The way you have defined "you", you are not creating. Because you have defined yourself as a human, and a human certainly did not create the universe.
But if you realize you are not a human but the whole universe, then you'll see that you are creating it by being it.
You can't see how you're creating it because of who you imagine you are. And you imagine you are a human because that is what you needed to do to stay alive as one.

Yes you can.
You are unlimited
Me-ness is a total illusion. Me is imaginary.
You could imagine that you are a walrus. Does that make it true?
Awakening will rob you of the illusion of me-ness. You will realize, "OMFG!!! How could I ever think I was real?!"
It does. But it is not you. When you see a bird outside eating and sleeping, do you think it is you? Why then do you that when "your" body does that?
Why do you take for granted that the experience happening right now is yours? What if it isn't yours? What if it just is, without you?
Is the sky yours? No? Then why is the body yours?
I have as much right to claim "your" body as mine as you have to claim it yours! Because it's all relative. It is whatever you imagine it to be.
You can't understand what I'm saying because of you did, you'd disappear.
Fundamentally you cannot help assuming you are real. This assumption distorts your whole understanding of reality. It doesn't make sense to you how reality could exist without a human self. But the human self is imaginary.

Maybe I would, maybe not. That all depends on what my goals and desires are.
Just because I choose chocolate ice cream over vanilla does mean one is better or worse from an objective point of fact.
Your personal desires are irrelevant when it comes to matters of Truth.
You have to stop thinking about reality personally. It's not personal. Stop trying to get anything beneficial out of existence. Have the courage to be totally selfless.
If you were totally selfless, it would not matter if you were sane or insane, alive or dead, healthy or sick, rich or poor, human or dog.
Truth is selfless.
When you are being selfish, you are being untruthful. You are falling into the illusion that one thing is better or worse than another. In Truth, there is no difference, no better, no worse. Being alive is not better than being dead. Being happy is not better than being in pain. That is Truth. But you don't want to accept it.
The ultimate freedom and joy is the realization that there is no difference between anything. This is what puts an end to struggle and suffering.
So long as you believe that one thing is better than other, you will always suffer and struggle and be unhappy.
Truth is the only salvation.

@jj40 Just simply from a biological perspective, the only reason you're alive right now is because thousands of generations of your ancestors fought with viruses and won, creating your robust immune system.
How can a creature have a robust immune system if it is never put to the test? And how can it be put to the test unless some people die?
Do you want your children to be sickly weaklings? Then fight that virus!
A thing cannot grow strong unless it encounters resistance.
But see, if you were weak and sickly, you would complain, "Why God? Why did you make me so weak." And yet when God tries to make you strong by infecting you with a virus, you complain too. You complain in every case. That's the game you're playing.
The virus is nicely showing the weaknesses of society as it is currently organized. The weakness of our political systems. So that your grandchildren could live in a stronger society with robust healthcare and economic systems. The healthcare and economic systems are not going to fix themselves without external pressure. Society evolves as a response to survival challenges. So here we are. Evolution is happening every day, through you! Your struggles are what makes evolution work. Which creates all of life.

Of course that's a huge factor.
Psychedelics have the power to wake people up and melt down all socially constructed belief systems. As a result they are extremely dangerous and threatening to those in positions of power and authority. So they must be locked down and tightly controlled to maintain the illusion of society.
If the US government did not crack down on the hippie psychedelic revolution of the 60's and early 70's, the people in power could not stay in power any longer. Which is why psychedelics are commonly demonized in all cultures. Christians demonized psychedelics and witchcraft because it was a threat to the authority of the corrupt church.
Yogis do this too. If 5-MeO-DMT was widely available, yogis like Sadhguru would be out of business.

Probably long and intense concentration practices.
Maybe Kriya yoga.

Just sit and do nothing or concentrate on awareness itself.
Total surrender to the present moment is very effective for me.

By seeking feeling better, you doom yourself to a life of suffering and misery.
UNDERSTANDING is the most important thing! Understanding solves every problem.
The reason you don't feel good is because you don't understand enough.
You are confusing two different things.
Of course harsh discipline is still Love in the absolute sense. I just said here that it's not how I choose to live my life.
The more conscious you become the more effortless and loving you'll want to live your life. For example, you'll have less desire to murder people. That doesn't mean murder isn't Love in the absolute sense. But if I'm choosing how to live my life, and I'm conscious about it, I will choose not to murder people. This doesn't change the fact that murder is still Love. But not-murdering is more in alignment with higher levels of consciousness. So if I see someone murdering another, I will totally understand it as Love. But that doesn't mean I will engage in the murder myself, or support it politically. Because I can still have a desire for a society where murder isn't common. That is how a higher consciousness being chooses to express its Love.
The more conscious you become, the more "godly" you will want to act. The more conscious I become, the less desire I have to force myself to do stuff. Effortlessness is a higher quality of God, even though all qualities are qualities of God.

If you aware of it, then obviously it exists then. But as soon as you're not aware of it, it doesn't exist.
You have no asshole until you think you do.
Your asshole appears precisely as it is needed.
No! You imagine that.
And there is no US, only YOU!

Awakening is such a radical thing that you simply cannot treat it like any other domain of human knowledge. It is not knowledge.
Imagine becoming God, becoming conscious of how time, space, Earth, the body, life, death, and mathematics was invented. Imagine you become conscious of how you designed Hitler. That's what we're talking about. It is not a human function at all. Your life as a human comes to an end.
It comes from pure consciousness. Where does the fact that you exist come from?

Yes, they can help a lot.
But they will not automagically still your mind. That requires years of training.
But a psychedelic will definitely put you into a effortless yet temporary state of samadhi. This is the whole point of psychedelics. They make samadhi accessible to anyone within 10 to 20 mins. Zero training required.
Will you keep the samadhi? No. It will wear off.

Yes
No, for fuck's sake man, there is nothing outside the present moment. This bubble of the room you're in is ALL THERE IS.
It's stupidly simple. Yet you keep trying to imagine some hidden mechanism. God is not anything but the room you are in.

No, not correct.
You're imagining people, self, other, and the other's mind.
There is only you looking at the coffee table and imagining the other looking at it. In this case, the coffee table still only has one side.
If you ask the other person to describe another side of the coffee table, you will hear some words, but the coffee table will still only have one side.
To be even more precisely, there is not even a "you" looking at the side of a coffee table. There is only the side of the coffee table without a "you" who is "looking". "You" and "looking" are already an illusions of the ego.
But it DOES exist for you because you're imagining viruses, atoms, molecules, immune systems, etc.
Imagination is extremely complex. It's as complex as reality itself. You don't have to literally see a virus for it to affect you because it affects you in many ways besides through vision.
There is nothing behind the scene. Ask yourself why a behind the scene is necessary? It's totally extraneous. Everything that exists is PRECISELY what it appears.

I am your own consciousness.
Yes, you will imagine it to be so, and so it will appear to you.
That's what "stab you in the eye" means. It means you're imagining an other who is getting stabbed by an imaginary you.
Obviously you're imagining my body and my pain.
What's less obvious is that you are also imagining your body. If you pay close attention you can notice that right now you are imagining your heart. You have no heart until we cut your chest open, at which point you will imagine a heart there, and it will appear. << This is what we call reality.
And thus the illusion of reality is created. You imagine everything at precisely the moment it is needed to render the illusion. A video game engine does not render anything other than those pixels necessary to create the current frame.
Why would God waste its time creating things it cannot see?? In fact, the problem runs even deeper: it is impossible for God to do that because God is omniscient. So God cannot hide from its own awareness. Anything God creates must be fully accessible to it at all times. If a coffee table had a backside, God would have to be aware of it. So if God wants to see a coffee table from one angle, it must create only that face of the coffee table and nothing else.
You got it

You're not going to acheive emotional mastery without some degree of awakening.
Emotional mastery is probably the hardest thing to achieve.

Yes.
It usually takes 100s of hours of such awareness for those qualities to start to appear.
The monkey mind disturbs the awareness with agitation and craving. Like rain drops on a still pond.
Pacifying the monkey mind usually takes 100s or even 1000s of hours of meditation or other kinds of inner work.
Pacifying the monkey mind is actually harder than Awakening itself.

It's very simple. The only thing that exists in the universe is what's in your experience this second. The end.
You have absolute access to the whole of Creation at all times. But the trick is, the whole of Creation is nothing other than what you see now. No object has a backside. If you can't see it, it does not exist. Very similar to how a video game is rendered. There is nothing more but the rendered POV.
That means you image the moon, the stars, the Earth, trees, clouds, your parents, your first day at school, your car, your pet dog who died, that time you went to the dentist, your last meal, that time you had sex, etc. You are imagining all those things right now in order to create the illusion of reality. Because that's all you are: infinite consciousness.

These are still stories and games.
Your psychedelic journey has only begun. Don't quit so soon.
You do not yet understand God or Awakening. So don't make any firm decisions about not doing stuff.
You have only dipped your toe in the ocean. The terror of it will go away. It took me 1 year to overcome the terror of my first big 5-MeO-DMT breakthrough and to go back for seconds. It was all games and fear.
These days when I trip there is no more terror. Only awe, magic, and Love. But it took close to 100 trips to reach this point. I promise you it's worth it. Just go slowly.

Like I said, the mind cannot fathom Awakening so it tries to fit it into some category it knows, like solipsism.
Awakening is not solipsism, but it's also true that you/God is the only thing that exists. So to you that sounds like solipsism and you can't tell the difference.
To create that distinction between the absolute and the relative is already a mistake. The relative isn't real. Only the absolute.
Yeah, if you want to qualify as "relative", then we can say that you are not alone. But this is precisely the illusion which we're trying to transcend.
It's sort of like if you said, "Yeah, I understand that Santa Claus isn't real in the absolute sense. But in the relative world he's real." Okay, but what we're interested in is the absolute sense here, not the relative world of illusions. As an illusion, sure, everyone you know seems "real".
No, you're not correct.
You imagine that there is a person who imagines you. But actually there is only you imagining others imagining you.
When you talk to someone you imagine, you are imagining that person's body too, not just their mind.
To put frame it another way, your imagination is so powerful it IS reality! Right now you're still under the dualistic illusion that there is a difference between imagination and reality. As if imagination is somehow inferior or bad. But the difference between reality and imagination is itself something you imagine! This is what allows you/God to create reality out of thin air. Ta-da!
Where did all the people you know come from? They were NOT born from biological parents. They were imagined by your mind! If you stop imagining them, they will cease to exist.
What makes Awakening very different than classical solipsism is the God part. Classical solipsism has no recognition of self as God. Once you reach God-consciousness, the solipsism stuff becomes pretty irrelevant because you are so amazed at yourself as God.

That's easy. What's changing is Consciousness. Consciousness is that which imagines the present into its current shape.
Consciousness is like a gaseous cloud that has infinite shape-shifting ability. This shape-shifting "cloud" is the very substance of everything. Yet it has no inherent substance of its own. It is literally pure imagination made manifest as brick walls, cars, trees, bodies, etc.
Imagine a cloud in the sky which can change its shape to become a brick wall, a car, a tree, a body, a memory of your parents, etc. That's what the room you're current sitting in is. It's just hard for you to notice it because the room feels very concrete and rock solid. The cloud is like frozen for you right now. So you can't see it's cloud-like fluid nature. Because it is a fluid acting as a solid. The solidity is just an act which can easily be dissolved with psychedelics or some other practices.
Since there is always only the present moment, in this moment you can either be in a state of God consciousness or not. If you are in a state of God consciousness, that's it. It doesn't matter how long it lasts. It could last 1 minute or a lifetime. The difference isn't important from the absolute POV -- since in fact all states are Absolute. But if you fall out of God consciousness back into a state of sleep and delusion, it will matter to you in the relative human sense in that you will have a memory of how good God consciousness feels and you will want to return to it but may not be able to, thus creating suffering.
That's a tricky question to answer. Yes, there is, but then also there are even fuller ones.
I assume at some point one becomes so conscious Earthly material reality would just disappear forever (AKA physical death). I can only speak to God realization while still remaining within Earthly reality because that's where I wish to remain for now and I could not communicate with you otherwise.
That's also a tricky question to answer. I don't have a full solution to that yet. Still working on it.
But the assumption that psyches don't create permanent changes is false. Maybe you can't fully live from that peak, but they still create changes in you which will last for a lifetime. It's just a question of how much change are you looking for? If you want to be in peak God consciousness 24/7, I'm not sure yet if that's possible. Seems doubtful. Enlightened masters are not always peaking.
But you should be able to inch closer and closer.

When all is Consciousness, how else could it be?
It's far more radical than that. Since all difference is absolutely relative, there is no difference whatsoever between start and end, therefore it never started. You are imagining right now that it started at some point, and thereby you create the illusion of it having started. This illusion of a start is indistinguishable from reality, so it seems as though it started. But it never did. Everything always starts and ends right now! Your parents start and end right now! They were never real! They didn't give birth to you. You are concocting that story on the fly RIGHT NOW for the first time! This is its start and its end.
It's absolutely crucial to become conscious that there is no difference between start and end within consciousness. Oneness cannot have a beginning or an end.
There was never just void. That void is something you imagine existed in the past to explain the present. But past is something you're imagining right now for the very first time! Even the idea that you've imagined the past before is wrong, because that assumes a past! You've never imagined the past before. You are imagining right now for the first time that you've imagined the past in the past many times before, thereby creating "memory". Memory is nothing but imagination in the present. Everything you think you remember is actually you imagining for the first time in the present without realizing that you're doing so. Ta-da!
It sure is a mindfuck, eh?
This is all shallow stuff. There is a much deeper level. Do not stop at no-self.
You are still not conscious that you are God.

@Endangered-EGO What you are missing is the obvious: that you are God. And also what God is.
These are deeper, more advanced kinds of awakening which require a lot of purification and profound levels of contemplation and questioning. And ultimately a state change is required. You cannot access God from your current state of consciousness.
You are on the right track, you just have to go much deeper.
If you did some 20 to 50 psychedelic trips, that would start to clear up the God question. Just start  Keep going.
Meditation is not good enough. You need to upgrade your neurotransmitters.

It is an infinite dial, but there are points on the dial where God awakens to itself as God.
God realization is a distinct event. Either it is, or is not occuring. This point delineates awakeness vs asleepness. But even so, there are many degrees to God's self-awareness. Hence many levels of awakeness.
Almost no one has reached the highest levels. Not even your favorite enlightened teachers. I consider most of them asleep.

No!
There is only your mind.
But your mind is identical to the whole world and other people.
You imagine the entire universe because you are God pretending to be human. You are one. There cannot be anything outside of you.
All outsides are inside your mind.

When you are being aware that you are human, you are actually misunderstanding what you are. You are imagining that you are human, in the same way that you could imagine that you are a kangaroo. But that doesn't make you a kangaroo. Only in your mind.
In fact, you are God. But you are too busy imagining you are human to notice this. The human obscures the God like clouds the sun.