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We are enlightenment but not enlightened, as enlightened implies some sort of past event which made us permanently under the idea that we are enlightened. You can identify with the life story of a self who became enlightened, but that is not enlightenment. Enlightenment is only now, trying to force the future into being a certain way (imagining a self which will act in a manner judged as "enlightened") is different from enlightenment. Any reason as to why one wouldn't be aware of it's true nature is, in itself, a misconception about it's true nature. The reasons themselves are lack of enlightenment. "I'm not enlightened because of X" is a thought pushing you away from enlightenment.

Not suffering does not mean inaction. You can still save people out of terrible situations by love without neediness. I'd save a stranger from a dangerous situation but not because I suffer, just because it feels good to help someone. But whether you suffer this situation or not depends entirely on if you care or not. Of course 99.999% human beings would care about protecting their children, that is not the question. "Suffering" doesn't show on the outside. The monk certainly was feeling the sensations of his body burning but he was sufficiently in control of his thought to not run around screaming. Whether he felt suffering is a question of whether he was fully enlightened or not, which is sincerely his own discretion. I am not enlightened and I suffer from times to times. But understanding the mechanics of it means I can break free anytime I want by simply sitting in meditation for long enough. Of course! Suffering is a judgement of reality as being bad. No reality is bad in itself. The examples you bring are extreme realities which are bad for most human beings. The whole point of pain is to survive as a living thing, it's survival. If you don't care about surviving there is no pain. Rocks do not feel pain because they aren't machines trying to replicate themselves. Yet your POV brings you constant suffering. If you don't want to talk about it fine but someday you might be sick enough of suffering to motivate you to see things as they are.

At that moment, pain and suffering would equal attachment to my body. If I was 100% unattached to my body, I wouldn't suffer what happens to it. 99.9% of people like their body and thus don't want their body to be destroyed or damaged and so for most people, destroying their body would make them suffer great pain. The sensations themselves of skin being cut, burned or whatever are not in themselves pain. When you get a vaccine is it intrinsically painful? Perhaps for people who are not used to vaccines but at least for me, when I take a vaccine I do not interpret the sensation I receive as pain, because I fully understand it and I know the body I'm attached too isn't being destroyed. Peter Ralston did the same experiment by refusing to take an anesthetic while having a root canal treatment. Some people are at this point, but you don't need to be at this level of "no belief" to go about your life. The analogy may be easier to make with a kid and his favorite toy. If you break his toy, he will suffer but only because he is attached to it. The kid wouldn't suffer if you were to break another toy. But you are the one who decides to attach itself to a body or to any other thing. If you suffer emotionally, it's because you have attachments and aren't OK with the current situation. You'd like it to be some other way and you believe this way is not OK. Stop believing that and there will be no more pain. In the case of being cheated on, pain would equal attachment to that person being "mine" and no one's else. If I let go of my need for them to be mine, no more suffering. If you literally don't care about it, it can't affect you. Caring about it is not "reality", you are the one caring about it and making your life painful by continuing to judge it as painful. Again, 99% of people want stable relationships with other people so most people would suffer this. And it's perfectly OK to feel pain. If you feel it fully you can then move on. Even if this "psychological pain" scenario nothing is lost, you still have yourself and now you have more space in your life to create truer relationships. In your case, you seem deeply attached to the need of having friends. This attachment makes you suffer and because you suffer all the time, it makes it less fun for people IRL to hang out with you, thus creating a cycle of loneliness. Breaking the cycle means no longer being attached to this idea. It's silly to be attached to something you don't even have and can only lead to constant pain. You may ask what is "being attached" what is "caring about X", how does one let go of those attachments? You aren't actually attached to them, it's just thoughts. All you need to do to be free is focus on something else (likely creating the results you want or even focus on breathing). Most people on this forum has been in terribly painful situations and got out of them. If I never had experienced pain I wouldn't have much to say about it. Nothing's rude about your questions, you are trying to see if my claim holds in all situation. The answer is yes, even for physical pain or any type of pain. No attachment = no pain. In his book, Peter Ralston goes in depth in explaining the why and how of pain. Pain is a thought, no matter which type of pain. At the end of the day you don't need EXTREME 100% detachment to your entire body and everything (we call this enlightenment). But you can get detached from the need of having friends and a social life and I believe this detachment is necessary for you to be effective at meeting people and making friends.

Nobody is asking you to create a belief of positivity on top of your belief of negativity, but to notice that your pain and suffering is a belief and has nothing to do with reality. If you can fully notice what that pain is (through feeling it) you can let go of it and be free from it. No other thought will ever work to dispel an assumption you are already assuming. The only way out is to feel and the only thing that holds you back from feeling is the idea that it won't work.

Same in Canada but OP seems to be in Australia, no idea how drug friendly they are there.

I am sorry to hear this. According to this paper: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/ajp.114.4.309 LSD seems to induce a small change in blood pressure. Shrooms as well: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00408109.pdf The studies have been done on volunteers so the change in blood pressure could possibly be caused by stress caused by the experience rather than the substance itself (honestly quite likely since there are no reason those compounds would affect blood pressure otherwise). Cataracts do seem to be related to high blood pressure as well. It would be perfectly reasonable to ditch psychedelics if they cause too much stress for your body to handle. I would imagine putting the body in high stress situations is increasingly unhealthy as we age. All of that being said I am not a doctor. And it is entirely possible for you to reach enlightenment sober. Psychedelics are not a necessity although they can be convenient.

Nobody hates you, if we did your posts would have no replies. We actually hope to help you, there would be no point in helping you if we didn't like you. But perhaps because we attack the ideas and mentalities which are the source of the problem, you may interpret that as "attacking you" but it's not you we are trying to attack but we are trying to free you from your source of pain. It's like you've got a beartrap around your leg and it hurts you complain all day about it but when we try to get you to remove it you are like "No! Stop hating me! This beartrap is part of me now!". Your complaints don't hurt us or annoy us, it simply makes us feel empathy for the struggles you are going through. Of course we suggest what is best according to our own knowledge, because we'd feel good for you if you would get to appreciate life and feel good. We don't "need" you to feel good, it just feels good to help others.

How does this statement feels? "I can't feel to say whether this statement is true, because it's an endless battle!" No, this idea is not true, but if you believe it, you can act it out like it's true. Perhaps you are trying to explain this (imagined) inability to feel whether a statement is true as "because it's of the past". Your feelings have no limits, they don't only work on the present. They sure point you to the present because there is little reason to focus on the past but if you want to have an answer about the past, there's nothing limiting feeling from giving you an answer... except the idea that feeling is limited. Yet feeling, just like seeing is different from spinning a narrative about what you feel or what you see. You've "adapted" a mentality in the past about how you should act right now which says "you should act in accordance with the idea of being in the present moment". Yet acting in accordance with this idea from the past, is different from actually being in the present moment which is no different from feeling.

Which one of these do you believe? There are no changes you can make to improve your situation. Your current situation is the best it could possibly be and any change would make it worse, because it is already the best. There are changes you could do to improve your situation but you are still looking for them and hope we'd give you suggestions. There are changes you could do to improve your situation but you don't want to do them for a specific reason (unwillingness to do efforts, fear, etc.).

Even better than my opinion is the opinion of your true self which appears directly through feeling. If you already have opinions you feel good about but are unsure if they are actually true, you might want to dive deeper into this feeling of uncertainty. Then once you have the opinion that feels the most accurate, you might realize that all need to impose your opinion over others is gone, as there is no longer any neediness to validate the opinion (no more uncertainty).

Nothing's more distorted than the idea that you have a reptilian brain which needs you to do stuff to please it. There's nothing to manage with emotions. Either you allow yourself to feel them (which dispels them immediately), or you bullshit yourself through some idea like the reptilian brain as reason to not feel them. EDIT: I realize you weren't the one who brought this distinction. I think this distinction (like materialism) has the ability to match reality but to identify with it and act as if you have a brain would be a mistake imo.

Perhaps as a kid, whining and complaining was an effective way to get people's attention on you. But as you grow older, nobody cares about your problems as you are judged autonomous enough to take care of them. That does not mean you have to stay alone though, there are actions you can take to meet people and make friends. In the end it is your choice to either make those moves or not make them. You can also choose between suffering being alone or being OK with it. Also up to you.

A dose of datura that would kill you (physically, like a poison) is actually very close to the dose you need for it to be psychoactive, so it's really playing with death. Given the low amount of literature on datura there is no way to tell what kind of dose would kill you and what kind of dose would be active. The only way to know is to play russian roulette with your life. On top of that, even if you find a dose that will be active for you, you will suffer brain damage, and you might not be able to focus on anything for days after the experience. There is absolutely no reason in my opinion to use datura if you have any psychelic in your disposition. If you absolutely feel like doing something reckless, you are better off taking a massive dose of acid or shrooms or simply do 5-MeO-DMT. I haven't seen a single trip report of datura where anything was gained from the experience, other than a lesson on being careful with ingesting poisons.

Fair enough, I don't think you should rush getting a girlfriend asap if you have things to work on. I just wanted it to be clear that getting a girlfriend is a matter of investing time and energy and whenever you feel like doing that, you can. It sure would make a lot more sense to seek a girlfriend from a place of happiness and optimism rather than from a place of pain and neediness. For that you will need to fully understand that pain and allow to truly feel it. I highly recommend meditation as the most direct way to do that. You like to say people who feel great are "bullshitting themselves" with positive stories but if that was the case you could just bullshit yourself to happiness, which you already noticed you are not able to do. You can judge the spiritual books as beliefs or hallucinations yet a good spiritual book (like Ralston's) shouldn't be claiming anything but simply question the reader about its own bias. If you sincerely question your own beliefs they will stop making you suffer. You don't need any book to do that, meditation alone suffices, but books are quite nice launching pads in my opinion.

Exactly what you are experiencing right now. The bird chirping, the sound of the vehicles, etc. Nothing. This is it. "Everything that is happening". Describing a "shift in awareness" would be creating a story about "I" who had such a shift. If you were to stop seeking this shift, you could fully enjoy this present moment. This would feel amazing and perhaps you would describe this as a "shift in awareness". In actuality though, the only shift is you stopping to try to find a shift. There's no thing that changes, you just stop expecting things to be different.

Absolutely! No need to torture yourself about it, better to focus on feeling instead.

If I were you, I would deeply question this idea that "anger would destroy me". The way you say it is such a nice encapsulation of resistance to feeling. "I can't feel! I wouldn't handle it! It would destroy me!" But feeling is just like seeing: both are consciousness. It's like saying you opening your eyes would destroy you. Indeed, if you were to feel the anger, it would bring an end to the pain, to the anger, to the problems, to the shame, to the judgements. Why are you afraid to feel? Oh because you think you are those problems. You think you have trauma and problems about yourself. You know that feeling would sublimate those issues, and so ego interprets feeling as losing itself since ego thinks it is associated or "has" those issues. But it's not itself it would be losing, but what is identified with, which is only pain. Your true self is without the anger problems and trauma. You shared that your true self is just sad from what has been done. You can fully be yourself again and drop all of this bullshit, all that is needed is to feel. At the end it's up to you, stay in hell and keep believing you need to do things to avoid your anger, or allow feeling and be free from all this pain.

Y'all need more brainwashing.

Generally not a fan of claims that contain either "always" or "never". Those are never true and always false. Ah you can notice his frustration in not having built a true relationship, that's for sure. If he's not willing to describe the truth he is bringing (why would a couple's survival agenda always conflict) then I don't really care. You can extrapolate what he said to fit your belief that he is your god lord savior, but that's you. If you want to defend Leo's weirdest takes, might as well go on genetics and why he can't be enlightened because of them?

No worries man. I spent my whole teenage years being extremely aggressive to literally everyone, I kinda know the drill. Seeing you was a bit seeing my old self. You seem to attach a lot to this story that "your case is too bad to be helped". But that's just an idea about yourself, which is not true. Drop the idea and the roleplay will drop as well. Hell/suffering is an idea. You could even ask yourself why you sent me this hateful message and notice that perhaps, it was to confirm to yourself "how bad" of a situation you are in. "Look at how dysfunctional I am! Please validate this idea about myself!" But that's just not true. You acted like that because you decided to, but that doesn't mean you are like that, it's just a role you played because of an idea. That being said you are always welcome here to ask for help and express your feelings (as long as you follow the forum guidelines but that's really not my problem). I'm glad this is turning out into a situation where you are actually open to seek help from @Nahm because that can only do good for you. An even more powerful way to exchange with him would be with sessions, in which you can talk to him on skype to really go deep into your problems. My experience with him was very useful and insightful.

Right now, is your current lifestyle and behaviors such that they offer you the highest possible percentage you could possibly have to get a girlfriend? Said differently, are you doing everything you could possibly be doing to try and get a girlfriend? Is there absolutely nothing else you could do to increase that percentage?

Can you see how, compared to lottery, you have some control over the odds of you getting a girlfriend? For instance if your odds of finding a girlfriend are at any percentage X, then deciding to live like a hermit in a cave decreases this percentage for instance. Do you agree with this?

I have no reason to think you would be lying, when making answers I respond from the assumption that what you bring is true. You do have much more information about yourself than I have but all of this information is about past events. I strongly doubt you are capable of predicting the future and know for certain that you won't have a girlfriend. "Not being able to get a girlfriend" is not an information or a piece of data, it's a conclusion. Is this conclusion correct? We can determine that by looking into what brought you to this conclusion. If you say "the proof that I can't get a girlfriend lies in information I haven't shared" well we can either go through this information that you haven't shared or else there's very little I can do here. At the end of the day if this information is sensitive to you, you can go through this questioning alone and really ask yourself "How I know I won't ever have a girlfriend? What's the proof?"

This is evidence that you've failed in the past. A correct statement would be "I never had a girlfriend" perhaps. But why would this prove anything about the future? What's the difference between evidence for "me" and for "you"? I thought evidence was evidence, now evidence is subjective? Is evidence really evidence if it's subjective? In my opinion, this is what we call a "belief". Maybe you found something I haven't found, perhaps you are capable to predict the future entirely based on the past. If so we could be extremely rich using the stock market right now From my POV though, I cannot predict the weather, how my career will be nor how my future relationships will be. It's all unknown, because it hasn't happened yet.

Do you have evidence to support this claim?