Joseph Campbell never experienced a truly psychotic state of consciousness.
It is not the the same as a mystical enlightenment.
It's a moot point to say that the waters are the same because it's all Consciousness. But Consciousness can take some radical states.
You swim in the same waters as a kangaroo and a glass of orange juice. But that will not console you if you find yourself turned into a glass of orange juice.

What you see is what exists.

Which is why I told you it will take YEARS of genuine, truthful, introspection work to break free.
By "feeling" what I'm really talking about is CONSCIOUSNESS.
Consciousness = Truth
Unconsciousness = Falsehood
Do not confuse introspection with emotional reactivity.

Yes, PUA can become very toxic if done by a selfish and low-consciousness guy.
But also don't forget, most men manipulate women for sex, PUA or not. It's not like non-PUAs are non-manipulative. Lol
Manipulating women for sex is the oldest sport in the world.

Look man, Covid has thrown everyone for a loop. Now is not the time to start pickup. Work on other aspects of your development and you can try cold approaching in a year once things ease up.
I live in Las Vegas and the entire nightlife industry has been nuked from orbit for what looks like 2 years. Yeah, it sucks.
Be happy you ain't being drafted to fight in WWIII as your grandpappy was. The world doesn't revolve around your dick.

Obviously fear exists. The point is that all fear is false or delusional in the absolute sense because no one outcome is better than another.
Fear comes from the mind's bias for one thing over another, imagining differences which are ultimately meaningless.

Dude, you cannot build attraction via text. It will NEVER work.
Grow some balls and build attraction in-person. That's the only way. You're using texting to attract her because you're a weasel. You want to weasel your way into her pants, and she smells your weakness from a hundred miles away.
Text should only be used to set up date logistics and keeping leads warm.
Once she said No, stop texting her. NEVER try to logically convince a woman to sleep with you. It reeks of desperation, low value, and cluelessness. A woman will NEVER sleep with you from logical convincing.
She will never, ever sleep with you now. So move on to the next girl and do it right next time.
Also, stop giving a fuck about rejection. Invest ZERO into any girl until she sleeps with you. Do not even spend 15 minutes thinking about her. ZERO INVESTMENT.
You're gonna have to learn that the hard way.

By going out so much that you are so busy talking to other girls that you don't have time to think about it and no one lead matters. And also by training yourself never to invest before sex.
As soon as you think, "This lead is special" you screwed up.
Note: this is only during the early phase of dating. Once she falls in love with you, then you invest back and treat her nice.

Both of these are serious books which you don't seem suited for right now.
When you are dealing with a serious subject matter like understanding reality, the question of "How can this immediately benefit me?" is not suitable.
What you're interested in is more along the lines of Tony Robbins self-help.
Wilber's work is for serious intellectuals.

Make a check-list of what you want, then roll up your sleeves and get to work.
All that material shit is straight-forward to get. There's no mystery to it.
If you sleep with 20 girls, you'll find at least a few who are what you want.
You gotta get serious about building out a life. Stop dabbling and being meek about it. Go fucking do it.

Yes, of course. Which is why masterful sages sit in silence and don't say anything at all. The only reason they talk is because you cannot understand silence.
All words you utter are false.
All opinions you hold are nonsense.
Reality just is.
The ultimate aim is no-mind.
Sadhguru once said that some scientists once hooked him up to a brainwave machine to measure his meditation brainwaves. The machine showed nothing. He is clinically brain dead. When he sits, it's literally no-mind.
If you could stop your mind, your journey would be over. You would have arrived in paradise.

@Nora You're not going to resolve the mind/body problem through language, reasoning, or logic from inside the materialist reductionist scientific paradigm.
You can only resolve it by having a direct consciousness of the fact that all of reality is infinite consciousness.
There is no body, there is no mind, and there is no world. All of those are thoughts. You have to work to become mindful of how this is so.
It's not a matter of argument. It's a matter of awareness of what's actually happening when you say, "This is my body. This is my mind." When you say or think these things, you're not aware yet that these are just noises arise from nothingness.

Most rich people ARE more competent, conscious, and productive than most poor people. This is especially true if they have self-made wealth.
But that only goes so far. As 99% of all people in general, rich people are terrible at questioning the self-serving nature of their own worldview because one's worldview is built from the ground up to serve one's survival.
Rich people are not masters of their minds or their psychology. Obviously. Since they spend most of their time climbing the ladder of success, which has nothing to do with self-awareness or moral development.
What poor people do not understand is that being rich does not solve the issue of survival whatsoever. Not at all. It only transforms survival into a more complex and abstract domain.
You will have exactly the same number of problems when you're rich as you did when you were poor. They will just be a different set of problems. This is hard for most poor people to understand since they like to blame their problems on material conditions without realizing that problems are a deep core function of the ego-mind, not material conditions.

Zen no-mind does NOT mean no thinking.
This is a common newbie misunderstanding.

This is not a matter of Red Pill theory.
You're just acting needy.
Keep the needy part of your mind shut when you are with this girl. You should be focused on flirting, sharing fun stories, and seduction.
Of course she did. Because you demonstrated that you are a weak, wounded guy who wants to use her as your emotional tampon.
A girl wants an emotionally strong guy who she can use as her emotional tampon. You flipped the roles so she lost attraction.
It's all about timing.
You can be emotionally vulnerable and serious with a girl after she is your girlfriend. Which means you must first have sex with her a dozen times. THEN you can cry together and it will be no problem. But not on the first date, for fuck's sake.
First rule of dating: Don't say anything negative or serious on the first date. No whining, no complaining, no blaming, no bitching, no crying, no victim stories, no emotional outbursts, no therapy sessions, no weirdness, no secret confessionals, no revealing skeletons from your closest. Just be friendly, fun, and chill. If you have to fake it till you make it, do that.

You fucked up real bad here, boy.
What are you thinking being brutally honest on a date? It reeks of neediness and low-value.
The first month of dating should be all fun and games. No serious talk! No serious talk until you sleep with her at least half a dozen times.
Stop using your dates as therapy.
LOL
Because you set the BOYFRIEND FRAME. Now she will withhold pussy from you for days and weeks. If you were fun and playful she would have had sex with you and everything would have been great. But you had to go and act needy and serious with her.
You have to treat sex like it means nothing. Like it's as common as chewing gum to you. When you make it a big deal, so will she.
You'll be lucky if she ever sleeps with you at all. A quality girl would never call you back after that.
Learn proper dating theory.
And don't listen to her stupid self-biased advice.
You fell into every newb trap in the dating book.
WTF is this gay needy nonsense???
No! No! No!
Keep it light and playful.
P.S. If you haven't had sex with her, she is certainly not your gf.

You do realize, right, that all numbers is completely relative? There is no difference between 1 and 2.
I dare you to find 1 or 2 in the objective world.
Anything you point to and call 1 will also be greater than one. Anything you point to and call greater than 1 will also be 1.
Because: one = many
But you weren't taught this lesson in math class.

@X_X Too much theory, philosophy, belief, and BS.
You have no idea what true meaninglessness is. You have some constructed worldview that says one thing, yet the way you live life is completely the opposite of that. If nothing has meaning then why you are you unhappy? You see? You're living in a BS fantasy world of your own construction.
To realize that reality is meaningless is a profound, life-transforming epiphany that will take you decades of work to achieve. You haven't actually achieved it. You've merely created a fake front. Which is why you suffer from it.
The solution is to stop lying to yourself and to ground yourself in direct experience and your current level of development. Your current level is one in which you operate based on good/bad and meaning. All your fear and suffering coming from the latent meanings you assign to things.
Drop you dumb philosophy, open your mind, and start following your heart.
True meaninglessness is not what you think it is. It's Love.
You're right, the universe doesn't need your help. But it is your playground and an expression of your Love, or lack thereof.
You are not here to fix the universe. You are here to discover Love.
Helping people is not done out of some dumb notion of objective right or wrong. It's done out of Love.
The universe is meaningless so that you have the freedom of choice to imbue it with your own personal meaning and style of love.
God is not telling you what to do precisely so that you can decide what is worth doing. And if you decide that the only thing worth doing is pissing your life away, then that's what you've decided.

@Don Wei Be mindful of doing work just because some other human told you to. This is a waste of your life and potential.
Then again, if you don't have a clear picture of what you want, then following that human might be better than doing nothing.
Become crystal clear about what you want to create in life and then get to work on it. << this is how you feel empowered and worthwhile in life.
Really contemplate whether the stuff you're doing in university, which is eating up all of your time and attention, is in any way related to what you really want to create in your life. Or are you just being a mindless sheep, following the flock into wage slavery?

In your example, you can certainly train yourself to let go of anxiety and replace with positive vision and confidence. That's a very important technique to learn.
Telling yourself that you cannot change silly anxiety like that is a victim mindset.

There is an entire therapy method called Cognitive Behavior Therapy which dealing with stuff like anxiety through thinking.
But did not say thinking is the only or the best way. There are many techniques.
You frame it as mind-games, but the truth is your anxiety is a mind-game to begin with.
Taking responsibility for how you unwillingly cause your emotional reactions is a huge part of our work here.

Dude, you have no clue what Sadhguru has accomplished in the name of consciousness.
You are parroting platitudes.
If anyone here accomplished even 10% of what Sadhguru has, you would be treated as a god on your deathbed. And rightly so. What he has done for the advancement of mankind is incredible.
You dismiss it only because you are clueless.
If you yourself are not gonna be a saint in this lifetime, as least have the decency to recognize a saint when one appears before you.

@SamC When you want truth and existential understanding more than any other thing.
It is okay to want other things, but they should take second place.
You are very young. It is normal and healthy for you to spend the next 5 or 10 years working on survival aspects of your life. Handle your survival needs so well that they stop bothering you.

Any psychedelic can mindfuck you. But mushrooms are especially twisted. At high doses of mushrooms you will hallucinate like a motherfucker and get lost down infinite rabbit holes of your mind. A descent into madness. This is not necessarily a good thing for our work. Our work seeks clarity, not insane rabbit holes. An insane rabbit hole can still come with lots of valid insight, but its so chaotic and twisted that you're not going to be able to make much use of it, and it will traumatize you in the process.
What we seek are higher states of clarity, not descents into madness.

Even the most toxic ideology like Nazism will have grains of truth to it. That's precisely how the devil uses it to lure you in.
Delusion is never 100% falsehood. It's falsehood mixed with just enough truth to make the two indistinguishable in the minds of the selfish and the ignorant.