Personally I don't like the whole number system. I mostly use it because other guys use it, in order to communicate with them.
There are actually practical reasons to use a number system. It's not done for ego. Hot girls require adjustments to ones game. A hot girl can be teased much harder than an average girl who is insecure about her looks. I can call a 10 fat. I cannot call a normal girl fat, she would lose her shit. Hot girls also tend to have a lot more sexual experience so this needs to be taken into account. These are stereotypes but there is some truth in them and making such distinctions helps guys get laid, which is why these distinctions are made by guys.
I am not endorsing this system. I am just explaining why guys use it.
I can often predict whether a girl is a stripper, model, go-go dancer, instagram model, or cocktail waitress just by looking at her body and face.
Also for example if my wing goes to a club and tells me: "This place mostly has 6s and below" I roughly know what he means and then I know it's not worthwhile for me to go to that club. It's gonna be a waste of my time. On the other hand if a wing tells me, "Bro, this place is full of 9s!" I have a reason to go. I could have reached these conclusions myself, but having a reliable wing saves me time. So it becomes a communication tool among guys. It's not totally accurate but it gives guys a general sense of things.
Yeah, a 10 is only a 10 in the eyes of the guy doing the assessment. Obviously it's subjective and guys have a wide range of types.
I have one wing who loves THICK girls with huge asses. I don't find that attractive at all personally.
I have another wing who will only sleep with small, anorexic Asian girls who are not FOB. He thinks that 95% of girls are too fat, even when they aren't. I personally think he's crazy because he passes on a ton of otherwise stunning girls. But that's what he likes. He will only approach skinny Asians. I don't find girls that skinny to be 10s, but that is his 10.
But despite those subjective disagreements, there is wide agreement among people as to what counts as a hot girl. That is why strippers and models get paid for their bodies very consistently. Everyone recognizes a beautiful face or body instantly. Girls recognize it too. Don't pretend like you don't know which of your girlfriends are bombshells. And don't pretend like you don't recognize male-model looking dudes. Our brains are wired to recognize beauty, even if there are subjective quirks in taste.
If I show a photo of a 10 to a group of guys, they will unanimously say, "God damn! You slept with her??? No way!" Plenty of guys will even struggle to believe that is possible. It can shatter a guy's reality to know such things are possible.
From a guy's subjective POV there is a huge difference between having sex with a 6 vs a 10. Many guys might simply be too intimidated to fuck a 10 even if she is begging him for it. Even approaching a 10 is hard for most guys.
You might say this is all shallow and none of this matters. Yeah, for a girl none of this matters. But for a guy it matters very much.

Everything in your visual field is base reality.
Go open your pantry and look at a bag of rice. That is base reality.
The mistake you are making is thinking that base reality has look somehow other than what you see. You are seeing base reality at all times. Rice is base reality. Toilet paper is base reality. The smell of shit is base reality. The feel of your mouth is base reality. The sound of traffic is base reality. The emotion of anger is base reality.
You are missing the obvious: reality is 100% direct.

Absolutely worth it. You haven't started to live until you moved out from under your family.
Yes, there will be a period of loneliness. You fix this by going out, socializing, and making new friends.

Practice a lot.
Record yourself. Speak out loud to yourself. Project your voice. Speak from your belly. Do vocal exercises like speaking the alphabet with various intonations. Practice speaking slow vs fast. Exercise your tongue and mouth before speaking. Practice singing. Speak about things you're really passionate about and know well.

It is thinking.
The problem is that the Buddhist types have demonized thinking.
There are high levels of spiritual thinking. This is what produces understanding, along with expansions in your states of consciousness.
The key is to expand your state of consciousness combined with high quality subtle forms of thinking. This produces understanding and insight.

When you contemplate you obviously don't have a silent mind. And that is not a problem.
There is a time for silent mind, and a time for active mind.
Silent mind is appropriate for after years of contemplating, once all your questions are answered. Then you can bask in silence. But trying to silence the mind too early by shutting down questioning and wondering is a mistake. It will just make you a silent jackass.
Silence is not the goal. The goal is total self-understanding. Silence will naturally come once that is achieved. Silence is not understanding, but deep understanding leads to profound silence.

There's little point to doing so because everyone already knows it.
Usually the only physical compliments I give are: "You're cute" or "You're adorable". And I usually only say that so that she knows that I'm hitting on her vs being social/friendly. I use that to avoid getting friendzoned.
And sometimes I say it because I just genuinely find her exceptionally adorable.
There is no need to give a hot girl physical compliments. She already knows she's hot and everyone tells her that all the time.
You would have more success telling her that she's ugly.
"I like your personality, but why are you so ugly?"
"Has anyone ever told you how beautiful I am?"
"Can you handle a guy as beautiful as me?"
"Your eyes are pretty, but not as pretty as mine."
Your logic is silly because you still have to sleep with her for her to stay around. You're not going to predict who stays around, and that really is none of your business. That's up to her, not you. If she wants she'll stay around. The only difference between a ONS and something more is that the ONS is followed by a 2nd.
Stop worrying about girls sticking around. That's a needy frame.

Lol, welcome to learning game.
You will start attracting hot girls when you stop caring about them. The hotter she is the less you gotta care.
Talk to thousands of hot girls, sleep with plenty of them, and then you will stop caring and they will love you.

You set a rule that if she cheats on you, there are no second chances, she loses you forever.
And then you stop caring. You let her free to do whatever she wants, see whoever she wants, doesn't matter to you cause you know your value and you can replace her with another girl and she knows that too.
This is the proper frame for keeping hot girls.

You can tap her on the shoulder, pull her aside a bit, and go direct.
Or you can enagage the whole group in an indirect social way and sprinkle in firtation with your girl. A good line you can use to do that is, "I can already tell... this one's gonna give me trouble" while pointing at your girl. And make strong eye contact with her. This approach requires more skill.
Or just wait till you catch her alone.

Try to observe what understanding is while you are understanding something in your direct experience.
Don't try to articulate it. Just try to observe it happening in you.
It has an slippery, ineffable, mysterious quality to it.
Understand?
- - - -
It would be more accurate to call it overstanding.

If we put thought into the woman's side of things, she would find it needy and never sleep with us.
As I get better with girls I put less and less thought into them. That's what game teaches you. Women punish guys for putting thought into them. It comes off as needy and unattractive. But then once the relationship starts the woman wants the guy to put all this thought into her. But it's too late because the guy who would naturally do that (the nice guy) she never would have slept with in the first place. Hence you end up dating guys who don't care about you.
From a guy's POV, the biggest thing you can do to increase your results with women is to stop thinking about them until after sex. And if you can manage to do that, you will probably not think about them much after sex either.
This is the reality of female attraction. The less you care the more women you get, the hotter women you get. And if you want the absolute hottest women, you have to not care at all about them. It's extremely counter-intuitive. I had to rewire my whole mind for this via brutal trial and error. And what really fucks with a guy's mind is that women will gaslight about this, insisting that, "No! Just be nice and caring. We promise to sleep with you." And they never do.

My best friend from middle school was a serious military nut and joined after high school. He spent 15 years in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he loved it. But he really loved that kind of stuff from a young age. He was very outdoorsy, very into weaponry, very into explosives, very into wrestling, etc. It's like the military was designed for him. He was a very hands-on, kinesthetic person.
Joining the military is a very specific thing. For some guys it gets their rocks off. They love that stage Blue discipline, toughness, machoness, loyalty, sense of clear mission, patriotism, etc. If you're that kind of guy then join. Otherwise stay away.

You need to realize that girls will get attracted to you regardless of what you have materially in your life. Mostly what attracts the girl is how you express your personality. So you work on that and more girls will get attracted.
You can be homeless and jobless and hot girls will still get attracted to you if you express your personality properly. That means mostly all you have to worry about is improving your game. On the other hand, if your game sucks and you are too lazy to improve it, not much will help you.

Wrong. You can be fully conscious of everything. It will be unknowable though, that is correct. Consciousness/Being is prior to symbolic knowing.
Omniscience is possible. You have yet to reach that.
It is not a paradox that symbols and concepts cannot capture reality. That is exactly what you should expect since a subset is always less than its mother set. It would be a paradox if symbols and concepts could capture reality. That would be fucked up.

Become Zedd.
Or get really good at cold approach. I met a 21 year old at the club last month who slept with 700 girls from cold approach. He pulls every day.

It's not technically necessary, but cold approach is not best for the hottest girls because they get approached so often. For them, it helps a lot to offer social value and to stack the logistics in your favor.
For example, I know a guy in Vegas who's slept with over 1000 girls. How did he do it? Not from cold approach. He did by building an elite social circle such that he's able to get free tables at any nightclub in Vegas. He can get a $5000 table for free any night. Then he just pulls girls into the table. Plus he gets invited to all the elite after parties. For example, he is friends with Zedd, so after Zedd performs at the club, Zedd invites 100 of the hottest girls to a private $20,000 hotel suite. He also invites 10 guys. That's where the real game happens. Imagine how easy it is to get laid when you are sitting in a $20,000 suite with a private pool next to Zedd with 100 of the hottest girls and a tray of cocaine.
That's elite level social circle game. That's how you get the hottest girls consistently.
It took this guy 7 years of 4 hours per day building his social circle to reach this elite level.
A lot of getting laid is simply social position and favorable logistics.
But you don't need anything like this to get laid with cute girls. I am just telling you what the pinnacle of game looks like. The pinnacle of game is that your social position is so good all you have to do is say Hi and the girl goes home with you. If you want that, YES, you'll have to work your ass off to build it.
Then again, I pulled an Instagram model thru cold approach dressed as a homeless guy outside the club at 4:30am. It's just not consistent. That Instagram model told me she was at Zedd's afterparty. Fortunately Zedd only has one dick

You should be happy to pull twice a month when you first start learning game.
I told you it's a lot harder than you think.
I am telling you the results of the best guys in the world. They are the Michael Jordans of their sport.

I don't even know if I would call myself intermediate.
There are many variables involved: how often you go out, how long you stay out, how hard you hit it, your health, your logistics situation, time of the year, what city you live in, your skill level, your personality type, the quality of girls you're trying to pull, your ethics, luck, what your goals are, how much momentum you've built up, your emotional state, etc. So there's not going to be any clear number. It will vary a lot from guy to guy.
A bad month is zero.
But also, I don't measure my results based on quantity of girls I sleep with. That's a pretty foolish measure. I would rather sleep with 1 amazing girl than 10 below average ones. But even that is still not the right measure because the skills developed and life experiences gained are more important. I measure my results based on how much it grows me internally. This way if I have a month where I get zero girls, I still see it as part of my overall success and I don't quit. Whereas most guys would just quit.

What's funny is that many normies can be pretty happy with life.
If your ambitions are low it's not hard to be happy. Get a stable job, go to church, have some kids, watch Netflix, play video games, eat junk food, drink beer, watch porn, go to football games, hang out with your dumb likeminded friends, hate-watch your opposing political party. Live unconsciously. Life is pretty good.
Ironically, strong religion and strong family are some of the best predictors of happiness.

The solution here is not some deep metaphysical point. This is a healthy fear which is communicating a valid message to you: "Be extra careful. Don't be foolish or sloppy. Take precautions."
Fear is there to help you avoid needless horrible suffering.

It's all good stuff, but for serious intellectual understanding books are irreplaceable. You will rarely get that same depth in a talk, even my talks.

Emotions are largely unconscious, automatic habits of the body-mind system to help it survive. So long as you are in that body you will have automatic emotions that arise and hijack your consciousness as part of your survival programming. It doesn't matter whether you intellectually understand that all is one.
For the same reason that I get hungry, thirsty, horny, etc.

Love of life is not an luxury. Either you proactively cultivate it or you will become a bitter, jaded zombie.

Tough situation. I've been there. I had to cut contact with my dad entirely for over a decade now. His influence on my life was just too toxic.
You have to make a judgment call as to whether having him in your life is a constant source of toxicity and holds back your evolution. If it is, then you should have a serious talk with him about that, and if he still continues unchanged then you can cut him off. But before you do that, you can consider just limiting your contact with him and see if that helps eliminate most of the toxicity, If so, then just keep a healthy distance with only sporadic contact.
The key question for you should be: Can you live the vast majority of your life and still actualize yourself while in contact with him? If the answer is yes, then try not cutting him off entirely and working through some of it with him. But if the answer no, then have that serious talk and cut him off if he refuse to change.
As a good rule of thumb, let's say 5-10% of your time you can sacrifice to dealing with negative bullshit from friends and family. Consider that charity work. But if it goes over 5-10%, cut that person off.
This is really a matter of learning how to set and enforce boundaries with people. Which is all about getting clear with yourself what you're willing to stand for and what is important to you. Define your boundaries clearly and communicate them explicitly to people. If they keep crossing your reasonable boundaries, that's on them. Don't feel guilty about enforcing your boundaries if they were clearly communicated and then repeatedly crossed.