"All the problems of life come from engaging the world indirectly."

   

The diagrams in How to Live in the Here and Now, especially the early ones, reflect the evolution of the ideas of Accelerated Practical Enlightenment. There was no time in exile or an ordeal that created a prophet of any sort, no change of name or gathering of followers. 

A drunken conversation, a stolen napkin, a borrowed pen, a slurred diatribe on the meaning of life with reference to a slowly disintegrating, inky piece of tissue paper. An entirely insincere and somewhat sarcastic declaration that I would write a book. This is how Accelerated Practical Enlightenment began.

I've had an interest in present moment awareness and existentialism as long as I can remember, but it was only when I started professionally helping people with their problems that I noticed the patterns. The phobic, the depressed, the anxious, the paranoid, the discontented, the overeaters...... I had been trained to distinguish between these maladies and treat accordingly. To know the difference between sadness and depression, anxiety and phobia, to begin to see what separated these ways of being. It was only when I looked at the similarities that things started to make more sense. It is only through relating to the World at Large indirectly that we can create problems out of mere situations. Literally all of the dysfunctional behaviors, all of the unuseful thinking patterns and the emotional fall-out these produce is the result of relating to the world not as it is - but as we imagine it to be (as we project it to be).

   So before Accelerated Practical Enlightenment became an end in  itself, it was a system of techniques to get away from circumstances and ways of being that were causing people distress and discomfort.

It was not long until I began to see it as not only as a cure but also as prevention and then ultimately as actualization and authenticity. A movement towards something that we do want. This movement is a movement in the same direction of course but can be seen differently depending on where we are up to with our life circumstances. 

In my own dealings with the present moment I supplemented the laudable advice I found in many books on what our desired destination looks like with hard and fast psychological technique adapted from NLP, Hypnotherapy, REBT, CBT to enable and accelerate the desired outcome. 

And so this is how it came to be that I set myself the goal of creating a working cognitive model of 'enlightenment' (or at least a way of living well and authentically in the world) - and how I subsequently developed the techniques to quickly install that way of being.