@Silver Sounds like a Buddha in the making.
Your intuitions are exactly right. But don't expect society to support you in that.
The kind of joy you can experience by yourself is infinitely beyond anything the external world can offer you. With nothing but some food and basic shelter you can live like a king. That's why people become monks.

The human species is not going to survive no matter what. Either it will be killed off, or it will have to technologically alter itself to such a degree that it will no longer be recognizable as human.
Evolution is ongoing. Everything morphs. The only question is, How long do we have? Technology is going to evolve a lot faster than genetic evolution.

@RossE Yeah, I've had that experience on shrooms where I look at a clock and laugh because the notion of time is so ridiculous. It's just a spinning thingy!

I’m currently unemployed, 23 years old, living with parents (who are financially supporting me) and i’m being pressured to join the rat-race (i.e. full time job in London). I finished university earlier this year (Yea, that was a total waste of money!) and then travelled for a few months - that’s why i’m unemployed.  Every single part of me doesn’t want to work full time, but obviously I can’t live at home forever and my life purpose as a freelance artist is still very much in its early stages. It just seems like having a full-time job will severely restrict either my life purpose or my consciousness work, both of which are hugely more important than some lame-ass job which I don’t really want. 
 
I want to be independent, support myself financially and ultimately move out of my parents place as soon as possible, but it seems as though the full time London job is the only option. It’s like I can’t escape the standard life trajectory (school-university-job-family etc) that my parents are so desperate for me to go into.
 
I was wondering if anyone in these forums is currently working a full-time day job, whilst also pursuing their life purpose and committing to meditation and consciousness work every day? Would be really interested to hear how you deal with it all and/or advice you may have for me.

London is a very expensive place to live. You might want to consider moving somewhere cheap, and cut all expenses as much as possible.
You gotta get creative here!
You're not gonna make it happen unless you really think outside the box. You're bootstrapping it. Do some research and think creatively about how to set yourself up and what exactly you need to make the life purpose feasible. Then reverse-engineer a strategy to get there.

@Evilwave Heddy Clearly your current job is a dead end and your intuition is telling you to pursue learning. But you're afraid because you have no immediate idea of how learning might lead to something productive or lucrative down the line.
THIS is where life purpose work is done. THIS is where the rubber meets the road. If you can't muster the courage and creativity to pursue your intuitions, you've already failed.
Now you can appreciate why most people have crappy jobs and zero life purpose. Because they do what you're about to do: repress the muse and settle for practicality.
It's not important to know how your passions and intuitions will lead to ultimate success. You will NEVER know that! What's important is to muster the courage to listen and follow your muse with diligence.
And your muse is clearly telling you: GO FUCKING LEARN!

Writers write right? Then if you do that, and enjoy it then you have succeeded.
Business people get busy with business. If you wish to be successful in getting published and book sales, then you need to focus on what it takes to do that. Maybe what you like writing about is not what will sell (today / season). Besides, most writers wrote many books before they got their first book published.
The strange thing about artists (writers included) is that once they start selling their art, and keep doing so for several years, they start becoming successful. Why so long? Because the public starts thinking that because the artist has been around for awhile that they must be successful, and therefore their art must be good. So they buy your art / books to find out what is so good about it. Their minds will adapt to finding what is good about it with minimal criticism or negative judgement. Most of these people will become ardent patrons and keep buying your books (until something better comes along).
So hang in their and don't give up. Be patient. Remember, those that hang in their are most likely to become successful financially.

@onacloudynight from my experience, no. pick up is just a waste of time. it's just a mini-game. don't get stuck in a mini-game.
go deep into yourself. maybe, someday, you'll find a girl who's devoted to consciousness work too. then you'll find a breach for a much deeper domain of development and growth: an intimate relationship devoted to Truth.

Artistic and/or intellectual work.   

Anything to do with being self-employed.  Create your own job.  Find a way to be an abundance of value in a manner that makes wallets crack.  It's that simple.  Sit behind a computer, talk on the phone, make some artifact or provide some service that pays you some sustainable dividends.  Try to find a skill that you can commit to master your whole life.

Any career that chiefly resembles this

 

@Jordan wang Of course. So get a job, hustle, and save up your own money to start a business. Don't expect anyone to support your life. You are very lucky your parents give you any money at all. Most people don't get that.
If you are so smart, you should put your smarts towards supporting yourself, earning a living, moving out on your own, becoming fully independent, and having creating business ideas.
If you're so smart, roll up those sleeves and get to work actualizing that smartness. It's easy to talk big, it's another thing to actually do it in the real world, where nobody gives a shit about your dreams.

@LetTheNewDayBegin Firstly, our universe is not the same as all of reality itself. Consider: what you know of as "our universe" is an infinitesimal part of reality.
Secondly, that is not what is meant by infinity. Infinity is not a size thing. It's not a matter of measuring the universe's perimeter to discover whether the perimeter is or is not finite.
Every physical thing is by definition finite, including the universe. What we mean by infinite is an "object" of actually infinite nature, which means it has no properties whatsoever, and therefore it isn't even an object, nor does it exist nor non-exist. It is Nothing. All of reality as a whole is an infinite non-object, object. Within that are found an infinite number of finite objects, including our universe. All of it neither exists nor doesn't exist. That's why it's called "nonduality". Everything is so ONE that even existence and non-existence collapse into one.

Well, to start off I will say that I actually don't want to write this post. Not because I don't want you to know about the experience I had and not because I'm lazy or something but any words I will use in this post just seem to me like a desperate attempt on trying to impress you, on trying to put something into words that simply cannot be put, on trying to give you any kind of a picture about it. It is in that respect useless to talk about it. And I feel very phony of doing so. Just because of the fact that if you read this post and think that Azrael had some kind of very far out experience and you make it into something great and unreachable and somehow away from you, you are kidding yourself. But I guess it can't be helped and I feel like I should at least try to point out what just happened. So see this as mere entertainment. And to the new ones, read my prior post first so that you can contrast the experiences.
+++ On Being A Pussy And Not Wanting To Do the 30mg +++
It's quite fascinating how confused we are in our normal state of egoic consciousness. And it's quite interesting how afraid we are. Even when you think you are not afraid and you are this tough guy, you're kidding yourself. Every bit of the attitude that you put up is rooted in a deep fear of being exposed. Of failing, of surrendering completely. You learned and embody this so throughly that you are all tensed up all of the time. And because this became so normal on a mere physiological level you actually think this muscular tension is you. It's quite incredible how ridiculous were are. And how well we play it.
But let's forget this point for a few more minutes and start with the story. How did all begin today? Well, it was a quite normal day here in Berlin, Germany. Azrael got up in the morning, ate some breakfast, took a shower, shaved his Zen-Master-looking beard and did his daily HoloSync meditation. What a great one it was. What I guess most of you who haven't done 5-MeO don't realize is that you'll start having flavors of the experience throughout your daily life. And especially in meditation. I recreated most of my last experience (the one in which I talk about our holographic nature). I meditated and saw my whole being flickering in this empty and endless space. I felt how when I move my attention I create that centralized space for that brief moment until it goes anywhere else. Quite fascinating.
As always on the weekends I took a walk after my meditation, bathed in the spaciousness I was still wearing and thought about the day. I had to prepare for a talk I will be giving next week so I did this most of the day. When I finished my work I did my daily visualization. I visualize daily what I did this day in a positive way and then I go through the next day and think about what I will do then in a positive way. I tend to be pretty analytical and negative, so my visualization keeps that in place and opens me up a lot.
When I was done doing that I laid on my bad and was just scared. I had thought the whole day that I wanted to do MeO after my work and now was the time. But I was paralyzed. Can I even physically stand the 30mg? Maybe I'm not prepared enough? Can I really surrender? I don't feel quite as confident today like I would want to feel before such an experience. You know the drill, my mind would be going bunkers. But this is normal. I asked several times inside whether I wanted to do this and my intuition was all for it. Like always. But my mind was very nervous and scared. It didn't want to die. And I respect that. Although I gotta say that the nervousness before the experience was harder then the actual surrendering in the experience. But we'll come to that in a few more moments.
So I basically re-watched Leo's video on 5-MeO-DMT, watched one in which Joe Rogan (the comedian) talks about it and I argued with myself all of the time whether I should be really doing it today. My mind came up with all kind of excuses to put it off for another week. But eventually I went inside again and my intuition really wanted my to do it now, so I did.
+++ The Experience: On Being God +++
So I sat down in front of my desk, played my common tripping music, prepared my couch with fresh water, a hanky and a plastic bag (for the case I had to throw up). Then I weighed 2 gram of Kola Nut powder on my fancy new scale, downed it with a little bit of water and weighed 30mg of 5-MeO-DMT. I waited a few more minutes until I felt the Kola Nut coming up and then I basically got on my knees and visualized that I'll have the most epic experience of my life and then I prayed that I can totally surrender into it. To whom did I pray? The fuck I don't know. Probably to myself, that I just give up the show and won't kill myself by resisting the experience. (I think it really did help.)
So yeah, I made two equal lines out of the gold and sniffed it into my nostrils. Man, just seeing 30mg of this and knowing what kind of experience you had with 15-20mg is very special. The whole act is a surrender. There is nothing easy about this - even though the most epic things follow. It's like you have a gun in front of you and you know that when you'll shoot yourself in the head you will be in heaven... but you gotta do the shooting first. It's like that.
So, I sniff it in and go to my couch, tilting the head upside down and massaging it into my nostrils. I waited 5 minutes until reality got really wanky. Then I sat up normal, opened myself up and tried to focus on love. I thought about a girl I loved once very much, I thought about her face when she laughed and how it completely melted me back then. Meanwhile my pulse was going through the rooftop and I had some difficulty thinking about her because my thoughts began to vanish. My head would be pumped with more and more clearness which felt pretty good and I was very comfortable in my body.
What happened then for the next 15-30 minutes I cannot put into words. I also will not scream with upper letters "OH MY GOD" or "I AM IT" or something like that, because I didn't feel any of this in these moments. I didn't say a word. I had a few thoughts but they were kind of arbitrary. I was completely in shock. Completely speechless. But not in a kind of hectic shock, I was very well relaxed and relieved while I was in this state. It didn't even occurred to me that I'm in shock or speechless until 30 minutes later when I slowly came back and began to understand what just happened.
Every picture I had about it prior to the experience was wrong. You can just not fathom with egoic consciousness what it is that underlies everything. I had no pretty visuals or something like that. I saw very clearly and when I closed my eyes for a moment I guess I saw some patterns, but I didn't pay much attention. I just was it. Everything and nothing. But it wasn't special in any kind of way. It began to be special when I came back and my individual tried to make sense out of it. But in the moment itself, it was completely obvious. It was completely eternal and when I felt my body here and there I just would feel so relieved and speechless. At some point I held my glass of water in my hands and I starred at it for probably 5 minutes without closing my eyes. The whole reality, every sense that I had seemed like a shell you could cut. It was also extremely still. Completely eternal. I had no idea what this word really means. In the peak of the experience it wasn't even explosive or something. When I got from normal egoic consciousness to the state I'm describing, the very transition can be quite explosive although the Kola Nut did a great job in making that a very smooth one, but the experience itself is completely still. It isn't even an experience or state. If you have to think about it, think about it like you peel endless patterns of your normal reality away until there is this one core thing left.. and you are this. God. Complete infinity. It's completely indescribable.
Well, I peaked for about 20 minutes and then slowly I began to understand what just happened and then as I said I just was speechless for a good half hour. I just sat there. I had not much thoughts about it, a few maybe but I was just shocked and speechless. Then at some point when I came down I began to cook and make myself a salad. I did this for a few moments and then just had to sit down again and just cried like a little boy for a god 5 minutes straight. I just couldn't believe what I had done to myself for my entire life and what kind of nasty game I played with myself. I just saw it before my eyes and couldn't believe it.
+++ The Beginning Of The End +++
In the last few hours I had some thoughts coming up that resulted from the experience and seemed pretty authentic to me.
You will never die. This is I guess the one thing I learned. You will never die. Don't be afraid of death (and I know this is easier said then done) but just think back. You as an individual were birthed into this live by magic. This whole existence is magic and there is nothing else then pure love. There never was a moment in your eternal existence in which you really had to fear anything. What shall there be? When you open your eyes you create a whole visual field of reality. You are all of that. When you hear with your ears your create a whole auditory space with your sense of 3D hearing. When you think thoughts you create endless parallel realities in your head that have their own reality. When you go sleep at night you can trust yourself to wake up in the morning. When you go you can trust your legs to carry you around. When you go about your day everything you do comes naturally to you. There is not a thing that is not supportive and loving to you. You just like to spin stories that this is the case and you love to identify with it.
If you really wanna see this this right now, just stop believing your own bullshit. When you drop all thought and belief, you are eternity. You are it. Before you lived you were formless and rested in peace. When you were born you decided to play a game called life to experience this material reality. When you die you let this reality dissolve again and will probably rest for some eternal time and then play some new games. Don't be afraid. It's all good. All of your problems have no value at all. Your negative emotions? Yeah so what, there was no time in your life when you couldn't stand those. It's the nature of negative emotions to be negative and it's your nature as God to provide the space for them to occur. It's the nature of the positive to feel good and create a negative that will come at another time again. If you're attached to this, it's okay. Just say to yourself that you're not believing your own bullshit. And keep up your quest. Time will show this to you.
If I had to put all of this in simple words, I would just say that I'm speechless and relieved. Relieved from the nasty game I played with myself. And even though I know that it'll slowly come come back and grab me again, I know that in the next few months I will go even so much deeper with these experiences that it'll just crack like a shell and will naturally fall off. Nothing else makes sense.
Be good to yourself. And be well.
Cheers, Azrael

That's a fucking powerful quote.

I once dated Tony Robbin's copy writer. She wrote all of his sales copy and got paid very well for it. She knew him very well and many other self-help gurus for whom she also wrote most of their sales copy.
She confided in me that she wished Tony Robbins would retire, because he's so over-worked all the time. He's addicted to success.
I don't like to gossip, but when you learn of these kinds of behind-the-scenes stories, the illusion starts to unravel.
You hit the nail on the head: if you were really unconditionally happy, would you care about success? And would you devote your life to getting other people to become successful, or unconditionally happy?
Notice, that every human being who is truly capable of unconditional happiness, does not teach success, she teaches spirituality. Because success is a second-rate substitute for spirituality. Success is what you pursue when you are spiritually clueless.

@Loreena, in my opinion it does to a certain degree. Before I started working in my profession I had just enough money to live my student life. Then, when I began working I got enough money to not care any more how much I spent on my groceries, whether I can go the bar with my friends this weekend, whether I can share a beautiful dinner with a woman and take her out.
And this gives at least me some kind of freedom. It supports the life that I want to live, so it's a basis in a sense. However, it won't make you happy in the way you want to be happy. When you share a deep conversation with a friend, when you are in love, when you have a great meditation or an enlightenment experience you tap into a kind of bliss that is so beautiful and spontaneous that you'll instantly recognize that everything material you can possess cannot compete with that.

Sooo, boys and girls. I had a quite interesting year and I thought I sum it up in this post, so you can benefit from my lessons and have some fun reading. Plus I'll probably share a little forecast in which direction I currently take my spiritual journey. I'll take the major topics and hindrances I faced this year and illustrate them a little bit and cut all of the uninteresting shit. So it goes like this ...
+++ Existential Crisis +++
If I had to sum up my whole spiritual journey this year with one phrase, it would probably be that: an existential crisis. A complete brain-fuck and wrapping every one of my world-views inside out. It's kind of interesting, I started my meditative journey in early April 2015 and for most of that year and the first two months of 2016 it just gave me lots ad lots of typical benefits. I would be way more calmer, I stopped biting my finger nails, I stopped smoking, I had my first clarity experiences, I was very pumped up to do my meditation etc. etc.
Then in early 2016 I watched @Leo Gura's Free-Will-video and meditated after it one the question: "What is going to happen next?". And in this meditation a strange shift happened. It was a very physical kind of opening (like literally a popping in my head) and from then I could consciously conceive that there are thoughts that I consciously formulate and there are thoughts that just come up and fill up the space. From this day on, my whole life should begin to change.
In the next 4 months I had the deepest experiences of fear, anxiety, helplessness, depression, falling apart etc. etc. that I ever had in my life. Besides that, I had the deepest realizations I had so far on my journey, 3-4 deep awakening experiences that always were surrounded with 1-2 weeks of total bliss and then an even deeper amount of existential crisis than I experienced it before. It all ended in early August I guess, right after I had my first Kundalini awakening in late July. This was one of the strangest things I ever experienced and at the time I didn't even knew what it was. I found out 1-2 months later here on the forum and then through research, that what I experienced was a Kundalini awakening.
Now, this whole phase was extremely strenuous. I had weeks and months in which I would wake up and be bombarded from second one with tremendous and ridiculous thoughts. In my daily meditation it would even get worse and make me completely crazy. I had a few sits I had to end after about 40 minutes because it was too hard. I had phases in which when I went outside I felt any kind of distress another person carries around amplified times a thousand in my own body with awful thoughts screaming at me.
Why did all of this happen? Well, I was bullied when I was about 12-14 years old for doing shitty rap music and I have some regular deficiencies and problems most of us have. If you wanna get out of the trap, you'll have to cut every single one of these bindings to the world. And you have to let go of your shadow. And that's not a pretty process. I had 2 times I seriously thought about suicide, because it was that hard. Funnily, right after these times I had even deeper awakenings.
But well, if you go through such a phase yourself (and you will more than one time probably on your journey) go back to this post and see you are not alone. It's natural and its very good. It gives you so much strength, realization and vision. It's incredible. You come out of that as a new human being.
Also, how did I went through all that w/o going completely nuts. Well, I went nuts for some time to be honest. I had times in which I wasn't sure anymore whether this is just purging or whether I'm mentally insane. I followed my intuition that said "Wait it out" and so I did. Everything was okay. I went through it. In that time I tried literally every kind of meditation technique, listened to every Alan Watts lecture multiple times, listened to tons of Rupert Spira stuff, Mooji stuff, did all sorts of things to help me out and they all did to a certain degree, but in the end I just had to take it and experience it. It's hard, and it's okay to give in in that phase and learn from it. I started smoking again for example, because I knew it would help me out here and I could stop it when I'm through and have the mental power for it. For you it might be eating some ice cream, binging on other shit. Sometimes, this is necessary.
+++ Change in perspective +++
Another key change this year was my change in perspective. When I started out on my enlightenment journey the one thing I was mostly fascinated about was: "How is the day to day perspective of an enlightenment being?" Because they always say: "Well, you have it. You are it." But there still is a change that is happening, right? Why are we doing this work otherwise? Well, yeah there is a shift that happens. And it'll start to happen with your first enlightenment experiences and then slowly sink in to your day to day life over time. That's at least my experience.
I can consciously recognize who i really am at every time. I can see it. And this happened with I guess my second deep enlightenment experience. From then on it stuck. And now its for me more about adjusting my whole life to it that I integrate these experiences and deepen them for the rest of my life. Because, although the simple recognition of who you are is a thing you can either see or not, all of the implications that you can draw from that to your normal life, are endless and can be deepened endlessly. And that's where the journey really begins.
To name some symptoms that stuck with me since I saw: I see colors brighter than I did before. I see new patterns in what I perceive. I see a lot of the games that nature plays with itself. I see how things mutually arise and aren't caused by each other. The list goes on and on. But remember: These are just personal symptoms that came with the recognition. It's not the recognition itself. I have phases in which these symptoms will get amplified and I might tap into huge amounts of intuition. This is where the crazy shit starts. I had 3-4 times visions of events I could have never predicted that turned out the exact same way as when I saw them in a dream. I sometimes have an extremely accurate sense of time (like sitting in a meditation and being able to tell when it ends in the last 2 minutes). I have this 11:11, 10:10, 13:13 phenomena going on a daily basis sometimes 5-10 times since I guess like 6 months now. I had a few mystical encounters in meditations and dreams. And a lot of other crazy shit. I'll probably do a whole post on that in the future. I mean, you can think of that what you want, but if you have it yourself going on very frequently you start to at least see how intelligent and crazy nature is. And that your normal one-coffee-bored-consciousness is not where it ends.
But yeah, my perspective changed completely this year. I recognized who I am and am now able to integrate this for the rest of my life and see where it takes me.
+++ Psychedelic experiences +++
This year, I also started to experiment with psychedelics in a more spiritual and integrative way. I started using psychedelics (mostly LSD) in the summer of 2015, but in this year I did I'd say probably like 10 deep LSD trips, 10-15 DMT-trips, a few shroom trips and then of course the MeO-experiences. I also had 2 bad trips (one on LSD and one on shrooms [actually just 1 week ago]) and I found that these bad trips are the ones that do the deepest inner work and that really change your being permanently. So after some time you'll know how to handle them and use them for this. It's great. Ever since my first and last MeO-breakthrough I am still integrating the experience. I had one sober really, really deep enlightenment experience that lasted for 3-4 hours a few days after the breakthrough and a lot of what I'd call clarity experiences. Also, another round of shit came up over the weeks that I had to deal with and go through. But right now I'm pretty good and I think I can do the next experience in a few weeks (after all this x-mas and new year stuff is over).
In the future I think I will mainly focus on 5-MeO-DMT, shrooms and normal DMT since I found these three substances to do the most permanent and deep healing for me. I use 5-MeO to crack the shell, shrooms to heal the wounds and integrate what is puring out and I will start with normal DMT as well again because I think the realizations you get from it will be hugely intensified through the 5-MeO. Every time I take a substance right now, whether its weed, alcohol, some party drugs or what not, I get a medium to strong MeO experience along the way, which is crazy and pretty cool. I don't know why, but it happens to be that way.
Psychedelics have shown to be a huge amplifier on my own journey. It's great.
+++ HoloSync And Meditation +++
Another biggy is HoloSync. I started using the Awakening Prologue in late August this year and will buy in a few days the Awakening Level 1. HoloSync boosts my daily meditation like motherfucking nuts. It's incredible. I go so much deeper. I sometimes am high from my meditation for 3-4 hours after it (sometimes the whole day). It also induces little existential crisis to integrate your shadow and it's worth its price, if you ask me. I love it. Meditation is just so much more fun with it. Try it out if you wanna boost your journey. It has also shown to help me focus, be more intuitive, more creative and just give me a better feeling throughout the whole day. I totally love it.
Also, another thing I've experimented this year with are various forms of meditation. I did my standard "Do Nothing" + "Strong Determination Sitting". I use these two as my standard and then will lay other layers on top of them like doing some Tao meditations, breath meditations, counting meditations, mantra meditations. Right now I do a mix: I do my HoloSync and in the first 30 minutes I do a counting meditation and in the last 30 minutes I do a mantra meditation with the word "no-thing". I hesitated a lot to do mantra meditations because it is always connected with TM and a lot of people seem to not like it for that reason, but I found out for myself that it gives me great results. So the lesson here is: Try out a bunch of things and do the ones that work. Fuck what other people are saying. If it works for you great, do it. Engineer your own techniques.
+++ Going The Whole Way +++
Well, and lastly I wanna take all this and put it in a box. I hope that if you've read that far, one thing you picked up is that I had a lot of highs and downs, a lot of trial and error, a lot of crazy shit, but that's just the journey. Was my existential crisis bad? Yeah, it was fucking nuts. But anytime right I have negative shit coming up for a few weeks I kind of laugh about it in my mind because it has no real power anymore. I know anxiety, pain, anger, loneliness, being tied to these things so deeply and intimately that they don't scare me anymore. Every thing I go through is there to let me know that the person I was always seeking and was always wanting to be, is just myself. Is just giving up the search. Giving up the "wanting to be different". And that everything I should do, comes from an inspiration that arises by itself when I rest in this calm and fulfilled state. But it takes some time to get there. It takes heavy seeking to arrive at the point where you can't seek anymore and have to give it up. It takes massive action. And even then you'll have cycle after cycle that shows you new stuff, that presents new challenges etc. etc. But along the way you'll become a master of it. You'll master yourself and you'll lose all fears and all hectic to get it done.
So if you take one thing away from this post, then it is this: To become abundant, happy and fulfilled and enlightened, you have to take your neurotic being and try go get there by pushing so hard for it that you'll see at some point that you just can't keep up with the work you have to do to keep this happiness. And then you'll fall a deep, deep way to the bottom and realize that you are happy and abundant by default, that inspiration and realization happens by itself, and that action will always come and pick you up when you wait for it to arise. It'll show you the way. It always does. And you'll have the time of your life.
So, go the whole way and see for yourself. There is no rush, there is no one to get there first. It's just a ride you can take if you want.
Anyways,
merry motherfuckin' x-mas from your silly-ass angel of death... Azrael

It's 8:15 a.m. And precisely 6 and a half hours ago, I was on my bed, having an amazing experience. Now I'm here, talking to you about it. 
Part 1 -- The Setup. 
When Leo uploaded his videos about psychedelics, I got really interested. Then he updated the book list, I ordered "Being Infinite," Martin Ball's autobiography. It took a while to arrive but I finished it on Friday.
It got me really interested in using altered states of consciousness for personal and spiritual growth. 
On Sunday, Austin posted a review of Robert Monroe's book "Journeys Out Of The Body," and I decided to try this out for myself. I looked up Emerald's videos on how to have an OBE.
And I went to sleep, hoping something amazing was about to happen. To put it mildly, I was not disappointed. 
Part 2 -- The Trip. 
I know people don't really call that a trip, but you know what I mean.
It was hot as fuck in my bedroom. I was sweating. So I took my shirt off. It took me a while to fall asleep, so I had to set the timer for 1 hour later than what I initially set up. I think I went to bed with too much anticipation. I was too excited, which kinda prevented me to fall asleep. 
Anyways, it's now 1:41, the alarm just stopped ringing, and I'm in sleep paralysis. I hear vibrations, perfect auditory representations of my brain waves. I can't move...
This feeling is amazing. I've been doing SDS for more than a year now, and I keep telling myself I can't move, but in the back my mind I know I can. This was the opposite, I told myself I could move, but in the back of my mind I knew I couldn't. It kinda sucked, though, because I was not in physical symmetry, and that may have interfered with the experience. 
Very quickly I tried just floating outside of my body. Too quickly I presume. Because I didn't. I gave up, quite quickly. I was done with it by 1:47. And then there was a lot of "OH MY GOD I can't believe I just had this experience !"
Because it was still a really powerful experience.
Part 3 -- Reflections. 
So no nifty experience happened. No "other realm" was visited. Just me, on my bed. But... lessons learned. 
I got conscious that I am not this body. I felt that I was not this body. Also I got conscious that those thoughts were this body's thoughts, just like this sight is this body's sight. 
I got a glimpse of a glimpse of a glimpse of a glimpse of the true nature of my own being. And I was MIND BLOWN !!!!
It was so beautiful !!!! I'm in love with everything. 
I'm deep in ego right now... And I'm like "why am I in ego ? I shouldn't be in ego !"
Tonight I'll just go to sleep, just like any other night, then, when the alarm rings, I'll make sure to stay slow and relaxed. Really master the Sleep Paralysis stage. Then I'll move out of my body.
If I am not this body, then who am I ?

You are the awareness in which the notion of having a body, having thoughts, consciously feeling things, making sense out of sense perceptions etc. arises. If you ever have a near-death experience this will become crystal clear, because in the moment of dying every bit of your perception goes away but one no-thing stays and you instantly begin to recognize that you are that (if you are looking for it).

@all, I would just encourage you to really do some research, if you wanna get involved in it. This can be quite fun because you learn some new skills on how to live in the 21th century in which everything seems possible. Of course if you wanna restrict yourself and take normal routes of administration, you'll probably not find it very soon. 5-MeO-DMT is something very exotic and not well-distributed.
If you read my posts on it I give a lot of very direct pointers in which direction to look. Be thankful for that information and act on it if you want. But of course you gotta do some good research. And don't contact me on this issue. I sometimes get several people asking me PER DAY on how to get 5-MeO. And I won't help you simply because you should really contemplate whether you are ready for this. And if you are, you will have the will to do the research and find it.
And that in my opinion is needed, so that the newbies just don't get hold of it and fuck their brains out. If 5-MeO can be used to permanently enlighten you and change your body/mind it surely can fuck you up if you don't use it correctly. Be aware of this. This is not some acid or shrooms that'll give you some fun experience but this will permanently alter your awareness. 

So, I got myself involved in 5-MeO-DMT. But before I start this post, I'd like to point out that if you wanna know a little bit about my psychedelic background and another fun trip report, you might wanna read my report on shrooms first - if you haven't. There I describe my background with this etc. You can find it here.
+++ Research, Planning And a Fun Experiment +++
So, how did it all start? Let's go back in time. Roughly two months ago when Leo released his mushroom videos I wrote with him here on the forum about my experiences with psychedelics, told him about one bad trip that I had and so on. In this conversation he said I should checkout 5-MeO-DMT and that nothing really compares to that.
I gotta say I was kind of skeptical at first. I had done regular n,n-DMT and thought that this would be as "high as it gets". Little did I know. So I did some research over the weeks into MeO, asked some friends who had done it and read a lot. After a few weeks I forgot about it mostly because I had exams to learn for and interesting projects at work.
Then Leo released his video about becoming God. I still remember how I listened to that in the morning while eating breakfast and I'm like: "This can only be MeO." So I waited a week until he made his video about it. So I thought, I better get involved in this. This sounds transformational and scary and I'm up for super-charging my progress. I did some more research and got me 250mg of 5-MeO-DMT, lab-tested with a minimum of 98% purity in HCL form. Don't ask me where I got it, if you can't do the research, don't do it. Onions might have been involved in this process, one rumors.
So, I basically set up an experiment that I was going to undertake. The question I want to solve is: "Can a habitual use of 5-MeO-DMT used 1-2 a month raise my awareness permanently if used for 6-12 months?" This is the question I wanna investigate with this. To do that, I will do the tripping and document what happens with me. I plan to release I'd say at least 1 post per month here on the forum on my experiences - but more importantly on the development that happens in me. This is why I do this. I am actually thinking about making this in a video form (me telling this to you instead of writing). I might do that if the changes that occur are as deep as I expect them to be so that the cost of exposure and the investment in time and effort will be worth it. We'll see. If you like this whole experiment, like the posts and comment, ask questions and so on, so that I see that you guys are interested. If not, I'll document this just privately for me or later purposes.
So, I got all this down and last Thursday, the 6th of October was the day it should all begin. So let's jump right into it.
+++ The First Two Dosages: Light and Medium +++
How do you prepare to die? That's the question I asked myself before I did the first trip. And you really can't. You can just try to be at peace with whatever happens as much as you can be. This is rather difficult, because your mind can simply not come up with any framework that brings it at peace with non-existence. You have to let that go. I was pretty scared and nervous before the first trip, to be honest with you. I did all the stuff I had to do on that day, so that I had time to prepare, to do and integrate the first experiences with this beast of a drug.
Before I started, I laid on my bed, closed my eyes and went deep inside. I talked to my unconscious and asked it whether it really wants to do this kind of experience and whether I could accept to die into it, so that it could become everything. I listened to my intuition that was in for it. That calmed me down a lot and was the basis for the surrendering I had to do here. I would've quit the whole thing if something in me would've not wanted this authentically.
The following is a sum-up of three light-to-medium trips I took on Thursday and Saturday. They are based on 1x 15mg and 2x 20mg of MeO and had similar effects.
I weighted the dosage on my scale, made two halves out of it, turned on my tripping music very quietly and snorted the powder in with a third of a straw. You basically wanna sniff it in with the least energy to get it inside, so that it stays in the nostrils. Then you hold a finger on the nostril opening, do the other nostril, cover that and sit down on your couch / bed.
I sat down on my bed, tilted my head upside down and massaged the MeO into my nostrils. It burns a little bit but not very much in my experience. After 3-5 minutes my reality would get wanky and I would lie down on my bed very openly. I tried to focus on my breathing that got slower and slower while my pulse would be shooting through the top. And I mean through the the motherfucking top. You have not experienced this kind of pulse ever before in your life (if you weren't confronted with a death-like situation). I knew this would be coming, but man. You begin to worry a little bit if you can even physically take this. Then my bodily tensions and pressures slowly vanished, I closed my eyes and all I could feel is my pulse, a feeling of terror in my abdomen and a very slow breath. I mainly focused on keeping my breath going because it felt like it would stop any second if don't consciously breathe. (This is a known feature of the MeO-experience that it feels like your breath stops, however it doesn't. One does not have to be afraid of this. However, if you feel this the first time it is very heavy to say the least. Me whole body gave me signals that I'm going to die right now and it felt like I was on the edge for a good twenty minutes.
So what did I do? How do you face such a situation? With eyes closed I just tried to get in contact with this force that birthed me into life and that makes and shapes me every moment. I actually kinda got hold of this and it felt very much like home and that I could just surrender into it. I was on the verge of psychological death. I totally gave in. In these 20 minutes it felt like I purged 10 years of emotional baggage. Every fear and every fight that I ever had with myself just vanished and disappeared as I faced my own death here. It is - to say the least - transformational and scary.
After 30 minutes the terror kind of went away, I opened my eyes and was just bathed in this clearness. I laid on my bed for I don't know how long and was just there. No thoughts, no interpretation, no worries, no hopes, no fears. Just stillness and clearness. It was sick, I gotta say. After it, a lot of the heightened awareness actually stayed and is still present. It cut out in the last couple of days a lot of unnecessary thoughts. My meditation practice feels super-charged and my unwanted desires mostly went away. I'm not in a meditative state, but just really grounded and authentic. I don't resist myself anymore - at least in the last few days - and every kind of conflict or negative association just melts because of what happened there. Like, you don't have to do anything to stay grounded and aware, you just are because even if a earthly worry would come up it just is not equipped to hypnotize you anymore, because you have faced your own death. And nothing is greater then that.
You faced your personal ever-nearing apocalypse - and nothing else compares. That's it. But that should just be the beginning.
+++ The strong semi-breakthrough dosage +++
For Saturday evening I had planned the last initial dosage. 30mg. Boy, I wouldn't have dreamed in my wildest dreams that 10 godly milligrams could do such a difference. I had expected that I would go from near-death to a kind of void and that this is it. Yeah, think again.
So I followed up on the normal procedure I described above, sat down on the bed massaging my nostrils. 3 minutes in the reality would get wanky again. So I laid down on my bed and expected the upcome to take at least a few more minutes. I don't know how long it actually took but I suspect 5-10 seconds when I laid down and opened up I was just gone. My mind just started collapsing in on itself. Indescribable. Pulse through the top, breath on the verge of being existent, bodily tensions and feelings not there unless a big, mother... god-fucking big existential terror in my abdomen. It felt like my whole nervous system collapsed in on itself, my mind tried to wrap its head around it and just every frame of reference vanished.
You don't even remotely suspect how deep your ego shapes your perception. Every experience you have, everything you take in and make sense out of is combined with your web of beliefs. Even the most little thing like taking a breath is carrying years and years of your ego in it. Every little cell in your body. And now imagine all of this goes down to zero, nada, nothing. Just collapses in on yourself. It is by far the deepest kind of transformation you could ever experience. You are just blown away and every tool that your mind uses to come up with a calming solution of "you can handle that in a certain way" just isn't there. You're basically going insane while you are dying while it feels like every two seconds you are flushed with the doubled amount of awareness you just had. Very, very intense experience, guys. Very intense.
This is such an physical experience that I actually thought I gotta vomit. It felt like my body would explode and implode every few moments. So I ran to the toilet, put a finger in my throat and tried to vomit. Nothing happened. And I'm like: "What the fuck?" I never in my life was so certain that I gotta vomit and I never put my finger so deep into my throat to get me to do this. But I just didn't.
So I laid back down in my bed for about 10 seconds and then got up because I thought I gotta vomit again. Didn't happen. The second time hanging over the toilet I realized that I'm completely transforming right now and that this is probably the cause of me thinking I gotta vomit. This was one of the only thoughts I had in these moments. Dear, dear thought. I was happy that you were around, buddy. At least a little calm.
So I got back to my bed, laid down again, opened up, massaged my navel a little bit (which a friend of mine - a Qigong practitioner - recommended to me to get my awareness from my head into my abdomen which calms you down) and closed my eyes. In that moment all tensions, the existential terror and the complete shock I was in just exploded in this ever-still moment that expanded in all directions while not moving at all. I was that for a brief time and then were birthed again into my ego, were ripped out of again and then were the stillness again. This occurred for some time.
God is a beast, man. A fucking beast.
After having this for some time I managed to surrender into this birthing and dying every few moments and flowed with it for a few moments. It was the most majestic, horrifying, loving, still and moving I don't know what to call it that I have ever seen. Completely impossible. In the process I actually thought I died because there was no indication left that I was alive. Having done that it birthed and destroyed me for some more time, like 10 minutes and I opened my eyes and surrendered to the process. I merged with everything I could see, I was the room, the thing itself and the viewer of it. I was still being pumped with tremendous amounts of awareness every few seconds. Fuck me man, this is nuts I thought.
By looking at the things in my room they changed their boundaries like every few seconds. Like the shelve and the wall would now be one thing, then everything would blur out and then they formed a different object again. No hallucinations, but just every kind of way you could perceive an object in like 30 seconds. I didn't even try to understand this.
After 45 minutes I slowly came out and by that time didn't even care anymore whether I was breathing, my pulse was going through the top or whatever just happened. I was completely wiped clean, bathing in this stillness and nothingness and slowly saw how my ego began to put my world together again.
After that I smoked a cigarette and took a walk. My head was surprisingly still and cool with what just happened and was happy to have even greater amounts of awareness and stillness, no bad thoughts coming up, feeling very authentic. I asked myself whether I wanna do this again for 6-12 months on a bi-weekly basis and my intuition was still in for it.
Why do I call this a semi-breakthrough and not a genuine breakthrough? I think that if I do this a couple of times and increase the dosage 3-5mg I would be leaving most of the terror behind and bath more consistently in the absolute. I was kind of going in and out here the whole time which was kind of crazy. So we'll see next time.
+++ The Aftermath +++
So, I guess you read all of this and just think: "What the fuck, how could anyone ever do something like that to himself?" Let me tell you why. In this moment of complete shock, terror and then dissolving into the absolute you are shown your own birth and death. You actually see how you die every few moments and then are born again a moment later. You see how you are this collection of thoughts, perceptions and emotions and how they spontaneously arise out of an infinite pool of possibilities. 
I'd guess that if you do that for a few times you can surrender so deeply into it that most of the terror dissolves and you just die into the beauty and majesty of it. Of your own divine nature. I also guess from the aftermath that I experience right now that your own mind has to rebuild itself in a higher order after these experiences because it has no framework to handle it with your limited view.
Besides that, I guess that this will lead to the most mature emotionality a human being can have because you learn to accept dying here. That means that over some time nothing really can bug you anymore, because you have experienced and surrendered to your death and have seen beyond it. This I would conclude can lead to tremendous psychological changes that could cause an permanent awakening because nothing else can really handle such an experience. No framework of a normal sleeping mind can do that.
Also, the feeling and awareness you get after these experiences are amazing. It feels like being reborn again, clean. It feels like I have done 3 years of daily meditation in 45 minutes, 3 years of talking and fighting and adjusting myself. It is that powerful. I think that it just gets more powerful the more you do it, although it is scary and horrifying to a degree. But you also see that there is really nothing that can really destroy you. And that itself is transforming.
So yeah, that's my take on the first experiences. If you are interested in me posting more of this and documenting my journey here on the forum, like this, comment and let me now. I'll go through that and see where I end up. I think it's gonna be a good place. The last few days were the most exciting, refreshing and calm days I had in my entire life.
Cheers to 5-MeO-DMT,
Azrael

If you meditate long enough, deep enough, it is impossible for you to hurt anybody for food; it is impossible. It is not a question of argument, it is not a question of scriptures, it is not who says what, it is not a question of calculating that if you take vegetarian food you will become spiritual; it is automatic. The whole thing seems so absurd. Just for food, killing animals, birds, seems so absurd, it falls down.
You can be a vegetarian and cruel to the extreme, and violent; you can be a non-vegetarian and kind and loving. In India there are communities who have lived totally with vegetarian food; many Brahmins have lived totally with vegetarian food, but they are not spiritual.
I don’t take non-vegetarian food has nothing to do with religion, it is just pure aesthetics. I am not one who thinks that if you take non-vegetarian food you will not become enlightened. Jesus became enlightened, Mohammed became enlightened, Ramakrishna became enlightened — there has been no problem about it.  Your humanity is at stake, not your super-humanity. 
 Just to think that you are killing an animal to eat, just the very idea, is unaesthetic. I am not against it because the animal is killed… because that which is essential in the animal will live, it cannot be killed, and that which is nonessential, whether you kill it or not, is going to die. 
The question is not that you have killed the animal and killing is not good, no. The question is that you have killed the animal — you. Just to eat? While good vegetarian food is available? If vegetarian food is not available, that’s one thing. But the food is available. Then why? Then why destroy a body? And if you can kill an animal, then why not be a cannibal? What is wrong with killing a man? The meat derived from a human body will be more in tune with you. Why not start eating human beings? That too is a question of aesthetics.
It has nothing to do with meditation. You can eat meat and you can meditate. You can eat meat and you can love. It has nothing to do with love either. But you will be showing one thing about yourself — that you are very crude, that you are very primitive, uncultured, uncivilized; that you don’t have any sense of how life should be. 

@The White Belt The mind always creates resistance when you try to make big positive changes to your life. This is normal. I always experience resistance when I start a big important self-help course. Just try as best you can to push through it and maintain consistency. Over time, the mind will quiet down. The trick is to not let the whining get you to quit a good thing.
Remember, that you also don't need to be 100% perfect in doing the course. 80% is good enough. 80% is enough to change your life.
Don't feel bad about finding your life purpose. It's really a necessary component of a conscious life. Even if you got enlightenment tomorrow, you would still want to develop a conscious way of making a living. So by doing this work now, you are helping yourself become conscious, and then in the future take the ultimate step to enlightenment.
Don't feel guilty for walking a comprehensive spiritual path. Just make sure you don't get trapped in success to the point where you neglect enlightenment.
Anything you can do to make your life more conscious is a great thing. Whether it's cleaning up your diet, relationships, career, friendships, or whatever. That is NOT wasted effort. That's all great stuff which is part of the comprehensive spiritual path. Sure, it's not directly related to enlightenment, but you gotta start with getting the basics in place or you will be unable to sustain enlightenment.
Remember, that if you're still young -- like in your 20's -- you've got plenty of time to pace yourself and address many aspects of your life. Just don't take that as license to slack off and watch TV.

You should've seen how I was feeling last night, while sitting in my room, and while outside was raining hard and the thunderstorm was really nasty. I was in a state of being so profound and simplistic, that, from a certain point, I started to enjoy every movement seen outside, like a four year old at the sight of a toy. 
I really didn't need anything, and this state of unconditional joy grows each day passing by, because I realize deeper and deeper that everything that I'll ever need to be content is The Present, The Moment, and nothing more. 
It's just miraculos and ridiculously funny how this thing is right under humanity's nose and yet people fail to see it, because of the wrong growth direction and education.