You gotta understand that enlightenment is very serious business. It's not for the average guy looking for self-help. It requires a level of depth and commitment that most people aren't interested in. So don't expect someone like Tony Robbins to talk about it or understand it.
If you want true happiness, you will never find it outside of enlightenment. It's not possible to be happy living in delusion. But you can certainly trick yourself into thinking you're happy, in the same way you can trick yourself into thinking that McDonalds is good food.

@John If you expect meditation to fix all your problems, A) that itself is a problem because obviously you're looking for an easy way out, B) it is possible but will require MASSIVE amounts of meditation.
I would suggest two things:
1) Try meditating 1 week straight for 10 hours per day. Just so you get a true sense of what real meditation is about. 20 minutes per day is nothing. At 20 mins per day, meditation will not solve many of your real world problems. But at 10 hour per day, in a few years, your entire life could transform in unimaginable ways.
2) If you have tangible life goals like buying a house or getting a girlfriend, you work on those IN ADDITION to meditation.
Notice how you are looking for an easy way out. Meditation is not such a way. But it is a very powerful way.
If you want a remarkable transformation in your life, expect to pay for it with emotional labor. The reason you're depressed in the first place is because you keep avoiding emotional labor.

MDMA is more empathogenic than entheogenic. Try a true entheogen if you really want to open your mind.
MDMA will blow out your brain's seritonin, so you can't take it often. And eventually it should stop working for you because the brain adapts to it. In this regard it's more of a drug than a psychedelic. This is not the case with true entheogens, which you can take hundreds of times.
Also be careful about purity. I would never take MDMA without checking its purity first with a drug test kit. MDMA is notoriously impure.
Don't let bad trip reports scare you. You can always take a very low dose to prove that nothing bad will happen. Chances are mushrooms will make you feel more amazing than you've ever felt in your life, and they won't blow out your brain's seritonin.
Funny you quote Osho, who seems to have killed himself with a nitrous oxide habit.

Lol
In other words there is a record to hold your feet to the fire and check your ignorance.
The internet is already annoymous enough for devils to run rampant without consequence, and you want to take it one step further where nothing you say has any accountability so that you can say absurd thing without consequence!
In real life your friends remember every stupid thing you said. You cannot undo conversations in real time. So you watch what you say.
This forum gives you 48 hours to edit your posts. That's more than you get in real life.
Saying embarrassing things is part of growing up. I've said plenty of stupid things on record.

Consciousness is Nothingness.
And Nothingness is not other than Form.
Be careful not to over-emphasize Nothingness to the exclusion of Form. That is only half-enlightenment. You must go full-circle to realize that Form and Formlessness are totally identical. That is the highest realization.

@jim123 You not being asked to believe anything in this work. This is not a religion, nor an ideology, nor even a philosophy.
Everything I say you must discover in your direct experience.
If you carefully look at what "good" and "bad" are in your direct experience you will notice that they are thoughts of your ego-mind. So you are literally creating them. This is not an opinion or a theory. Look and see how your own mind works.
You must be curious enough to investigate your self's functioning. This is self-science.

Bro, that's old news. All of that is Trumps lies. It's well documented that Trump inhereted and lost over $400 million.
His net worth numbers are pure lies. Which is why he refuses to release his tax returns. They will show that he loses tons of money.
What Trump does is get large loans and wastes them while creating a public image of having used them to make money. He manipulates the system to get more and more loans. So he's always playing with other people's money.
It's a classic scam strategy. Which is why every US bank refuses to lend him money. Which is why he had go to Russia for loans. And the Russians are corrupt at fuck. Russia is a mafia state. They use him to launder billions of dollars out of Russia and into real estate.
That's how real business is done son. This is no joke. The Russians don't fuck around. They are stone-cold raqueteers, crafty as the devil. Way craftier than Trump. He is their pawn.

Haha, YES, you're "wrong". All that is judgment and ego.
You think God didn't invent everything you call evil? So you would call God evil?
There is no evil. There is only your judgment. Whatever you believe becomes true, but only for you.
Stop judging God. Stop thinking you know better than God.
The psychopath is the one who judges. You see how you've got everything backwards? The evil you see is the evil your mind creates.
So actually you are being a devil. A devil is one who judges God and calls Goodness evil. That's what you are doing. But of course you are not conscious enough to realize you are doing it. You think you are defending the Good by calling out evil. But that's precisely how you create evil.
You have to realize that morality is a delusion. Nothing is right or wrong. You have complete freedom. But there are natural consequences to all actions -- which also are never right or wrong.
All of this is very tough to swallow for religiously raised folks. What you have to understand is that religion has been corrupted by devilry from the very beginning. So everything you were taught about morality was actually the work of judgmental devils, who succeed in implanting a mind-virus into you which flips all truth upside-down. So actual Truth turns out to be the very opposite of what religion taught you about morality.
Ta-da!
The devil sure is sneaky! He's reading this right now and still he refuses to admit he's a devil. He is totally convinced he's an angel.
Before you go calling people fools, first check the mirror

@Progress Just be careful not to misread people. Just because someone appears quiet or shy doesn't mean they aren't very successful. People behave differently in different contexts and often wear many masks depending on the situation.
Careful not to project all your assumptions onto them using this method.

If ya'll are seriously interested in astral projection or OBEs, check out the book: Mastering Astral Projection: 90-Day Guide To OBE Experience by Robert Bruce and Brian Mercer.
I'll be adding it to my booklist at some point.
But remember, enlightenment goes WAY fucking deeper than OBEs. So be careful where you invest your time and energy, given that it's your most precious resource.

The reality is you need it.
Enlightenment without personal development work produces enlightened assholes and rubes.
Personal development without enlightenment produces polished egos who can never find fulfillment no matter what they achieve. This would be like the Tony Robbins effect (sorry, Tony, my projection )
After enlightenment you still need to master the following things:
Relationships Socializing Science Business/career Family Health Bad habits & addictions Bad cultural conditioning like sexism or racism Embodiment of unconditional love Old childhood traumas Ethical behavior

@Raffaella Takes LOTS of practice.
So get started!
You need to practice active ALLOWING! When a negative emotion comes up, just recognize it and try to allow it fully, rather than resisting it the way you normally do.
Yes, it ain't easy at first. After all, there's no one in control in that skull of yours. It's empty if you haven't noticed yet Nevertheless, it's still possible to open up and allow.
You can even actively ENJOY the deepest suffering. Like your dog dies, and your heart is broken, and you ENJOY it! That's the ultimate goal, but it will take you awhile to get there.
You do realize, right?, that you can ENJOY any suffering. You can do it instantly at any time simply by deciding to. The problem is, it's extremely counter-intuitive and you have limiting beliefs telling you its not right or not possible.
There is no HOW. You just have want to enjoy it and remember to do it.
Next time you feel terrible, simply ask yourself, "Can I allow myself to enjoy this?"

Dude...
When you abandon your entire lifestyle and go live in the woods or a cave for 10 years, living off one coconut per day, meditating 12 hours per day for years on end, for 10s of thousands of hours, begging for food, and eating it out of a bowl made out of a human skull -- THEN you can talk to me about seriousness.
No TV, no internet, no sex, no jerking off, no bed, no house, no fresh clothes, no money, no friends, no family, no A/C, no heating, no bed to sleep in, no sleeping bag, no tent, no health care.
I don't hold enlightenment nearly as seriously as yogis, Buddhist monks, or Zen masters.
You say such things not having done your research, and not having done any serious contemplation.
Try contemplating for 100 hours straight, non-stop. Then let's see how you feel. (That would still be newbie-level spirituality.)
And laughter or playfulness does not preclude seriousness. Those are actually by-products of it.
AFTER you've contemplated for 20,000 hours, then its easy to laugh. At that point, ISIS could be chopping your head off, and you could be laughing.
You, as you are now, have almost no capacity to laugh. As soon as you experience the slightest discomfort, insult, or even a minor calamity, you vent, cry, curse, get depressed, get agitated, etc. You can't even sit still on a comfortable couch for 60 minutes without serious suffering. An itch on your nose can send you into agony.

Hi. Yesterday i tried changa for the very first time. Gotta tell you that taking a full tab of LSD is like taking a cup of coffee compared to smoking changa. I did it in a wrong set and setting though. My apartment was a total mess (i-just-moved-in type of mess) and I didn't meditate.
LSD lets you know there's something more. Changa lets you travel between dimensions. 
LSD shows you that the spirit is affecting the matter. Changa is purely spiritual.
 
I started hearing a beep. Then i was in a place that was constantly morphing, colors were red, white and black, but mostly red. There was no up or down in that place. Colors changed to cream, blue and yellow it was beautiful, and very scary. When i tried to resist it, it stopped being beautiful, the shapes stopped moving and i felt like trapped by some other shapes. I didn't have a body, i was/am pure spirit, a ghost tops.
I saw the serpent everybody talks about, but it was drawn by the geometric shapes. It was not an entity. But it probably would have come alive if i would have stayed longer.
I never lost connection with the ''real world'' but i was definitely close to.
This material reality is just a curtain.
There are other (infinite amount probably) dimensions.
 
Insights:
-I am not my body. I no longer identify with my body.
-I am an infinite spiritual being that exists interdimensionally.
-I was never born, i will never die. I have never been alive. I just exist.
-I am nothing. I am pure spirit.
 
-I might be god. I might be living everything simultaneously-infinitely. But idk.
 
 
 Notes:
1. I can see the potential of this substance for addiction treatment.
2. I liked the smoke and the taste. I expected it to be harsh.
3. Minutes after the experience i told myself: -'' I might do this again in 10 years'' Now after integrating i understand that i want to go to that place again and more prepared.
4. ''Shamanic'' preparation is wanted. Like eating super clean x amount days before the experience and meditate during those x amount of days. That's for those of us who still don't have a daily meditation habit.
5. I was prepared but i could have been more prepared.
 
Arc.

@santerton For fucks sake, STOP WATCHING MGTOW. Period.
And never visit 4chan ever again in your life.
It's all toxic, dogmatic, egotistical, unconscious, devilsh garbage.
It is not even worth debunking or arguing against. It's so false and wrong it's hopeless.
MGTOW, RedPill, and Incels are the American equivalent of Al Qaeda Islamist radicalism. By ingesting their videos and discussions your mind is getting programmed with that mind-virus. That happens because as you watch and listen, it appeals to your desperate needy ego. Triggering all of your worst fears, hates, insecurities, and victim mentality.
If you want to get better with women, you can do so and have amazing loving sexy relationships. But it will take self-improvement and spiritual work.
Dating coaches are not liars. Dating coaches can teach you how to get really good with attracting women. I have interacted with dozens of dating coaches and their advice is top-notch for attraction. Not so good for relationships. For solid relationships you will need a more spiritual approach which you can layer on top of the attraction advice.
Once you become spiritual and consciousness enough, sex will not even be important to you any more. You will be so deeply happy without sex that chasing women will be a joke.
Awakening is 1000x more enjoyable than any sex you will ever have. With that said, you can do both.
Here's the practical solution for you: Stop sitting in your Mom's basement browsing toxic forums, and GO OUT and talk to real females. You will never get laid by sitting at home. It is not physically possible.
See how simple the solution is? Yet you refuse to do it. Because it takes emotional labor to face your fears and grow yourself. You much prefer to sit at home and rant against how bad women are and how nothing can change.
Rule #1 of all personal development: You must take 100% responsibility for your life, your beliefs, your feelings, your situation. No one is to blame.
MGTOW is not a teaching. It's egotical, reactionary rantings driven by fear, hate, insecurity, selfishness, woundedness, and neediness. It's very similar to Hitler's rants against the Jews and communists.

Need/desire is a duality.
You are the one defining them. Whatever you say is a need becomes a need.
Strictly speaking there is no need to do anything. You could just lay down and die. There is not even a need to live.
Practically speaking, sex is one of the most powerful human drives. Good luck ignoring it. It's designed to be unignorable.
By saying that sex is a need all we're saying is: it's a core biological drive which dominates human survival. It can be overcome, but not easily, and not through something as simplistic as NoFap. You might as well be practicing NoShit.

@Patrick Lynam I'm not really sure anyone offers MDMA assisted therapy since MDMA is illegal in most countries and a serious therapist would not want to risk it.
You can either do psychedelics on your own and that itself is the therapy.
Or you can consider doing psychedelics with a shaman like with Ayahuasca or toad venom or ibogaine clinics in Costa Rica, Canada, etc.
Traditional talk therapy certainly works, but nothing compares to the therapeutic power of psychedelics. You don't need a therapist to administer it. The psychedelic is 100x wiser than any silly therapist. The therapist is more of a distraction than of help during a trip. The psychedelic will show you everything you need to know about yourself and your issues if you come to it with a genuine intention. All that's required is that you want to know the TRUTH about your issue. That's all. The psychedelic will show you all the answers, as much as you're willing to stomach.
Just make sure you follow a proper tripping protocol. And start with small doses.
It's very smart to take charge of your own mental and psychological issues. No one can really sort you out but you. Which is why traditional talk therapy is so gradual. The answers are all inside you, if you'd only sit down with a notepad and introspect.
You can teach yourself how to diagnose and troubleshoot all of your own psychological problems.
Of course if you have the cash to burn, talk therapy could be good too. But you can't just rely on talk therapy to fix your life. Your life will require a lot deeper work to truly sort out. No talk therapist even understands how deep this work goes. So it's worth your time to learn how to self-help.

The ego-mind returns surprisingly soon. Like within 30 minutes you're back into standard ego operating mode. But of course shaken to your core. It's often a relief to return to ordinary life. But there is also a deep regret for losing that full-on God-consciousness because nothing in life will ever top that.
Sometimes the God-consciousness lingers for a few hours or even into the next day.
The saddest part about 5-MeO is that you cannot be that high 24/7/365. Losing touch with God is one of the deepest pains. But as you awaken more, you will start to realize that God is present all the time, even if you're not on a peak. This takes a lot of tripping to start to realize.
Enlightenment is right here, right now, at all times. But only if you're awake enough to see it. It does zero good telling an unawakened newbie that enlightenment is right here, right now, at all times. He just cannot see it. He needs actual breakthroughs and mystical experiences to demonstrate it to himself. That's where the 5-MeO comes in so handy.
After enough tripping, your whole life will start to feel like a trip. The materialist paradigm slowly gets snuffed out forever. I no longer experience myself as in a material world. The world gradually becomes self-luminous.

Perception, thought, and creation are not two.
The universe is hell for devils because of how they perceive and how they think -- which is their creation.
How you think about reality affects reality directly. By thinking of the world as a place where you exist, where others can harm you, and where one day you will die, you literally create your own hell.

Yes, but Green is still not thinking about it systemically. Green is mostly doing it from her heart. That's all great, but it is not the kind of full-bore systemic thinking I described.
Green is still looking at the situation from a personal agenda level, it just so happens that saving the Earth is now part of her personal agenda.
Yellow and above is more impersonal. And yet still very personal! Tier 2 is more detached.

God created relationship so that the depth of your love could really be put to the test. It's easy to love the world when you're sitting alone in a cave because there are no fools or devils to deal with.
Try being enlightened while running for president. Now there's a real test of your consciousness!
Osho was an enlightened master, but his community was full of devilry.

@NoSelfSelf You are missing that you are member of society whether you like it or not, whether you're enlightened or not. Society can only function when its citizens are well-educated and conscious. If the most conscious people stick their head in the sand and only focus on making their own personal lives work consciously, then society will be seized by the most unconscious right-wing nationalist tyrants. That's how Hitler and WWII happens.
As a human being you have to take responsibility for your role within a collective. Personal enlightenment is good but not good enough! Which is why enlightened masters become Bodhisattvas, to help elevate the rest of mankind. They are playing  a much bigger game than their own personal enlightenment. Personal enlightenment is a cake walk compared to enlightening society.
If you are the whole universe, then you are also society. You cannot treat yourself as only an individual unit, only a personal human life. You are also the collective! The life of all beings is your responsibility. You are God after all. How can you neglect your creation? Are you really going to sit by and watch devilry prevail? No! You cannot. It is actually impossible. Love and consciousness will move you to towards the highest Good.
To be fully conscious is to take responsibility for EVERYTHING to the point where you are willing to lay your life down for the greater Good. That is literally God's work. God did not design this wondrous creation through negligence or selfishness.

This has never been about the money. It's about helping people understand reality.
You might as well ask, why didn't Jesus or Gandhi retire and live in a cabin in the woods?
They had much higher callings.
Do not confuse these callings for ego. That would be a big mistake. God does its work through conscious people. How else do you think Goodness happens?

There is not one strategy, there are many
You could focus on gaining financial security first and then go hog-wild on spirituality.
Or you could do just the opposite.
It really depends on what your heart wants and what you can handle. It can be very painful to force yourself to work on mundane financial stuff when you are itching to be creative or spiritual.
Then again, if your financial situation collapses, that might force you into slave labor and out of your spiritual quest. Again, depending on who you are.
The most spiritually gifted people will never be stopped by financial concerns. But that's not most people. You have to be realistic about what you're gonna be able to handle.
If you want the most direct path to the highest human life, drop everything and go balls deep into spirituality. But that's very hardcore and too difficult for most people to pull off. Most people won't be able to handle it. Hence there are more gradual approaches.
Personally, I focused on locking in financial freedom first. But it was pretty painful, to be honest. I would not wish that kind of pain on anyone. But it sure beats being a wage slave.

It is easier to get enlightened out in nature than in a busy building full of people. There's a reason yogis meditate up in the mountains and forests. Nature has a tranquilizing effect on the mind.
But don't make this an excuse. You can practice spirituality anywhere.
The problem with rural areas is that the people there will be more closeminded and rednecky. Don't go telling them you're God, or they might hang you. City-folk are more tolerant and open, but more lost in the materialist race rat.