You are not already enlightened. This is the dumbest thing spiritual people say.
Awakening is a specific state of consciousness. If you are not in this state, you are simply not awake and you are light years from awakening.
That being said, awakening is nowhere else but HERE and NOW.

Imagine for a moment that the entire universe is one single Infinite Mind. But this mind suffers from split personality disorder. This mind fractured itself into a trillion sub-minds which each imagine they are independent. But if ever this Infinite Mind awakens to itself, it will realize that all the "other" minds were always just fractures of itself. And then the Mind becomes ONE. The split personality disorder is healed.
Notice how you treat your body as a single whole unit. You don't think of your arm, your leg, your dick, and your head as all being different "others". You clearly see that they are all ONE unified whole. But someone who is fractured and thinks that the arm, leg, dick, and head are all separate things would say, "But that's solipsism to think that you are one unified body!" It's solipsism from his fractured perspective. But actually it's just holism from the higher, unified perspective.
Now extend that logic to the entire universe.

Good attempt.
I suggest you try snorting it. That will produce a solid 30-45 min trip. Yeah, vaping will not give you enough time to understand and contemplate, which is key.
Your imagination is infinitely deep. There is nothing outside of imagination. It creates all of physical reality. Which you will discover in deeper trips.
Once the mind starts to go in some direction, like thinking of snakes, in high states of consciousness that will tend to become instantly manifested. If you do a large dose you might even see your arms, legs, and toes turn into actual living snakes.
In one of my early mushroom trips my mind started to notice that my room looks and feels a bit like ancient India, and as I stared at it more and more I went into such a deep samadhi trance that literally my room was transformed into a full-on ancient Indian palace.
Such is the creative power of Infinite Mind. It can dream up anything without limits. The only limit is your degree of consciousness and selfishness.
It's also useful to use longer acting psychedelics like LSD for really deep long contemplation sessions. Those help a lot to make sense of how consciousness works. You can get 4 to 5 solid hours of contemplation on LSD.

@tashawoodfall Exhaust stage Orange by diving deep into it by pursuing material success.
Work on improving your material lifestyle until you realize that it will not make you fulfilled. Then you'll be ready for Green.
In other words, Tony Robbins style success-oriented self-help is what you need. Not enlightenment or spirituality.

Values and Spiral alignment is hugely important.
But that doesn't mean your partner has to be doing a specific thing like some precise spiritual practice.
But if you are at stage Yellow and your partner is at stage Blue, that will never work.
You should probably be looking for a stage Green partner at least if you follow my work. You can work with Green.
Ideally you'd find someone at your level or one level above you.

I haven't done DMT yet in large doses, only small doses.
I have been busy exploring and integrating other molecules.
No doubt DMT is awesome. But 5-MeO-DMT is awesomest
One of my biggest gripes about DMT is that I don't like vaping things. The trip is too short and it's bad for your lungs. So I was looking for good methods of taking it rectally or orally, but that presents complications. I have yet to perfect my DMT method.
Also, once you discover the power and perfection of 5-MeO-DMT, you will be so happy you will want nothing else. It is literally perfection. I have to force myself to explore lesser molecules.

Breaking this illusion is the whole aim of enlightenment/awakening/liberation.
Your initial glimpses of awakening will not result in a permanent break of this illusion. It takes lots of really deep awakening to break it.

By being aware of awareness you are attempting to short-circuit the duality between subject and object to ultimately realize that the two are actually one.
Awareness is already aware of itself.
Become awareness!
Become ONE!
That's what "be aware of awareness" means.
When you look at a chair, you are not looking at a chair, the chair is looking at itself. The awareness is not coming from the human body, the awareness is baked into every object at all times.
You job here is to realize that the chair is seeing itself.
This is otherwise known as Being.
What you think of as seeing is actually Being. Being means that every thing is "seeing" itself.
Watch my video: What Is Perception?
Ego is usurping Being to create dualistic "seeing".
Stop assuming that you are seeing the chair. There is no fucking you! Just the chair. The whole room exists without you.

I've refined the recipe and now I add lemon juice to the soup in the last 5-10 mins. I also don't add olive oil any more. I add butter to the serving bowl. This makes the pot easier to clean with no clingly oil. Butter tastes WAY better than olive oil. I also add frozen peas for more protein.

It's not an idea.
It's what is.
Stop right there.
The but is imaginary.
But that's not what is the case.
The case is that you open your eyes and the boogey man appears.
Everything is EXACTLY as it appears! That "EXACTLY" is highly important. I am not syaing that closing your eyes will allow you to escape suffering or manipulate reality in favorable ways that benefit your survival. That is not the case and not what actually appears.
Sure, in which case you will experience it as a feeling in your body. There won't be an asteroid, there will be pain, burning, suffering, etc.
You don't perceive either.
No
Eyes are imaginary.
In a video game Mario's eyes are NOT drawing the world.
It's not just visual. Direct experience is every possible experience you have.
Direct experience is NOT human interpretation. It's the end of humanness and all filters.
You can make whatever diatinctions you want, but they are all imaginary.

The body moves on its own all the time. The ego just gets in the way and takes ownership. As the 5-MeO knocks out the ego, you will see the whole universe moves with a perfect intelligence which is prior to the ego's grasping and desires.

You will not think your way out of it.
Psychedelics or hardcore spiritual practice.

When I first realized that God was real, the realization generated a burst of energy so powerful in my heart that it shot out through my fingertips like force lightning and physically scared the skin on my fingertips.
My fingerprints still have tiny hairline scars in them 3 years after.
You've no idea how serious God-realization can get.
Most so-called enlightened people have hardly a clue what God is. They are as ignorant as children.

See my video: What Is Perception? where this is explained.
It was pure Consciousness become conscious of itself.
Good. Here you're asking, "What is Consciousness itself?" to which the answer is Nothing.
But a verbal or logical answer will never be right here. You must Awaken to what Consciousness is. Which you did! But you're still not fully clear about what it is because it's a slippery beast. Pure consciousness cannot be qualified because it is totally empty and without attributes because it is pure Infinity.
It will take you more trips to probe deeper into the nature of pure Consciousness.
Yes, pure Consciousness being conscious of itself.
Next time you trip, contemplate, "What is Consciousness?" until you understand.
Your state of consciousness is lacking. You are in a contracted state of consciousness right now. The psychedelic changes that.
Yes, your state of consciousness changed. You entered samadhi. To do this "sober" requires extremely steady concentration.
As Patanjali says, yoga is the cessation of the wandering of the mind. If the mind wanders, it creates disturbances in consciousness which draw attention away from pure Consciousness itself. A psychedelic puts you into instant yoga/union.

Totally natural. We address this in the course, of course
Humanity may not be ready, but it sounds like you are

Exactly.
You are not ready.
Well, reality is a projection. So machine elves are no less real than Martin Ball.
At the bottom-most level, nothing is real because it's all a projection. But this is NOT the level that most of us are in contact with or live from or even care to know.
But also consider, just because something is a projection doesn't make it inferior or less than. Projections are just as valid as anything else.
Yeah... you project machine elves and Martin Ball. So what? Life goes on.
Once you realize that everything is a projection, you're sort of left right where you began.

@Mert If you get the bottom-most layer of reality you will realize that there is only you, imagining everything and everyone else.
So "objective reality" or "consensus reality" is just a very deep layer of your own hallucination. You need to imagine this layer in order to construct "reality" and trick yourself into thinking there is a world and other people.
In other words, this is how God creates "reality": by hallucinating others and imagining that those others have perceptions and that they can agree or disagree with yours.
It's ALL a fucking illusion. "Objective" here simply means that you hallucinate others who agree with you.
You say you want the Truth, but you can't handle the Truth. You want other to be real.

No, you are conflating various levels of imagination there.
Ultimately, at rock bottom, everything is imaginary. But there are levels of imagination such that imagining a dragon is not the same as the imaginary chair you are sitting on.
Imagination is a very powerful thing. It is creation itself. So don't think of something imaginary as somehow less-than real. It is as real as all real things. Real = imaginary.
But if you go to the deepest levels of consciousness you will become so conscious that you will look at your own two hands and realize you are imagining them.

Right. Of course. You realized that the self/other distinction is imaginary.
The more conscious you become the more all dualities will melt into one Absolute Unity.
If you become infinitely conscious you will turn into a perfect formless singularity of Infinite Love. The material world will disappear and you will just become one infinite conscious forever. You will become one with every physical object and every being that could ever exist. This is Absolute Love. Your Love becomes so total that you literally, physical unite with all material forms as pure infinite potential.
Imagine rewinding the Big Bang until our material universe collapsed into the single point which existed before the Big Bang. That's Absolute Unity/Love. That would be Total Awakening. You'd be so awake you'd collapse the entire Universe. You would undo the Big Bang

Dating is how you find the real one.
Date with a purpose.

@Space I understand what you mean but for me that stuff is secondary. My trips are far more cerebral than bodily, although I do sometimes vibrate and work out kinks in the body. But all that is just to get the body out of the way to go deeper with insight and understanding.
People are different so they trip differently. Martin makes a big deal out of the energetic yoga stuff but that is his style/bias. I don't trip that way at all. I go into silent contemplation.

Fine. Go do it.
Stop thinking of these as unhealthy or egoic things. Frame it as: "I'm working of my career/biz, on having a house, on being financially independent, on building skills, on attracting mates, on dating, on sexuality, on relationships, or physical fitness, on becoming a stronger person, etc.
You can pursue these things in a healthy way. Distinguish between toxic Orange and healthy Orange.
You are so young you can hit Orange hard for the next 5-10 years. It also doesn't mean to abandon your metaphysical/spiritual interests during that time. You can still read, meditate, contemplate, do some psychedelics, etc.

@zeroISinfinity Ever heard of Diogenes the Greek Cynic? They called him a cynic because he slept with dogs outside rather than humans.

It doesn't work without crazy concentration which alters your state of consciousness.
The key is the crazy concentration, not the question. Without concentration the question is worthless.

While I love the idea of being the first and greatest, I have read reports of a Western guy who attained mahasamadhi from LSD. He was actually meditating in a cave, did a bunch of LSD, and simply left his body for good.
A guru in India later verified that the dude left his body and didn't simply die by suicide or overdose.
If you believe the stories that is.
Some interesting food for thought.
I am certainly nowhere near that level of consciousness without 5-MeO-DMT.
I also wouldn't call what I experienced as a rainbow body. I would call it becoming an infinite singularity of love forever. It is totally formless consciousness. Like becoming pure potential with no actualization.