Man, for now, I would say just forget about that. Your mind is filled with fantasies of being some crazy Buddha. Don't worry about that for now. Spend the next 5 years just learning how to survive and thrive in America. Then revisit the Buddha issue.
Remember, Buddha was 27 years old when he left behind his life of luxury, success, and family. He had a wife and child. He was experienced with the ways of material living. And then it took him another 6 years to finally get enlightened. So you've got plenty of time. 23 year olds are basically babies. You have virtually no life experience or survival skills. So build those up.
This is not unique to you. Most 23 year olds these days are like this. As was I at that time. You'd be amazed how much can get accomplished in 10 years. Way more than you could image.

Because he became enlightened as fuck.
His level of attainment is very unusual, even among enlightened folk.
There is a level of enlightenment at which you appear superhuman, godly to by-standards. Those were the levels reached by people like Jesus and Buddha. It wasn't your run-of-the-mill Neo-Advaita enlightenment. It was a very deep embodiment. One's level of embodiment is what makes people say, "Holy fuck! Look at that guy!" And then that produces tons of loyal followers and free mass marketing.
Massive deep enlightenment is the oldest method of viral marketing. Because it's so rare and amazing and inspiring.

He refuses to accept that 5-MeO-DMT gives an experience of the Absolute.
He also claims that yogis are not enlightened. And that kundalini rising cannot lead to enlightenment.
He is simply wrong on those points (according to me of course; you will have to discover who is right for yourself).

@Pure Imagination It has nothing to do with odds or luck. You're thinking about this totally the wrong way. Don't confuse statistical averages across society with one individual's spiritual path.
If you want to, you can have 100% chance of being enlightened.
People are unenlightened not because they can't, but because they don't have any desire to be.

As I've said before, mastery in this field takes 20-40 years.
But that doesn't mean you need to wait that long. There is a big difference between mastery and one enlightenment experience. You can have one experience quite quickly. And you can grow a lot along the way. None of the work is "wasted". You life will be improved by leaps and bounds even if you don't go all the way.
Yes, of course enlightenment is rare. Most folks here are just getting started on their spiritual journeys. Don't expect to find enlightened masters hanging around on a forum.
Once you have an enlightenment or two, you'll quit this forum.
BTW, I have seen people here having awakenings. Can't tell how deep they are, but people are doing it. Or at least getting glimpses, which is still an epic and life-changing thing when you have it.
This ain't no Usain Bolt situation. The only problem here is, you don't really want enlightenment bad enough. So a lot of time is wasted beating around the bush.
If you just discipline yourself to self-inquire, you will make quick progress. You'll feel it.

The real danger you should be concerned about is staying under-developed.
I know folks who got enlightened in their early 20s. So if anything, you're behind the ball.
If our society had any decency, everyone would be fully enlightened before they finished high school.

I spent last Monday chatting up strippers at a strip club with my enlightened buddy. I chatted to them about meditation, yoga, enlightenment, DMT, and normal everyday things for 2.5 hours. We all had great fun. One of the strippers even had a Sanskrit tattoo which I quickly identified. Another stripper was into meditation but drank too much to maintain a steady habit. I jokingly lectured her about her unhealthy drinking habits. A 3rd stripper wanted to try some DMT, and I educated her about the benefits of 5-meo and how my enlightened buddy was too big of a pussy to do a 30mg dose.
Don't be so serious about being "spiritual" and developed. You should be able to relate to ordinary people once you're in touch with the being-level of life. It's all being after all. Everyone is at your level. You can learn to talk to people about anything. Just don't expect them to change or convert to your ways. And don't expect people to bring up the topics YOU want to talk about. That burden is on you as the conversationalist.

While it can be helpful to still the mind, it's certainly not necessary, and this idea that you must stop all mind activity to become enlightened can become a trap in itself. It's much harder to stop the mind than to become enlightened.
The heart of the matter is that you must become conscious of what's what. Which does not require stopping thought. Although if you're stuck in monkey-mind, that will be an impediment.

@ashashlov Just a limiting belief. I find it's actually easier to do all this work when you're between the ages of 6 to 25. After 25, your mind becomes rigid and set in its ways. Young people's mind still fresh, still open, still free of pet ideologies, and full of energy and curiosity of about life. Many great sages have become enlightened in their early 20s, before 25. Buddhist monks are trained from age 8 upwards very successfully.
I wish I had all this information back when I was 6 to 12. Changing 20 years of bad habits is really hard.

No, the sneakiness here is the excuses and distractions being made to avoid doing the exercises.
Just do the exercises and you will progress very well.
All rationalizations for why the exercises aren't good to do, or can't possibly work, are just distraction.
Don't get so hung up on avoiding the mind that you fall even deeper into mind.
Steady practice is the key. Debating whether or not to do practice is a trap. If you do the practice, you will see results.
And enlightenment itself is not the only measure of progress. Your awareness will grow A LOT even if you don't become enlightened here. You should be happy with any gains in awareness you make, no matter how small.

Notice, all of this is just more ego.
THERE IS NO YOU!
And there's certainly no you to kill you. This is just silly.
So stop pretending like you exist to be destroyed.
There is nothing to destroy and no one to fight.
So if you're gonna pursue enlightenment, do it with a calm manner, without the drama. It will be a lot easier and quicker. The drama is what enlightenment is supposed you relieve you of. So why not start right there, rather than kicking and screaming the whole way?
Sit and enjoy your self-inquiry. It's not like you're being asking to go mine coal for 8 hours a day. All you're being asked to do is sit and look.
This isn't some sort of epic Hollywood struggle. Finishing high school was harder than getting enlightened. So keep things in perspective, and stay calm and carry on.

@Jed Vassallo You've clearly never gamed. Stopping a woman randomly in the daytime with a genuine direct approach makes her day. It makes her feel great.
Imagine how you'd feel if a hot girl approached you at the supermarket and told you that she's attracted to you. You'd feel awesome even if you never took her up on the offer. You'd feel like king for the day.
Go to a mall, stop any random woman and tell her that you just thought she was beautiful, and she will be so happy. Obviously don't lie about it, it must be genuine.
You've also clearly never gamed.
I didn't say that was the end of the conversation, I said that's the opener. From there you use cheeky conversation to build attraction.
Stopping a woman cold on the street and being genuine with her about your feelings about her is extremely rare. It builds instant attraction and it makes you stand out from everyone else. I am not talking about a pickup line, I am talking about genuinely expressing yourself. This also makes her day. She will feel great the rest of the day even if she declines your offer for a date/coffee/phone number.
The words you say to a woman almost never matter. What matters is how you carry yourself and the tone you take. Most attractive women will have boyfriends, but you'll never know until you try.
Every street approach ends with an invitation to an instant coffee date, and failing that, a phone number.
The biggest issue here is that you don't have the balls or skill to pull off such a direct and genuine approach, nor the skills to carry the conversation, nor the skill to close it.
If you find a woman attractive, hiding your feelings about it to try to weasel your way into her pants is weak. She will smell your manipulations.
Hot women like men who are clear and decisive about what they want. When a woman makes you feel something, you don't hide, you be direct about it, the way a strong man would. That in itself builds massive attraction.
Women only hate being approached when you are being creepy, insecure, or obnoxiously cat-calling her.

Lol, she was on the brink of suicide and suffered for YEARS! You are dismissing all that "work".
Yes, if you drive yourself nuts to the brink of suicide and then finally the ego happens to collapse by some fluke instead of you actually killing yourself, the brain can then rewire itself. But it wasn't really quick. It was a process years in the making. It's like an explosion that was building up for years, and then one day it all burst.
And even so, these kinds of cases are extremely rare. They might as well not exist. This is not a reliable strategy for awakening.
You make an interesting point. But I still think there is a physiological component to spiritual giftedness. It's just damn rare.
How do you explain that many of the most awakened people experienced their awakenings very early in life, often when they are 12 years old, 18 years old, etc. How do you explain people who do one meditation retreat or self-inquire for a few weeks and become enlightened? That is extremely rare and atypical. An average person cannot do that. Otherwise a large percentage of the population would be enlightened, but they just aren't and can't.
More broadly-speaking, how do you explain that less than 0.00001% of humans wake up? This cannot be explained simply by lack of effort. Even within people who do hardcore spiritual practice, STILL, less than 1% deeply awaken. Again, this is not merely due to lack of effort.
There is a deep connection between one's effort in this work and one's spiritual intuition. Why are some people much more spiritually attuned than others? Why are some people totally spiritually clueless? Lack of effort is not enough to explain it because one's willingness to exert effort is directly proportional to one's initial spiritual attunement.
So my claim is that the people who wake up are the ones who start out in life already highly spiritually attuned. Poor upbringing and environment can obscure this attunement, requiring some decades of life experience for the person to realize that they even have this spiritual attunement.
The problem with spiritual attunement is that most people who have it take it completely for granted. They don't know what life is like without it because they've always had it, and they assume everyone else has it too. But most people don't. It's sort of like having a very high IQ or being very tall. You don't even realize that most people are not that way.
For example, I am 6'2". It took me 30 years to realize that not everyone is that tall. To me, being tall feels totally normal. I don't even know what it means to be short. It took me 30 years to realize that the world is designed for short people: hotel showers, all chairs and sofas and benches, airplane seats, sinks, toilets, urinals, jackets, pants, cars, etc. I can't sit comfortably on most chairs because they are designed for short people and I only realized that a few years ago! I didn't realize it because I assumed that all people are the same.

Meditation still has enormous value because you cannot be hopped up on psychedelics all the time. Psychedelics should be done rarely. Like 1-5% of your life. The other 95%+ of the time you will be sober and you'll want to boost your sober state with manual techniques like meditation or yoga.
Regardless, you need to develop the ability to just sit and do nothing for 60 minutes straight, and to concentrate your mind for 60 mins straight. These are crucial skills to develop for anyone doing self-actualization.

I deviate a bit from the book.
No, you do not use timers for yoga.
With a bit of practice you will know when the 5 minutes are up, naturally, without a timer.
It's not that hard to guestimate 5 to 10 mins. You don't want to be interrupting your practice to fiddle with a timer. Become fully adsorbed in the practice and don't worry too much about time.
Once you get your routine down, it will be like clockwork.

It really depends on you. It's not a function of time as it is a function of your effort.
If your effort is too low, then you will never get good. But if your effort is very high you can get good in a year or two.
Effort matters most of all. To advance quickly you have to get very serious about it. It has to consume your life for a few years. If you are just dabbling in game, even 5 years won't get you far.
You have to be a beast about it.

My standards are realistic and true to consciousness itself. I don't impose any human macho litmus tests on consciousness.
Just because some monk trained himself to ignore pain does mean much. It is not the evidence you think it is. Yes it's badass, but to set this standard for students is very counter-productive.
The epitome of toxic spirituality.
No it isn't. You have no clue yet how deeply you can suffer.
When your life goes wrong enough you will understand.
False
In a 5-MeO peak none of this matters. It all flys out the window. You could jump out the window and not care.
Conscious of Truth is independent of how you feel and how your mind/body is trained.
God awakens, then God goes back to dreaming.
By your logic God could never become a human because God is fully realized. But obviously God can lose consciousness, which is how you were born.
Yes, they are different. This thing you call liberation would involve a lot of training of your mind and body and emotional system.
I have not met any spiritual person who doesn't suffer when things get bad enough. If they exist they are one in a billion.
Sorry, but I just don't buy it. Find me a real person who doesn't suffer. It is easier to find a unicorn.
It is such a stupid expectation to tell people to be Ramana.
I will bet all my money that if you take any modern spiritual teacher and stick an icepick in his balls you will see him suffer.
- - - - -
This whole discussion is deeply wrong.

1. Enhanced willpower and capacities, clarity of perception, siddhis(still refining), decreased sleep, rapid insights, bodily bliss, removed Karma in extreme ways. Kriya on psychedelics brought certain degrees of consciousness about. 
2. Started kriya last year 
 

I do a mix of Pranayama 2 + the Pranayama described in Gamana's book.
You can play around with different versions, the essence is the same. I like to visualize energy flowing up the spine to the very top of the head through all the charkas. I think the more precise your visualization gets, the better.
Gamana says not to visualize the energy flowing up each chakra, but I feel it's more powerful to visualize it. I find that doing a detailed visualization also helps stabilize and focus the monkey mind.
Experiment around and see what works best for you.

People seem to be getting into Kriya Yoga after my video, and lots of questions are coming up, so I thought it would be best to accumulate them all in one place.
Post all your Kriya Yoga questions and tips here.
Over time this should become a valuable resource for people. Similar to our monstrously large 5-MeO-DMT Mega-Thread.
Feel free to share your advice, tricks, and progress reports. If we have a lot people doing Kriya, it would be cool to see how many people start experiencing gains and mystical experiences, and how quickly. It would be awesome if we had like 100 people post a progress report after 3, 6, and 12 months of practice. In the name of pseudo-science

And that liberation requires work.
So I don't see what you are disagreeing over.
You speak of liberation as something automatic and effortless. Liberation will require lots of suffering. Which is the point of this thread. Most people are unwilling to pay the price.

@SoonHei The bottom line is that it takes lots of mindfulness pratice and multiple awakenings.
The more you do the work more no-mind you will experience. At first it will be only seconds at a time, but with more practice it will turn into minutes, and then hours.
Kriya yoga is very good for attaining no-mind. It will speed up your progess a lot.
You can also specifically train mindfulness during busy work. Start by doing walking meditation. The try to meditate while driving, while doing the dishes, while out in public, and even inside of conversations. All of this will take a few years at least.
Attaining stable no-mind is not easy at all. It is a very advanced stage of practice and I am certaibly not there after 5 years of meditation and other kinds of work.
But I am getting closer. Just lately I made a significant step towards no-mind and I can see that it will come with years more of practice.
It's worth the work.

I could be way, way, way more conscious than I currently am.
My daily consciousness of God is mild. I want it much stronger.
I don't know. There isn't a simple answer.
100,000+ pranayama

You haven't even begun serious meditation or yogic practice. You don't even understand the effort required.
This is very advanced work. It requires momumental effort.
I recommend you do Kriya yoga. But even learning that will require much more effort than you seem ready to give.
Without effort there is no God and no liberation. Sorry, but that's just reality.
You need to sit down and rethink your priorities and your work ethic. Your priorities are bad and your work ethic is poor.

No, just do it as long as humanly possible.
It's very important that when you do your whole routine, that it be natural and organic. Don't waste too much mental energy criticizing yourself, timing things, analyzing yourself, etc. You must enter a flow state. The whole thing must become silky smooth and effortless. Let go of any self-conscious thoughts and just follow your heart.
Turn off your targeting computer and use The Force