What videos of actualized.org have helped you deal with OCD? 

So easy. Imagine an adult you hugging a sad suffering child you.
And many other visualizations are possible. Like loving your entire life, body, and mind exactly as it is.

Two basic solutions to this problem:
1) Practice Self-Love. Using visualization, give yourself the love that your wish your mother gave you. Give yourself unlimited love. Give yourself the love you which any woman or girlfriend would give you. Do this for 10 minutes every day for several months. It will make a big difference.
2) Go attract some women and have sex with them. Get a girlfriend.
After you do steps 1 & 2, your problem should be gone. If not, repeat steps 1 & 2.

You need to learn to set boundaries and communicate your values and boundaries to people rather than acting silent or passive aggressive.
Better communication is crucial.
People-pleasing is a common problem. It's worth taking the time to work that out in yourself. You don't want to live as a people-pleaser your whole life.
Once you solve your people-pleasing, then you will be able to effectively communicate and enforce your values and boundaries with people, and you won't have to ignore them or suffering silently.

@ethanb121  Sounds like you're in need of serious healing work.
I would look for an energetic / psychic healer in your town who you can talk to. Try out several of them to find one you resonate with and go as often as you can. They usually cost: $70 - $150 / session.
This is something you'll want another person to help you with. The worst thing for you is to be too isolated and not around high-consciousness people. You need someone who can help you shift your energy around and show you new perspectives on life.
I would not rely too much on traditional medical professionals. They rarely understand the root issues of things. Clearly there is mental trauma that you're struggling with. Some drug is not going to magically fix it.
I also recommend you get thorough bloodwork testing. Find out if there's anything missing. Also check for heavy metal toxicity via provoked urine testing. Heave metals in the brain can cause all sorts of problems like this. Get your health and nutrition in order. Do detox protocols. Liver detox, kidney detox, heavy metal detox, etc.
And overall I just recommend you do A LOT of research into your condition. Search the web, buy books on this exact issue, read, take notes, find people who have successfully cured  themselves and copy what they did. Research is crucial. You need to understand this condition in and out. And not just what traditional medicine says. Look into all sorts of alternative medicine approaches.
Sorry, not much advice I can offer besides this as I don't specialize in these kinds of issues.
I would also add:
1) Psychedelics might save your life
2) Start practicing self-love immediately. You need to open your heart, live more from your heart not your head, and forgive yourself and fully accept and love yourself exactly as you are. See a psychic healer who can show you how to get out of your head and reside in your heart. The heart doesn't contain all those thoughts. Find some guided meditations which shift you into your heart and use those religiously.
3) Neurofeedback brain training could also be very effective for such a condition. You can search for neurofeedback centers and specialists in your town. Every major town has them. A dozen of those sessions could cure you or at least reduce your suffering.
4) Hypnosis might also be very effective. Look for hypnotherapists in your town.

@Romer02 What you bring fully into awareness, you transcend. It’s not a becoming or not, but a becoming aware of or not. 

Closing is a very specific skill set.
If you want to just date randomly and see what happens, go ahead. But you'll lose lots of girls. If you're okay with that, fine. But most guys would get very frustrated and want to construct an optimized skill set to deal with the repeated challenges.
@Elisabeth I understand your disgust, but you also have to see the relativity of the situation. Dating for men and for women is very different. This advice doesn't make sense from a woman's perspective but it does from the man's. You have to appreciate how much rejection the man has to deal with. It's not like the man can only approach one girl and make it happen. He has to approach hundreds. That process by its very nature is mechanical and objectifying, not just of the woman but also for the man. Imagine approaching 100 people and getting rejected 95 times. What do you do? Imagine that out of 100 approaches you get 5 people to like you and agree to come home with you because it's the world's perfect match. A match made in heaven. But then 4 in 5 times the person's friends will come and drag them away and you will never speak to them again. What do you do when facing such odds?
See, from the woman's POV none of this is noticed as a problem because you play the selector role and you don't have to do 100s of approaches. From your POV, one right approach is all it takes because you are on the receiving end of the approach. So from your selfish POV you think a guy should invest tons of energy into one approach. But from the guy's POV it's exactly the opposite. He can't invest any energy into any one approach because most of them fail.
Notice the relativity in self-agenda here. If you say, "But what about true love?" Yeah, that's your female self-agenda. "True love" is defined differently for a female vs a male given their reproductive asymmetries.
Neither side is right. It's relative. It's survival. It's selfishness.
My advice was for men, not for women. Of course women are not going to like it because if dating advice is any good it, by definition, encroaches on the other gender's self-agenda. The man's agenda is to invest less energy into the woman, the woman's agenda is to have the man invest all his energy into her alone. At least initially until a serious relationship is formed. Then things can equalize somewhat.

Closing involves a lot of factors and is an art in itself. This is perhaps the most advanced aspect of game on which hinge most of your results.
Basically closing requires being really experienced at these things:
Screening her to make sure she's possible to isolate Being really good at planning logistics on the fly. Being really good at improvising new plans Leading -- getting her used to following you around Bouncing between various locations A convenient place to isolate her to (could be her place, or even a rented motel room, or even behind the elevator) Dealing with last minute resistance, shit-tests, and endless excuses Dealing with her annoying friends who will try to cockblock you every chance they get Seduction -- physically and emotionally turning her on. How do you learn all the above? Lots of trial and error, watching other experienced guys do it, and by studying some basic theory.
Expect a lot of failure and near misses.
One of the dirty secrets of PUA is that even the best guys only close like 50% of the women they manage to bring home. In the end, you can't force her. And many times she will be too relucant. But even to reach this point already takes serious skill. Just learning how to isolate her is tricky. There will be so many excuses and logistical obstacles. Endless excuses.
Even once you get her panties off, it's still not a lock. You can lose her at any point. You can even lose her while you're inside her! It's a circus.
Nothing will increase you lay count more than having a convenient place very near to where you met her. This is HUGE! It's so important it's worth paying an extra $1000/mo for it. Living within walking distance of the club/bar is priceless in game. If you have to drive 40 mins to your Mom's house, forget about it.

Working with emotions is very tricky stuff because they are not logical and they completely control one's behavior and thoughts.
Bulling your way through emotional issues with a cold heart and lots of discipline will not work.
Emotional issues require a compassionate, gentle, loving, mindful approach.
It's about becoming heart-centered rather than stuck in your head. It's about feeling into things, feeling into your body.
The whole macho attitude of dominating emotional problems has to go.

That should be plainly obvious when you watch how conservatives defend Trump and war.
They operate from an entirely different (and lower) level of consciousness.
Anyone who advocates for war gives himself away right away. That tells you who they are. A highly conscious being would never advocate for war.
To be fair, plenty of centrist neoliberals also advocate for war. They are slightly more evolved, but not by much.
Also the nationalism is a dead givaway of low consciousness. Nationalism is what gives rise to the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, mysogeny, culture wars, and fascistic/authoritarian leanings.
Why do all the Republican Senators support Trump's brazen illegality and devilry? Because in their heart they like the notion of a strongman / authoritarian, as long as he is THEIR authoritarian. So they follow like sheep.
Liberals are less inclined to behave this way. Liberals are less conformist, more free-thinking (even though they still of course get trapped in group-think).
Studies show that liberals have higher openmindedness. Which is a key dimension of consciousness. You can't be conscious and closedminded at the same time.

Psychedelics are a catalyst for facing one's shadow and transcending one's ego. The more dysfunctional one's ego is, the more shadow one has, the less stable one's mind is, the more things can go wrong during a trip.
People with mental illness or disorders need psychedelics more than anyone, but they are also less likely to handle facing their shadow.
It's like a high stakes bet for such people. If you win, you win big. If you lose, it will be hell.
Proper and very gradual dosing is crucial in such cases. You don't want to bite off more than you can chew. The less mentally stable and whole that you are, the less you can chew, the less you should bite.
Of course if you are mentally unstable the less likely you are to follow my advice, the more sloppy your approach will be, the more likely you are to overdose and freak out. Ignorance cannot help being ignorant.

Keep in mind that things have evolved a lot since Da Vinci's time.
Today to succeed you must be more specialized. You can't be an architect, a painter, an engineer, and a writer because you will be out-competed by others who specialize in just one thing.
Back in Da Vinci's time fields like engineering, architecture, etc. were not as developed or deep as they are today. It will take you 10 years of study just to become a decent engineer. And now you need work experience, licenses, certifications, etc.
So you can certainly be a polymath in the casual sense of studying lots of topics, but you ain't gonna master them all enough to make a career out of. Pick your career field more carefully. Even something like Engineering is far too broad. You need to pick what kind of engineer you want to be.
Competition is a lot more fierce today. So many amazing specialists to compete against. And it's a global marketplace. In Da Vinci's time the marketplace was a single city of 300,000 people, most of whom were peasants who couldn't read.

It's not true acceptance if in the back of your mind you're accepting it only so that you can avoid facing it.
"I accept that I have gay desires as long as that means I won't ever have any gay sex" << that's not acceptance!
True acceptance would be: "It's okay if the only kind of sex I have in my life from now on is gay sex."
Acceptance requires that you face the thing you don't want to face. Not hypothetically, but actually. That doesn't mean you actually have to have sex with a man, but you do have to face and accept the prospect of it until the point where it doesn't bother you.

1) It's an excellent teaching
2) If you still have no clue how to let go, you haven't really been listening. The teaching is super, super simple.
There is no method for letting go. You just let go. That is the method. Simple. But it requires practice. Stop looking for intellectual explanations. Just do it.

I think what everyone overlooks is the simple fact that people have different nutritional needs. There is no one best diet in the abstract. The question is always: What is the best diet FOR ME? And that you can only discover through trial and error.
There are many factors at play: your genetics, geography, climate, your budget, your health conditions, your level of development, etc.
I have found that vegetarian does not work well for me. It doesn't give me the energy that I need to function well. But it would be a mistake to apply my conclusion to all other people. My conclusion is for me.

Once you know that your heart is not into a thing, that is the end of that. There is no use pretending you can make it work.
If your heart is not into engineering you will never succeed at it. So that's not even an option for you.
Just accept it and move on with pursuing what your heart is calling you to do. Deal with the obstacles and problems as they arise. If your parents refuse to help you in following your heart, then follow it anyway without their help.
Don't let following your heart be negotiable. You can't succeed at something your heart isn't into.

You're right that you DO have to distinguish between good and bad resources, teachings, teachers, etc.
This is a deep epistemic problem which ultimately roots in the problem of distinguishing truth from falsehood. How do you know what is true vs what is false? If you had an easy answer to that, you'd be awake and you wouldn't need to ask the question. The whole challenge of life is that when you enter it, you start from ground zero with no idea how to distinguish truth from falsehood. So then an epistemic journey begins. Through a combination of life experience, contemplation, research, intuition, wisdom, and trial & error you slowly learn to sort out truth from falsehood. Of course most people don't do this. They just blindly accept whatever their culture tells them. But in our work here, the whole point is to undertake a serious epistemic inquiry and derive the truth for yourself.
It's like putting together a puzzle or solving a criminal conspiracy. You have to investigate carefully and cross-reference everything.
I addressed this process in this video:
https://www.actualized.org/articles/how-to-develop-big-picture-understanding
Anything anyone tells you about what is true vs what is false, you cannot know if it is true or false because that would be to beg the question. Which is why a direct personal inquiry is required. The only way you can know if what I'm telling you is true and a good teaching is by investigating and validating it for yourself.
But if you want to jump straight to the answer, the highest teachings in the universe will emphasize a few key things:
Direct experience is king Consciousness is the key to everything Love is the highest truth Selflessness is the greatest power You are God, You are All Reality is ONE & infinite Death is an illusion Don't get stuck in any one belief system. All belief systems are relative and incomplete. Of course, you don't know if the above is true or false unless you personally validate it. But I promise you that if you work at it, in 10 to 20 years from now, you can validate all the above beyond any doubt. But again, you don't know if that's true unless you actually do it.
The purpose of your life is to go on this grand epistemic journey, the end result of which -- if you do it very carefully -- is Truth with a capital T. And by that point you become the guru and people come to you for advice. But you also cannot really help them because you know the only way for them to know what you know is to go through the long and personal process you went through. Truth is simply too big to be told.

This is a personal dev site. Whatever you don't have, you can develop.
Passion can be cultivated. Start today.

Yes, you need to set firm boundaries in a relationship as far as what you're willing to accept.

Well.... it depends how you read. Of course reading can be a great adjunct to contemplation -- grist for the mill so to speak. But even so, reading tends to fill the mind with preconceived ideas and beliefs which limit serious contemplation. The best contemplation is done from scratch, without reliance on other people's ideas. Like deriving mathematical proofs for oneself without reading the textbook.
Reading is useful, it just isn't deep contemplation.
You need to learn to develop stuff on your own, without building on top of a mountain of others' ideas. This then allows you to think outside the box. If you build on a mountain of others' ideas, you will not think far enough outside the box because you're going to internalize all of their core assumptions and get stuck in paradigm lock. This is one of the biggest problems for academics and scientists. They rely too heavily on that mountain of ideas without thinking independently enough. And how do they get that mountain of ideas in their head? By reading a lot without deeply questioning what they read.
Contemplation is not taught in school or university. Because that would be too dangerous. Students are taught to be parrots, not true philosophers.

That's right, the stronger your focus the more psychedelic your visual field will become.
That's a tiny taste of how psychedelics work.
Imagine that multipled by 100.

Philosophy is love of wisdom. A philosopher is one who sits around contemplating reality. You can contemplate reality without reading a single book. Reading is not contemplating. You can go live in a cabin in the woods and be a philosopher.
Philosophers in universities don't do much contemplating. They are like caged birds. Don't expect them to fly very far.

@Identity You can go to a hypnotherapist or psychic and do past-life regressions, or they can read your past lives for you. If you want to believe in that sort of thing. In fact, you could go to multiple different ones and cross-reference their results.
I've had some psychics read my past lives. It's interesting. Hard to say what it really means though because I don't have a direct experience of them so it ultimately boils down to a story from my POV. But if you could corroborate it with your own direct experience, that would be something even more interesting.

@actualizing25 Overall you got a bad attitude about life. You are taking life soooo for granted.
It's not that those things won't make you happy, rather all things should make you happy.
Right now you are looking for some escape hatch from life via awakening, but the thing that awakening will reveal is that the escape hatch leads right back here! There is nowhere to go since here is already nowhere and nothing. The secret to happiness is simply taking great interest and joy in the tiniest things, like holding a glass of water in your hand or feeling the texture of your shirt as you put it on in the morning. 
The magic and joy is found in Being itself, not in any destination.
Life requires passion. Awakening requires passion. Stop waiting around for passion to come from outside. Generate it from within by starting to notice how amazing reality is at every corner. Don't take anything for granted.
Cultivate a curiosity and passion about reality. Then awakening will be possible.
Take a psychedelic to remind yourself how magical being is. You have lost touch with being. And being and awakening are one and the same.

Mostly existential issues such as the sense of going insane or losing one's mind.
That is especially problematic until you realize that there is no material reality and that everything is Infinite Imagination.
And a few times the trips just felt "off" for some unknown reason. Like they had a bad, negative body vibe to them. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was interference from certain medication I was taking or just something in my mind going sideways.
And sometimes if the dose is too strong, material reality melts so much that it can become scary in itself.
In total I've had maybe 6 "bad trips" out of 80+
One I attribute to early arrogance and too high a dose (with mushrooms), which led to sense of going insane One I attribute to interaction with a medication I was taking (with LSD) One I attribute to eating some food right before the trip (with 5-MeO-DMT) One I attribute to simply very deep existential insight which creates such deep mindfuckery it becomes uncomfortable (with 4-AcO-DMT, although I don't really consider this a bad trip) One I attribute to a panic attack reaction upon first time taking 5-MeO-DMT, fearing it might be terrible One I attribute to taking a new research chemical which had an awful body load Some other trips were uncomfortable or shocking, but I wouldn't call them bad.
And in the big picture, all of them were necessary and perfect for my growth. Especially my worst trips.
If you get a bad trip, that's God trying to teach you a lesson. You only have to figure out what the lesson is and obey it next time. Then the punishment stops. For example, you dose too high because you are cocky and aren't patient enough to ramp up doses, God punishes you. You learn your lesson and never do that again. Everything goes smoothly.
If I dosed less carefully I would have a lot more bad trips. Moderate dosing is crucial.