There's a bit of a hypocrisy about sex in the woman's mind. She likes it. She will often have it frequently will random dudes. But then she will deny having done so because she doesn't want to appear easy or slutty.
From the guy's perspective it's frustrating because the more a guy tries to be a nice guy, the less his chances of sleeping with the girl. She often sleeps with the fun asshole instead because he makes her feel spontaneous. Girls rarely reward nice guys. So we are incentivized to be jerks.
The more a guy cares about a girl, the less likely she is to sleep with him. If a guy is totally detached about a girl, the higher his odds of sleeping with her. That's the paradox of attraction.
From the guy's POV, total detachment until sex is necessary for success. You cannot invest in her at all until sex. And the guys who are best at that are total asshole players. So they get laid the most. It requires an almost sociopathic level of detachment. So ironically, the hottest girls reward sociopaths the most. And of course that makes perfect sense from the POV of survival. The more selfish the better, until it comes back to bite you in the ass. The problem with dating a sociopath is that he also doesn't give a damn about you.

Pickup is a lot like Zen. The harder your try to act how you should, the less you will succeed.
It's very counter-intuitive.
Ultimately all that good pickup is teaching you is:
1) Go talk to lots of girls!
2) Be authentic, don't be a dancing monkey, and be willing to get rejected for who you are. This will look different for each guy because authenticity is relative.
3) Don't be socially awkward or creepy.
But to really learn these lessons you gotta go out a lot and fail a lot. You will try to impress girls a 1000 different creepy ways until you learn it.
95% of your results from pickup simply come from you going out every night and approaching. The theory only accounts for the other 5%. So don't waste too much time worrying about the theory. You learn by going out and talking to females. The theory will tend to put you inside your head, doubting yourself.
The reason you've been having success is simply because you've been going out. If you go out long enough, sex will randomly fall on your lap. Some nights you will get laid for no good reason whatsoever, simply because you happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Spinoza was a European philosopher in the 17th century who was one of the first of his time (in his culture) to propose a pantheistic understanding of God or Nature. His magnum opus, Ethics, directly challenged fundamentalist, traditional Judeo-Christian religion (and all religion in general) and tenets of God being an anthropomorphic being with characteristics of man. 
His understanding of God or Nature was that of an all-encompassing, eternal, infinite substance. He denied humans and even God as having free will, as everything is dictated by causes. 
Is anyone familiar with his work? If so, what are your thoughts on this great philosopher? It is my opinion that he had a certain degree of spiritual enlightenment.

Careful... this is incorrect.
Thoughts are distinct from feelings. You can have a thought without a feeling and a feeling without a thought.
Thought is also possible without language. Thought can be in the form of images.
You are on the right track, but this stuff is more nuanced than you think.
Of course language is used to divide up reality into categories, all categories are dualities, and then those categories are reified or made "objective" through the creation of these categories, and then language is used to construct meaning. And all of this is ultimately imaginary.

Mating is an arms race.
Both sides manipulate to get the most they can while trying to minimize their survival risk.
There's nothing personal about it. It's just unconscious selfishness.

There's nothing honest about that. Plenty of people care.
Counselors are supposed to be trained to handle situations like that. This is what basic life coach training is for.
Being gay is a great thing and there's nothing depressing about it. A good counselor would help her client reframe the situation and see it in a loving and truthful manner.
If a client hates himself, that's not honest or truthful, that's falsehood and delusion. The coach's job is to show him the error of his thinking.
Sounds like your counselor friend needs better training and a deeper understanding of consciousness work.
Many counselors and coaches deeply care about their clients.
How you reply to such a thing is you guide the client's mind out of his delusional thinking by getting him to become more conscious of how his mind is creating this negative meaning. It's not about saying something positive to cheer him up. It's about helping him discover the Truth! -- which is that all is Love.
Self-hatred is a misuse of the mind.

@Nadosa Start practicing mindfulness with labeling. That is the surest way to deconstruct thoughts.

Not all thoughts are automatically bad. There is a sort of higher intelligence at work in you, guiding the mind. For example, you might get the thought, "I should really start to eat healthier." And that can be a message from your "higher self" which would be wise to listen to.
Thoughts may not be absolutely true, but they can be relatively true, which is important from a pragmatic perspective. You need healthy thoughts to set your life straight.
Only at the very advanced stages of consciousness can you start to transcend thoughts altogether. And even then, you'll still return to them for pragmatic reasons.

No, actually you don't control them AT ALL.
Notice that you actually have ZERO control over your thoughts.
Notice that you have no idea what thought will come in the next 3 seconds. Let alone any further out than that.
BIG HAIRY PURPLE ELEPHANT.
See, I just implanted a thought into your mind. You had zero control over it. In fact, I have more control over your thoughts than you do!
FAST JUICY WEASEL.
See! I did it again. I am in control of your thoughts!
The thought that "I control my thoughts" is itself a thought that you did not control, did not will into being, but that just arose spontaneously.
Apply more awareness to your actually process of thinking until you break this illusion that you have any control over them.
Here's something to try:
Stop all thoughts for the next 30 seconds.
Notice you cannot do it. That should make you very suspicious of this idea that you control thoughts. If you had the control claim you have, you should easily be able to stop your thoughts for a measly 30 seconds.
The entire notion of control is one big fat lie. You've never controlled anything in your life. You've only thought you have.

It's hard to find magic pills in life. Technology usually comes with trade-offs. The trade-off here is time and money.
It shows you what true meditation feels like. Without the machine the mind wanders around far too much and tends to stray from that narrow groove which is true meditation.
The machine experientially guides you into the groove and keeps you there. It is a state of total thoughtlessness. It's very tricky to stay in that state without the machine.
Really, in the future, all meditation will be done with a machine because it's too ineffective otherwise. This is why most meditators don't go far. They are unable to hit that groove even after years of practice. It takes talent to hit that groove. A talent most people lack and don't even know they lack. Most meditators don't even know what this groove is that I'm talking about. But a machine with the right training program and show it to you in 15 minutes.
It will probably take 50-100 years for cheap, powerful, yet user-friendly meditation machines to develop. Right now they don't exist.

In practice the peak of an LSD trip only lasts up to 6 hours. After the 6 hour mark you will exit deep tripping territory and remain in the after-effects zone with a long gradual tail.
For LSD you definitely gotta take the entire day off and start your trip pretty much as soon as you wake up that day.
For deep tripping, just sit still in a room and contemplate reality. There's no need to go anywhere or do anything. Staring at the carpet is basically good enough. You shouldn't be left disappointed.

No, it's deeper than that. The entire self/other distinction is imaginary. There is no one in the universe but yourself. By this I mean, you are the entire universe and all "others". Universal Mind imagines your body and all other bodies into existence.
See my video: What Is Reality?

To get good with girls at any cost.
When you're trying to solve a serious life challenging, it's a good idea to approach it with the attitude of "at any cost". Do not think about the cost of things you really want. Just work five times harder to pay it. Some things in life have absurdly high costs which almost no one is willing to pay. This allows you to set yourself apart from your competition simply by being willing to pay that cost.
You won't really appreciate a thing unless you work your ass off for it.

So make it simple and natural then.
That of course is all part of the work.
You have to customize this work to fit yourself.
Doing this work mechanically or out of a sense of obligation will backfire. The key to spirituality is finding ways to make it seamlessly integrated with your way of life. Not as something gym exercises you force yourself to do once a day, just so you can fall right back into asleep once the timer rings.
Ask yourself, "What would it look like for me to live a conscious lifestyle naturally?", "What would it look like if I lived consciously all the time and it was something naturally did, not something I forced myself to do? How would I think, emote, speak, behave?"

It's not a tragic view. That's just how your ego interpets it. You are assigning negative meaning to meaningless, which of course is absurd.
You are not going to awaken without confronting the truth that all meaning is imaginary. To the ego this can feel depressing and deflating because your ego's whole plan is to concoct and chase meanings until you're dead.
Depression can be a problem on this path, but don't blame it on meaninglessness, blame it on ego.
If you feel this work is making you unstable, take a break for a while. Come back to it later. It means you're not ready yet to go that deep.
Understand that awakening is a very hardcore pursuit. You must be very mature to want it and to actualize it. Many of you are simply not there yet. Don't force it too much. Go live a bit of life first before you try to go full-Buddha.
Full-Buddha is definitely not for most people. You have to really be fed up with material life to go full-Buddha. Many of you here have barely begun material life. Ask yourself why you are pursuing awakening? Is it simply because you are blindly doing whatever Leo talks about? Or does your heart truly desire it?
Be careful doing things I talk about simply because you heard me talk about it.

Why are you worried about this at all? Just go talk to girls and see what happens.
There are no limits. Attraction can happen in 1 minute and you can build deep rapport within a few hours of conversation.
You can make deep friendships with any random person if you really wanted to.
It does not really matter who the girl is, you can bond with her. It's just a matter of deciding which girls are worth your time and meet your standards.
Get clear about what you want and don't want. The rest will sort itself out.

Sounds like kundalini. You are stuck at the lower chakras so you're wasting that energy on sex because that's your current level of consciousness/development.
As you spiritually purify yourself you will seek less and less of lower bodily pleasures like junk, TV, and sex.
The whole point of yoga is to purify the chakras, body, and mind to unhook you from chasing lower bodily pleasures like sex, food, money, fame, power. All of that wastes enormous energy which could be put to higher use.

Trust feelings of love and inspiration.
Distrust feelings of fear, anger, and pettiness.
In other words: selfless feelings vs selfish feelings.

Yes
You can also just go to the mall and walk around while practicing making funny observations to yourself about ordinary things you see in the mall. Train yourself to have a commentary on any random thing you see: a tree, a car, a bird, a dog, a bench, an ad, etc.
DO NOT try to script or memorize this stuff. It won't work. Rather you need to train the ability to improv it on the spot.
It helps a lot to put yourself in a good mood as you try to do this. You gotta be relaxed and playful. Not stiff and business-like.
When talking to girls you gotta be like a kid in a candy store. Passionate, playful, spontaneous.

That's great.
Here are some tips to improve your game:
1) She will almost always say she's gotta go. In this case, ask if you can walk with her and continue chatting. You need as much chat time as possible. Don't just accept her excuses. She will always have excuses.
2) Never do Facebook. It's bullshit. Get her number and text.
3) Before you even try for a number ALWAYS try for an instant date. After a short chat, don't ask for her number, ask to get a coffee right now. If she says she's too busy, then get the number.
4) Rather than asking her questions, make interesting observations about her. So instead of, "What do you do?", you say, "You seem like the kind of girl who works with kids." Or whatever. Doesn't matter what you say. Sometimes you can make purposefully wrong assumptions about her just to tease her.
5) If she tells you she's a lawyer, you gotta tease her for that shit: "OMG! I walked over here loving you but I hate you now. I can tell you have an evil lawyer heart." And push her away in a playful manner.
Find every excuse to playfully touch her.
6) Get in the habit of asking, "By the way, are you single?"
7) Always seed the next date. Insist that you will text her and that you two will grab a coffee and talk.

Yeah, that is a classic newbie problem. You gotta train yourself to talk your mouth off about yourself. Be totally self-absorbed. Become a chatterbox. Don't hold any thoughts back. Talk about your opinions, desires, hates, plans, feelings, etc.
Talk about the smallest, dumbest things like how you were flossing your teeth today.
You can practice at home in front of a camera. Record yourself explaining how you ate breakfast today and how you felt about it. Make it sound interesting. You gotta turn ordinary life into stories.
STOP BEING LOGICAL in your conversations with girls! That is crucial. Untrain your logicalness.
A good trick is, rather than asking questions, make observations and statements. So instead of asking, "What do you do for work?" or "Where are you from?", you make random or informed guesses like, "You seem like a California girl" or "You seem like you work in marketing."
It makes no difference if your guess was right or wrong.
You can even make the dumbest observations such as: "Hey, did you know you're sitting next to a palm tree? Did you bother to think about it's feelings? What if it hates when you sit so close next to it? What if you smell like a skunk to the palm tree? Why are you so inconsiderate? "
This kinda stuff is gold, but you gotta train yourself to be this stupid.

You can get so good you can sleep with a new girl every week.
But that takes a lot of work and training.
Not saying you should do this. Just saying what's possible.
Keep in mind what you probably just want is to get a nice girlfriend. So that's probably your best goal.

It takes 1000s of approaches to get decently comfortable doing it. And even then, you won't want to do the first few of the day/night.
This is why people drink alcohol.

Stop and just look around the room for a minute. Everything you're seeing is consciousness.
That is not molecules or atoms. That's consciousness. Consciousness can take on an infinite number of colors, shapes, and qualities.

@SoonHei No, you're still not getting it. There is no you! The you who thinks it is reading this sentence does not exist. You are a fantasy.
Reality is happening without you. The idea of "a you" is being attached to that reality to create the illusion that it is happening to "a you".
For a minute right now, try to totally eliminate any sense that reality is here for you, or is in any way related to your body. Eliminate the sense of yourself entiry. Look at the room you're in an imagine you were never born, but the room still exists exactly as it is.
Eliminate every ounce of you-ness from experience. If you are still saying the words, "me", "I", or "my" you still aren't getting it. Those words refer to nothing.
Or just take a psychedelic and it will be so obvious. Stop wasting time on ineffective methods. Psychedelics answer all questions.