SeaMonster

That's not what enlightenment means. It doesn't mean you become emotionally numb or a comic superhero or anything else your imagination wants to conjure up. It means you no longer believe in the false idea of self that creates an alienation from your true nature.

Dumb schmucks need charismatic leaders to educate them. Of course, being dumb schmucks they can't tell if the charismatic leader is full of shit or not.

I would guess that approaches 100% of seekers, but they would also almost never admit it. There is a high seriousness that surrounds seeking, with all kinds of moral undertones about the purity of motivations for seeking. In reality, it's close to 100% a search for relief from neurosis or worse.

White Supermind, motherfuckers!

God, you people are so uber-serious you can't take an obvious joke. Although, in all actuality, it doesn't matter what your motivation for enlightenment is, the real issue is whether you awaken or not. Whatever the motivational thoughts that led to that drop off anyway. You could be motivated by thinking you'll get laid or make more money. How you get there doesn't matter. People who think they have PURE motivations in seeking are lying to themselves anyway. Let me introduce you to "stop being influenced by whacked out Leo Gura videos." The basic question is, what is your current conception of "I"? Is there a center point, or mindbody identification?

If that's a stable state, that could be the first stage of nondual awakening. The center point is gone, and there sort of a localized emptiness, like a ball of nothingness. There is still an idea of "me" though, it's just not the old idea. Once the idea of "me" is seen as a social fiction, that's enlightenment.

Refer to this and acquaint yourselves with the lyrics, because reading through this forum some of you are just mad ridiculous.

My thoughtful perspective would be, date other girls. If she comes back and wants to resume the relationship AND you're upto it, ok. Otherwise it's ridiculous.

Better get enlightened in this lifetime so you don't have to reincarnate as a human.

Not Gods, angels.

The world doesn't operate on SHOULDS, but on what is. Men have the burden of performance.

So you didn't have a girlfriend, you had a girl who was a friend, and a particularly dishonest one at that. All you lost was 9 mos., nothing else and gained a valuable lesson, so on the whole it's a wash.

You have to address whom you're improving for. Is it to please others / receive approval from others or is your improvement something in line with what you want for yourself, your life purpose, what is best for you.

That's just a label for something, not holding on to an idea of what your experience is supposed to be. That something is experienced as complete surrender.

It's hard to miss something after realizing it was never real to begin with.

What do you mean you've had no luck with the gym? That is entirely under your control. You can make incremental progress if you keep doing it. I suspect the real problem for you is how you THINK about these things, your mindset is in serious need of adjustment.

You're framing the issue incorrectly. It's not about limitless self-improvement. That's a mindset where you're chasing the impossible. It's about reorienting yourself to align with your own life purpose.

Like everyone else, massive self-delusion. Delude yourself into thinking you're in the next stage. Your life won't actually be different, and you'll be as miserable as you were before, but as a tiny consolation prize you'll be able to feel superior to people at a lower stage.

Only in a good way.

I mean, that is most of it. This plus physical exercise, so add your bicyling to that.

Yes, it's called The Natural State, sahaja samadhi, etc. This is the realization that everything that happens happens naturally, and any thread of identification has always been a fallacy. There is no sweet spot, there is no "let's be attached just a little bit", there is no compromise with The Absolute. You have to let go completely.

Power isn't controlling what other people do, it's controlling what you do. If women could control themselves, the world would be very different, instead they seem to focus a lot of their energy on controlling men. A lot of "porn"/OnlyFans/CamGirls is this very thing: women controlling men, trying to get their attention and money. If women controlled themselves and stopped MAKING porn, the porn industry would collapse too.

The negative vibe comes mostly from low-information/low-IQ caricatures of it. In its unadulterated form, it's just raw truth without telling you how to feel about that truth or how to act on that information. It's actually extremely integral to spiritual enlightenment. If you get spiritually enlightened, at some point you have to contend with socially programmed myths as part of your integration process. So it's not supposed to cause you to become bitter about women -- it's supposed to dispel whatever self-undermining myths you've believed about women so you can live appropriately AS a man. Like you said, two years of experience of trying to do pickup allows you to see and understand things you can't UNSEE. Believing the myths nice guys believe ends.

It's not an intellectual process. It doesn't matter if you intellectually get that identity is constructed, you have to drop identification so that the subject-object duality (the belief that there is a "real" as opposed to "virtual" split between "you" and "the world") permanently disappears. This is why seekers use techniques such as self-inquiry, meditation, etc. In other words, the only utility of "realizations" is that it becomes easier to change habits which are by their nature reflective of this limiting self-identity mindset.

Sounds yummy. Good job. You get used to eating healthy after 6 weeks or so, give or take, a junk food habit requires a brief detox.