enable forces not in alignment with the spiritual universe to take over our thinking and actions, which never results in happiness or life success. It is the genesis of all pain, suffering and despair.

So here was Ken, heightened in an awareness of the need for love, caring, honesty, courage and respect - to survive - confronted with people who did not understand the need for a commitment to these principles, or the need to relate to each other with spirit-human consciousness.

He had just survived a war, where this awareness was imperative to survival - in fact, it was these principles that Ken and his mates had put their lives on the line for - some sacrificing their lives for these principles. So he decided he simply would not sell those principles out. What can you do? - one either submits to the lack of awareness of spirituality in the environment, and so becomes unaware of oneself - or remains true to one's own universe, the spiritual universe, and does not betray its principles.

This may have been the beginning of the realisation for Ken that he could help people understand these principles - particularly if they were in an environment that suppressed these principles - so they lacked in their lives a space where the individual could obtain a sense of his or her own determinism, and what his or her own abilities and potentials were.

Finding spiritual purpose

So parallel to his 24-year business career, which was just beginning, Ken was reaching into and trying to understand what was it that made individual people betray respect, friendship, love, caring and self-honesty - almost as a socially acceptable way of life. What made people betray their own universe - the spiritual universe. He would reach into and study anything that came across his path: from different religions, west and east; to philosophers, great writers; anything that would give an insight into the spiritual universe and its loss in human society.

During his business career after the war, Ken was successful because every dealing he had with anyone, became an exercise in learning how he could validate the spiritual awareness of the person.

Many of his anecdotes and stories come from this period as he held on to the love and commitment to the viewpoint of the spiritual universe in all his dealings with people. He found it more successful than one up-manship, or the basic game of ‘I'll get you before you get me'. He was successful during this period because he validated and explored for himself the principles he had grown up with: caring for others and maintaining decency.

He also began to explore why these qualities were not naturally there with people, sometimes when they were so obviously present at other times.

Marriage and fatherhood

Ken was married twice in this period. First, in August 1946 when he married Judith Scott Fox - this marriage ended in September 1950; then in March 1951, Marie O'Donnell - this marriage ended in 1973.

He was committed to both relationships. An idealist in love and the heart, he strove to create better and better relationships as he moved on in life. With Marie he had two sons - Mike and Steve - and anyone who knew Ken was to understand the unlimited love and commitment he had for his two sons. Nobody who knew him for long would have not heard Mike and Steve's story and been conscious of his commitment to them both when they wanted it. He would forgive anything and strive constantly for their welfare. His postulate for both children was that they would be a gift to society. His joy in their childhood is mirrored in his many anecdotal stories about this time not only for the effectiveness of many things he used with them as children, but the wisdom the children gave him as they were growing up.

At this time he was also an instructor at the Rose Bay Youth Club where he taught boxing, gymnastics and tumbling. He was a delegate for the Under 14s Eastern Suburbs Rugby Union Football Association. He introduced the use of boxing bags to teach safe and effective tackling. This is now standard procedure.

At the same time people were coming to him as someone who could help them achieve what they wanted from life, because he could do it. He was developing a reputation for effectiveness in the area of human behaviour, helping people overcoming negative influences in their lives. Over time he was evolving methods of assisting the individual to understand and get rid of those forces and energies within themselves that restricted them from having happy and successful lives.

The 1960s and 1970s

By the end of the 60s, Ken was well respected and his business saw him being contracted by American holding companies to coach their executives in Australia. Ken's understanding of the human condition and practical application of a spirit-human consciousness, made him very effective. He got results. He could get to a group of executives and help them to work outside of their defences and stuck identities. This would bring them back into human communication with their staff. Once the executives treated their teams like people with a human quality or had a sense of spiritual consciousness and began to be concerned about the growth of the individuals in that team - they would simply get co-operation, and success would follow. But what Ken was beginning to be able to do was to make this happen to get the results - which is why he had success.

At this point of his life, in the early 70s, he let go all of his business roles and completely changed his life. Devastated by the ravages of the new drug culture just emerging and what it was doing to young people including his sons, Ken set himself up so he could work only a couple of days a week and concentrate on understanding the phenomenon in order to help. There were no drug rehabilitation centres then - the problem was virtually unconfronted. So Ken went to the places where these young addicts went and started to understand how he could help young people overcome their addiction. During this time he was successful in getting many young people off drugs, and on to leading healthy lives. Both of his sons rehabilitated with Ken's assistance.

At the same time people were coming to him as someone who could help them achieve what they wanted from life, because he could do it. He was developing a reputation for effectiveness in the area of human behaviour, helping people overcoming negative influences in their lives. Over time he was evolving methods of assisting the individual to understand and get rid of those forces and energies within themselves that restricted them from having happy and successful lives.

Developing Energy Conversion and Kenja with Jan Hamilton

It was during this period that he developed a worldwide reputation for the work he was doing with energy. He developed, drawing on a number of influences, a technique called Energy Conversion. This was a one-on-one meditation enabling the individual, through the stillness of another, to become conscious of energies creating negative effects in their thinking and their lives, and then to dissipate them. This action itself enhanced one's spiritual consciousness. By becoming conscious of the energy causing the problem and getting rid of that energy, the problem disappeared.

In 1978, the next period of his life began when he met Jan Hamilton. Jan had returned from three years full time study on an Arts Australia Council grant at the East 15 Acting School in London.

Part of Jan's training had been the study of "clowning" - not painted-face clowning, but the use of particular exercises designed to reach in and touch the human part of each individual and to "bring out" the essential "inner child" in people. This was in alignment with everything Ken knew about the human. He encouraged and helped Jan expand her own work in this area which thus began a thirty-year relationship and the formation of Kenja.

Ken began to give classes and communicate constantly about his own realities on the spirit, mind and body. Energy Conversion classes began. Ken began to train people in Energy Conversion which gave access to many more people as Ken began to give seminars, classes and lectures.

Jan began clowning classes, applying Ken's work to expand her own understanding of the human viewpoint. What was apparent was that if a consciousness of the spiritual universe and the human spirit were not present, Man became a very dangerous animal, subject to the compulsion of energies that simply were not aligned to a spiritual universe.

So the essence of Kenja began to evolve: an opportunity to expand our consciousness of ourselves spiritually and to become conscious of and responsible for the human. Many activities grew in Kenja - from sporting teams to music, choir, tap dancing, ballet, gymnastics, poetry and ballroom dancing.

Throughout all these activities Ken insisted on an ethic towards the human. What this meant was that standards of behaviour towards each other were put in place. Kenja developed activities that had the basic purpose of bringing out the best in each other.

Ken's contribution to ethical standards in this area over many years meant Kenja activities have become renowned for their good sportsmanship, lack of degradation, and bringing out the best in the person through every activity.

It became a safe environment. Human trust was there. Individuals felt free to explore their potential. People were free to grow in a disciplined, safe environment.

During this period, Ken also became renowned as an excellent public speaker. He would almost always speak to booked-out houses. His lectures were endearing and enlightening. He took the human condition out of mystery and into the individual's own hands.

He gave classes and seminars which became renowned and exciting because of the insight and understanding he showed. Hundreds of thousands of people have heard him speak over the years.

He helped hundreds of people individually to lead fulfilling and successful lives, in and out of Kenja. Ken travelled around Australia lecturing and giving seminars.

What emerged was a group of people prepared to confront the forces that are not in alignment with the spiritual universe and the human viewpoint. Using the technique of Energy Conversion to view and dissipate one's own negative energies empowers one to see and confront them in others. Energy Conversion is a spiritual action, increasing one's consciousness of the spiritual universe. It allows a person to view destructiveness and its origins from a compassionate and understanding viewpoint.

Kenja became a place opposed to the suppression of the human spirit and Ken continued to expand his viewpoint and shine a light on suppressive areas in our environment. It brought him some opposition, especially from those with things to hide and who did not want the light to be shone on their actions.

What became apparent was that Energy Conversion was very effective. People using the work became more successful, happier and more fulfilled. Families became happier and more aligned to each other. It is remarkable to think that there is zero drug use, and no anti-social behaviour within the people doing the work. Wonderful friendships are developed. Children become leaders, able to resist negative peer pressure because they are shown how to own their own space and life. They are successful at school and sport, and are privy to the best training in many areas, in culture, in sport and in their communication skills.

Ken's understanding of the need for personal ethics established Kenja as a very safe place. Children are always accompanied by parents, and are taught self-respect - and that self-respect has been enhanced by the family's interchange with Ken. Children know how to speak up and be counted.

Battling hostile fundamentalist attacks

In 1992, when he was 70, the first orchestrated attacks against Ken and Kenja began. Only when these attacks failed, did the tactics of using false charges to destroy him emerge. Ken suffered this attack for almost ten years - listening to lies about his character, his work, and portraying him as the opposite of the reality. All charges that went to court were shown to be false. He did not have a conviction against his name.

Ken consistently demonstrated his consciousness of the spiritual universe. He was an inspirational, caring, courageous and highly evolved man who could never be in company without helping the people he was with. His human bubbled with warmth, and he used it to enhance our own ability to confront our own weaknesses and to seek to build up beingness to reach its highest potential - the very purpose of life.

He was a true spirit warrior, completely fearless, who stood up and condemned the suppression of the human, and constantly fought for the right of the individual to evolve.