It wasn't even really a decision. My #1 goal as a living being has always simply been to understand what reality is. It is not even a deliberate goal I set. It is more like a deep natural curiosity about life. And from there, when I heard about enlightenment, it was just naturally the most important thing to pursue. There is not even a choice for me whether to pursue it or not. There's only the question of: How fast, how seriously? And via which method?
You pursue it despite fears and inhibitions. Don't wait for them to disappear.
It has never even crossed my mind that I will not pursue enlightenment. To me that would be like throwing away the greatest gift in the universe.
Just start doing Kriya yoga everyday and psychedelics. The rest should take care of itself.

Definitely
I feel like I'm on a mild psychedelic high throughout the day if I just sit still for a minute.
Kriya is like microdosing psychedelics.
It also significantly calms the monkey mind.
It only takes a month or two to start to feel that. At least for me. Your results may vary. I have done a lot of psychedelics over the last 2 years, so I am much more conscious than I would be if I was starting Kriya from zero.
Don't recall exactly which book it is from. I think it's the Kriya Supreme Fire. You basically just breath in, do the 3 locks, then hold it for 90 seconds (or as long as you can).

I stopped conventional meditation. I just do Kriya instead + I randomly just sit and look around the room whenever I feel like it.
After a few months of Kriya your mind should naturally start to calm down and you should start to feel like you're naturally meditating whenever you take a moment to just sit and be quiet. Meditation also becomes much more enjoyable.
After Kriya, my meditation has become much more organic, less forced and artificial. I meditate when I'm taking a piss, etc.
Because the yoga rewires the brain stem. It's more of a hardware fix than a software fix. It's more like a psychedelic in this regard.

Yeah, that's how it goes.
Try a full dose
And start doing Kriya yoga. It will raise your baseline level of consciousness to micro dose levels and beyond.

@Jcent Def sounds like kundalini energy being awakened.
The navel chakra stores the largest reserve of kundalini energy. Which is why the navel chakra is often stimulated only after lots of prep work -- because when it opens it could unleash a torrent.
Sounds like you would get a lot of out of Kriya yoga. It should be very effective for you. Much more so than conventional meditation. Give it a try for 6 months. You could awaken just like that. It could change your whole life.
Don't depend on other people to awaken you. Take the job into your own hands. Which is not to say never do Reiki, I just mean, seize this lucky break to awaken yourself.
I have some books about kundalini on my book list. Make sure you educate yourself about some of the dangers of kundalini and how to awaken it gradually and properly. Otherwise you might run into problems.

Don't sell yourself short. Your art is teaching. Take that shit to the next level. Start thinking of it as an art.
I do.
Actualized.org is my canvas. Mindfucking you guys is my art.
Of course, if you're serious enough about it.
I highly recommend learning Kriya yoga if you want mystical experiences.
You're gonna have mystical experiences up the wazoo.
Mushrooms are like the cheat code to life.

With a deep enough enlightenment there should be no depression.
Depression is mostly the result of improper psychology, not some permanently bad brain chemistry. The bad brain chemistry is mostly caused by improper psychology, diet, and lifestyle.
A practice like Kriya yoga will also rewire your brain and can create ecstatic bliss.

@Cocolove You learned some good lessons attempting that. Failure is part of the learning process.
Now you have a bit of a better sense of how difficult it is to pull off a solid meditation retreat. Especially solo. Its takes super-human levels of self-discipline and dedication.
Yes, you have to build up to it. Just like you cannot will yourself to bench press 300 lbs. It takes many months of ramping up to that.
The value of something like Kriya yoga is that you can do it for 1hr per day and it will gradually strengthen you over the course of a year in a way which you would never be able to achieve with a week-long hardcore retreat. The reality is that it takes time to rewire the mind and build tolerance for meditation.
Yes, you need a lot more daily practice. It also helps a lot to hit a point in your practice where you actually enjoy meditation. It's very hard to pull off a retreat if you're secretly hoping it stops. The key is to surrender to the whole process and try to enjoy the silence, solitude, and peace. But that probably won't happen your first few retreats.
Just keep practicing and doing as much as you can. Remember, it's not all about quantity. The quality of your practice is far more important than quantity. Quantity without quality will not yield much results.
Also be patient. You are young. You don't need to be enlightened tomorrow. It's okay if it takes 5 years of practice. You will still be ahead of everyone else.

Kriya yoga is a set of special physical and energetic techniques for rewiring your nervous system. It is supposed to be much more powerful than meditation.
Kriya yoga is a bit like micro-dosing psychedelics.

@Hero of Time Well, firstly you should know that the stuff you were doing at Blue which you call "spirituality" was mostly fantasy, group-think, & egotism, not genuine spirituality. So very little is actually lost by letting all that go aside from your ego taking a beating (which is precisely spiritual!).
Secondly, don't wait to reach some Spiral stage to do genuine spirituality. You can begin it at any time (if you dare).
For example, you could go take a psychedelic tomorrow and experience God in 30 minutes. No need to wait. And that's just one simple example.
And finally, for me stage Orange "spirituality" felt a bit like recognizing the wonders of the universe through science and rationality. This is pretty weak when compared to genuine spirituality, but it can be exciting. Most great scientists become scientists because science is their way of doing spirituality (connecting with the wonder of nature & existence). They just aren't conscious of this yet. If you look at someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson that's what he's doing every time he speaks publicly: he's scratching his own spiritual itch, via science.
Spirituality is really nothing other than the exploration of yourself, the exploration of the universe, the taking in of nature in a conscious & truthful way. You are God exploring itself. The big problem with stage Blue is that it prevented you from ACTUALLY exploring yourself. Now you are free to go explore and see what can be discovered.
Don't use Spiral Dynamics to limit yourself. You can go straight for Turquoise teachings right now! You might not be able to stomach or understand them, but you also might! So it's worth a shot. You could start doing Kriya yoga tomorrow and see huge shifts in consciousness within 3-6 months. It's not guaranteed, but you won't know till you try.

Both. You should feel subtle weekly gradual effects and eventually some bigger breakthroughs. The gradual effects can really add up. Which is the whole point. I am more interested in Kriya for the gradual effects than the breakthroughs. I can easily create breakthroughs via psychedelics, but they don't stick so well. Which is why Kriya is important.
To me those are optional. Talabya is probably quite good, but takes a lot of training to achieve. I recommend you don't bother with it until your core routine is solid.
Gamana
I combine everything into one routine. Ideally you'd do this routine twice per day but right now I'm only managing once per day.
Not now. Build your core routine and do it for a few years. Then you can revisit that question. You're not supposed to do those routines until you have 3-5 years of solid practice.

@Waves There is no way to formulate that balance. It will be unique for each person, and it will even change for the same person over time.
You must experiment and see what works best for you.
You can certainly maintain a 1hr daily meditation practice or Kriya yoga practice while you do pickup or dating. That's the minimum I'd recommend.
Generally speaking you should set an overarching goal/plan for your year. What is the biggest thing you'll be focusing on this year? Attraction? Enlightenment? Business? Improving self esteem? Better nutrition? etc.
Don't try to do it all at once. Space things out. You'll be amazed how much stuff you can do in 5-10 years if you focus.

@Svartsaft To get serious benefits from meditation it's very important to start doing it strictly. It's too easy to turn meditation into just daydreaming. That is not proper meditation and so it doesn't produce benefits.
So you need to find a formal technique and stick to it rigorously.
Or try something like Kriya Yoga. It's more powerful than regular meditation and you can feel the benefits pretty fast, within weeks/months.
Either way though, you gotta make your technique more strict. This work requires serious self-discipline. That's why it's difficult and most people don't do it.

There are many ways to reach Absolute Love. Psychedelics are not required. But they sure make it easy.
I reject the notion that consciousness has to be "earned". You are God! You don't have to "earn" anything to know yourself as God.
Of course it's not a magic pill. You still need to do lots of other work on yourself.
I have not gotten deep enough into Kriya yoga to see what kind of awakening it produces.
I trust they can be powerful awakenings. I think Kriya is very powerful.
Of course, that is omniscience. God is all-knowing but in a far more radical way than human knowledge.
Knowing and Being are one. God knows everything by being everything.

Your mistake is sitting there thinking about all this with your mind.
Instead, you must do the practices.
All your rationalizing is just a waste of time. You will never figure it out that way.
If you want to get somewhere, go do psychedelics, or Kriya yoga, or mindfulness meditation. Do it seriously and rigorously, like it's the most important pursuit in your life, more important than money, sex, entertainment, or comfort.
You cannot understand the things I teach without doing serious practices. It's just that simple.
Do, or do not. Speculation and theorizing will get you nowhere.
Common sense should tell you that there must be a heavy, heavy cost to awakening, otherwise everyone would be awake.

Don't overdo Kriya. That can be dangerous and counter-productive. 2hrs is plenty.
3hrs per day would be for someone who's already done it for years and is very advanced.

Naturals are better than PUAs. I know this first hand. I have professional PUA coach friends and one natural friend. The natural friend is way better.
One time I was talking about getting in state and he asked me, "What's state?" I explained it to him and he said, "Oh. I'm in state as soon as I get in my car." I said, You fucker!
You cannot beat a natural. That's because he is genetically wired for extreme extroversion. No introvert can be that good. These kind of extroverts are also usually quite good-looking. So they got all the cards stacked in their favor. It is a perfect storm of pussy magnetism.
Gaming with my natural friend is so fun. It's incredible. It's just like a party around him. And he knows nothing about pickup theory. It's all just intuitive. He could sell satanism to a nun.
But then he struggles in other areas of life. So it's all trade-offs. Extroverts got plenty of other problems.

@kieranperez Sometimes you can't immediately get what you want, but must hatch a longer term plan.
For example, why can't you teach yourself some valuable skills, like web programming, move out on your own to a cheap state like Nevada or Texas and work for a few years to build up a nest egg?
Then you can go monk.
If you recall, Om Swami worked his ass off for 10 years in business before he went full monk.
You sound very young, so you got plenty of time to do both.
You also don't need to go full monk to pursue enlightenment. With Kriya yoga and psychedelics you can make enormous progress quickly while still working a regular job.
By the time you are done building up your nest egg you could already be half-enlightened.

This product is fairly priced. It is about 300-400 dollar. But if you really want to get to the core just buy the book the charisma myth and human magnet syndrome. You will be off a lot cheaper. 
Julien is usually all over the place. I don’t like his teaching style.  That is my personal opinion.
He also has some book reviews on his channel. If you are smart just read the books he is reading and you won’t have to buy is programs. 

HVC is amazing, I have it, it’s probably the best most advanced, concise, holistic and integrated product on Social Skills, and Communication coming from authenticity and a higher paradigm perspective.
I’ll say it’s foundational to Social Skills, Charisma, and developing/expressing your authenticity personality as a whole.

Learn all other Game stuff, after you’ve watched and put this course into action. It’s the solid foundation you need to learn the rest and not get lost or trapped in toxicity and sociopathy.
HVC won’t go into specific with dealing with women and being sexual.
 
If you aren’t actively going out, taking action, making observations, writing down and analyzing your reference experience, as well as some inner work. The course is useless just an any other information you don’t implement.

Good! You guys should be doubting more and reasoning for yourselves.

It permanently quiets the monkey mind. But very subtly, very slowly.
It raise baseline consciousness, but very subtly, very slowly.

Good.
A visionary is one who has a creative mind and sees strong visions of how things ought to be done, what things ought to be created.
If a visionary is writing a novel, he has a strong sense of what kind of novel to write, what values it should embody, what themes it have. A visionary knows what is right, knows what he wants, sees a btter way to do things.
A visionary says, "No, we must do things this way, not that way. Follow me, I know how to do this right."

My explanation of it is pretty simple. In order to be human you must reside within a very narrow and low state of consciousness. This is true even if you are a fully enlightenment Buddha. Your consciousnes is still less 1% of what is possible. And that is simply because that's what it means to be human. The highest levels of consciousness are so alien and non-human that a human can barely remember or think about them, nevermind access them at will, nevermind making such changes permenent. What the human can make permament is very very little. Which is why enlightenment teachers poo-poo the whole idea of "chasing states". They tell you not to do it because a human can't sustain them. That's what "human" IS. Human means being pretty much in the state you're currently in. But what a human can sustain is something like deep surrender and emptiness. Which is what they call enlightenment. And this has it's benefits for humans, but as far as consciousness goes it's still weak.
So it's sort of a sad situation because most of consciousness remains inacceesible and unsustainable for humans. Merely by the fact of being human. I guess after death that will change. Which is the point of death. Death finally frees you to explore higher domains because you are no longer attached to the human experience scheme.

This will vary wildly per individual.
Don't look to others for the answer, feel into yourself. Your body/mind will tell you exactly how much rest you need. If you just become attuned to yourself.
You need to listen to your body rather than trying to impose expectations on it.