Yes. Once I get warmed up and really into. But entering that flow doesn't always succeed. Sometimes I feel uninspired, exhausted, or distracted.
No. You don't have to read anything. Reading can help, but it can also be a distraction.
The utility of reading is learning techniques and learning about the many traps in this work. Without reading you are likely to fall into a serious trap and get stuck in it for years.
For me there is no direct connection. I like game design just because it lets me be creative and imagine cool worlds that cannot exist in normal life.
The most direct connection between design and philosophical work is that design is about thinking in a big picture, holistic way, and so it philosophical work. I have a designer's mind and I think like a designer. This is the common thread between game design and philosophy. A designer's mind must be very holistic because you need to take the entire product into account. A designer needs to see the game in its totality, not just in parts. A good game is designed top-down as one unified whole. Which is of course how God works.
Thinking very big picture, like a film director, is a very good skill to develop. I have that kind of director's mindset. It is the mindset of an executive, a CEO -- where you are responsible for the entirety of a thing. To invent a game, you must be responsible for the entire thing. It's the mindset of founders.

● I used to have crippling social anxiety, even getting off a bus, going to class, and of course talking to girls. This is 90% gone after two years and this alone has done so much for my life. I use to get very frustrated when people told me you have to live with it. I rejected that flat out.
● A lot of health benefits. Overcoming eating problems, dropping ALL supplements, and eating about 60% of what I used to and still maintain my size. I'm 186cm, 94kg and 14% body fat. Extremely active, bouldering, jiujitsu, powerlifiting and I eat almost half as much without losing ANY weight. 
● Sleeping less, and taking less shits lol. It has also enhanced digestion. Maybe 7 hours of sleep which again is crazy for my level of activity. 
● Had very bad OCD (diagnosed) and perfectionism. OCD is almost totally gone. I can plan compulsively sometimes but I don't check the door 50 times in the morning so it's been so liberating. 
● The desire for porn, coffee, eating meat, watching TV, alot of this stuff just naturally fell away. I didn't try to do anything. Sex drive probably halved.
● More frequent non-dual experiences. For example, walking down the street, I suddenly feely merged with everyone around me. Frequent episodes of bliss and love but it's not awakening. 
● A more elusive one, but it's easier to get what I want in life and I am generally much happier. Better emotional states. Feel more balanced and capable.
● I also have a deeper sense now that I don't really need to do anything in life. I just feel fulfilled. I don't feel obliged to help anyone or do anything and I don't think it dictates my worth as a human.
● I have become a catalyst for growth for everyone around. After people spend some time around me they usually want to change. Major impact on family.
I credit a lot of my progress to reading Dr Hawkins book about surrender and for years I took surrender and kriya yoga EXTREMELY seriously. I did it religiously. Sometimes I was doing kriya yoga three times a day. It was addictive.
I have always wanted to make a video about this but I'm afraid people will call me a pseudo scientist full of shit etc... lol

It's complicated.
They are all distinct achievements.
Sahaja samadhi would be abiding God-consciousness as I understand. Other lesser samadhis are temporary. They are not abiding. So in that sense they are like a psychedelic peak. Psychedelic puts you into samadhi automatically. Then from that state you can have profound insights and realizations.
Liberation to me means totally overcoming the self. Breaking free of all identification and all attachment to the material world, such that you are not driven by cravings or suffering. At this point you would be close to just leaving your body because you are so detached from life. You are basically giving up human life to be formless because you've had enough of form. You are no longer interested in exploring form. You just desire to be the Godhead. Liberation should bring you very close to something like that.
No-mind is yet a distinct achievement. Although of course there tends to be overlap between all these. They are all pointing in the same general direction.
I would not worry about these nuances for now. Just focus on having a few solid awakening experiences. You'll figure out the rest afterwards. Don't get ahead of your skiis.

Having fun wingmen is the #1 tip for going out.
Yes, going solo is brutally hard so you won't be motivated to do it. You need good wingmen who make you wanna go out for the fun.

When you are sick you can not do it.
You will still get benefits.
But if you are not sick you should do it every day. It is an issue of priorities. You have the wrong priorities in life.

1) That was a general statement. It could have exceptions for some people.
2) Kriya yoga is different. I think it is more potent and accumulates better over months, so you can do 1-2hrs per day and it builds up. Meditation does not build up so well. For meditation to build up requires like several days of nonstop practice.
Again, these things will vary if you are spiritually gifted.

I'm not doing kriya anymore for now because I have some heart problems. But I can tell that stopping kriya was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. Everything came back after a week or smth. Bad sleep. Bad mood. Mantal claritity dropped like a brick. Memory dropped. Ability to think and articulate thoughts dropped. everyday I dream about when will I be able to start it again  
Kriya yoga was the best thing that happened in my life. I was at a point where I could fall asleep in 2-3min, Mantal balance and constant joy within everyday... all gone...

 

There's nothing wrong with focusing on getting your life together.
Just keep your meditation practice going. It's not a big weight. Plenty of people manage to run their life and meditate an hour a day.
Kriya yoga, for example, was designed to only take about 1 hour per day. The instruction was: spend 1 hour per day on yoga and enlightenment, and the rest of your day handling your business and family obligations.
You do not need to become an ascetic to become enlightened.
Just do your practices more diligently. Quality > quantity.
I know people who do 2-3 hours per day of yoga and still manage to run a busy life.
A very effective structure is this: 1-2 hours per day of inquiry + four 10-day solo retreats per year. The rest of the time, do whatever business you got.
Another option is: take 3 months off and go balls-to-the-wall with inquiry. 24/7. Get your awakening breakthrough and then return to ordinary life, deepening your realization with 1 hour per day of meditation/yoga.

No, it will not give you want I said. I was talking about a serious full-length Kriya practice.
What you are doing is dabbling in one technique. That will not produce a sigificant change.
Yoga must be done seriously. If you are too cheap or too lazy to get the book and follow it rigorously, then yoga is not for you.
Yoga routines must be done perfectly. DO NOT HALF-ASS YOGA!

@electroBeam That is because your general level of awareness is still so low.
It's sort of like you've walked into a dark room full of objects and complain, "Am I expected to see anything in here? Are you actually telling me there are real objects in this room?" To which the reply is, "Yes! Once you turn up the dial on the light dimmer switch."
At the start of Kriya your awareness of your body and spine is so poor that you cannot even feel you have a spine. "Spine" is just an idea for you. You only believe you have a "spine" because some human told you so. After some months of Kriya, you will discover, "Holy shit! I have a spine! I can feel my spine for the first time in my life!"
I find that even more important that visualizing (in Kriya) is feeling into things. Feel into your spine. Feel into your chakras. You're just extremely numb to feeling. That's the problem. You cannot feel anything subtle. In the same way that a heroin addict cannot feel subtle emotions of joy and love and beauty because he's zonked out of his mind on heroin.

I see a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about Kriya yoga, and yoga in general.
A lot of people are attempting to dabble in it. Which will not work.
So I shot a new video about how to start yoga properly. It will be released on my blog in the next day or two.
In a nutshell: DO NOT HALF-ASS YOGA! Yoga must be done rigorously, or not at all.

I don't think it matters much. I put my hands on my thighs, palms up.
3 cycles is what the book says.
That finger technique is however good for tracking your Kriya breaths, which will be in cycles of 12. Works great.
Definitely a must.
Jogging vigorously in place for 1-2 minutes prior to your sit will significantly help clear up blocked sinuses.
It's really easy. You just open and constrict your throat and breath in/out through the nose. You'll get the hang of it in a week or two.

Of course they do. Just not the mainstream westernized Buddhists you hear about.
The Dalai Lama has a personal oracle as one of his advisors. Sadhguru actively tells his advanced yogis not to practice siddhis or perform healings or miracles because it would create a PR nightmare for his organization.
Many enlightened masters have such abilities but will not tell you about them because you would not understand, and because it will distract you from working on your awakening.
You have to understand, people get killed for talking or exhibiting such abilities. There is a huge stigma against witchcraft, even today. Look at how Osho's commune was erradicated. That's what will happen to you when start flaunting spirituality around ignorant people.
Sadhguru was accused of murdering his wife after her supposed mahasamadhi. He was also accused of holding people captive and brainwashing them by parents who didn't understand what yoga is.
Almost every spiritual tradition has deep esoteric teachings which are kept secret and never penetrates mainstream culture because mainstream culture is so closedminded and materialisitic.
These are very advanced things which are not discussed with closedminded people.
I am not saying everything they claim is true, but you'd be surprised how much truth there is in esoteric teachings.
Yogananda's biography is very fantastical. It's not a good resource for skeptical rationalist western minds. For you to understand the things he talks about requires someone like me to break it down into a western anatyical paradigm. Which takes a lot of work and people still don't buy it.
If you really care about understanding siddhis and paranormal abilities, you must spent years practicing them. The proof is in practices.
Spend 5 years doing hardcore yoga and then you'll have a better understanding of the possibilites here.
Kriya yoga's primary intention is unlocking your chakras and liberation, not siddhis. So don't get stuck on all the fantasical stuff. Focus on awakening.
P.S. The deepest truth is so incredible, it will kill you.

@herghly I have not. What's I love about Kriya is that it's supposed to be a private practice not done in groups.
You can always rent a motel room for a week and do your Kriya.

Journaling, contemplation, and visualization should help a lot with this.
You could use just these 3 techniques + psychedelics to totally transform yourself within a couple of years. But you must do them consistently.
And Kriya yoga too! Kriya is excellent for raising your baseline level of consciousness to almost mild psychedelic levels.

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.