@MM1988 Alcohol is an unhealthy, consciousness-lowering substance and doesn't have any personal development value. Psychedelics are the opposite.
Reason they're illegal is because people are ignorant about what psychedelics are and what benefits they can provide. And because they lead to questioning of epistemic foundations, upon which all of society is predicated.
The fundamental problem is that no one who was responsible for outlawing psychedelics has ever personally experienced them, or done objective research into the scientific and clinical evidence.

Except you don't even control your body. You have no idea how you walk, for example, not to mention everything else your body does every second.
Go for a walk, and notice that you have no idea how you're able to make your body move. Not a clue!
Also notice that you have no idea how your mind generates or strings together thoughts.

@Wes Thoughts It's a good idea, but if you only have a few month's worth of savings, that won't be enough.
If cash is tight, you need to look for a spiritual community that provides food and lodgings in exchange for some work. Plenty of them around, including Zen monasteries, yogic ashrams, Hare Krishna's etc. But beware, when joining a community, they will indoctrinate you. You'll be dealing with a lot of dogma.
Choose your ashram very carefully. Don't get sucked into a cult.

Be careful not to confuse Love with certain ways of acting or even being.
True Love is so radical it does not care which way a person is being.
Any conditions you set on how love must be is not true love.
Unless you are able to see Hitler as an expression of Love, then you're still not getting it.
Love is not something you can do. You must reach an appropriate state of consciousness, at which point everything appears to you as love.
So any of your plans to be loving is not going to work. You must become enlightened first.
You cannot act or fake your way into true love.
If you seriously pursue enlightenment, the end result will be true love. Otherwise not. Survival is going to co-opt love for its purposes.

All of your knowledge is groundless, relative, and ultimately delusional.
You do not actually know what anything is.
Read what the ancient skeptics wrote. Read Outlines Of Pyrrhonism.

The epistemology and metaphysics of science is a very complex topic. There is no silver bullet against science. The devil is all in the details. Many books could and have be written about it.
The core problem is that science does not question its own foundations.
How do you know science is capable of accessing Absolute Truth? After all, this has never been demonstrated by science. And how would you demonstrate it anyway? By using science? Do you see how that begs the question? If science is incomplete or flawed then you cannot use science to validated science. You need a meta science. And a meta meta science, and so on to infinity.
Science actually has no foundation because reality is infinite.
The ancient Greek skeptics showed 2000 years ago why no human knowledge is possible. But the scientists ignored them. And they are in denial about it to this day.
You cannot convince a scientist that science is a dream. Because scientists hold science as a dogma. Like religious people. You will never convince a Muslim that his idea of Allah is a dream. Because his mind is not open to such a possibility. He is not interested in searching for Truth because he thinks he's already found it. 

Existentially we are all equal. But this is pickup/dating. Within the dating game you gotta build up confidence.
If you feel like you're inferior and less cool than others, the girl will smell it off you like stink off a squashed skunk.
You have to feel entitled to the girl. You will only be able to attract and maintain girls who you feel entitled to. As soon as you start to feel, "Oh man, I'd be so lucky to have this girl", you've already lost her.
Your attitude must be: "This girl would be lucky to sleep with me because I'm such an awesome person." And then make that true. Turn yourself into an awesome person. This isn't just about BS-ing yourself or her. Your confidence must be grounded in the fact that you truly love yourself and recognize your own awesomeness.
It all boils down to building a high self-esteem.
How could you not be awesome? You are God after all! LOL. So start acting like it.
P.S. And God is always alone

Maybe, if you meditate well and then carry your meditation into everyday life rather than just doing it on the cushion.

That's the beauty of it: you are free to do whatever you want.
It's called liberation for a reason.
There are no shoulds in life. All shoulds are relative.
But don't forget, all actions have consequences. So you are not free from the consequences of your choices.

There is nothing but direct experience, so you have no other other but to trust it.
Name one thing which isn't in your direct experience? You cannot.
The problem is how you are misinterpreting your experience with egoic distortions.

@Inder This issue goes deeper than you yet understand.
Of course ego also cares a lot about physical survival. Your physical, social, and psychological survival are all intertwined.
Intuition and even the higher self are often also part of survival.
Try to locate what isn't survival in your experience. Most things will be survival.

A few good options here:
1) "My friends are around here somewhere." [point into a large crowd], or "I'm waiting for them to show up" or "They just left. They were tired."
2) Just own it and admit you're out alone. "I was bored at home and I felt like going out, so here I am." or "That's how I roll girl. I'm not part of some gaggle of sheep."
3) Just ignore and change the conversation into something else, "You seem like the kind of girl who voted for Trump. Admit it! You voted for Trump, didn't you?!" or "Why are you being so racist?"
They lose interest because you don't own your aloneness. If you think it's weird, she will think its weird. If you think its totally normal to be out at a club alone, she won't care either. But you have to keep the conversation moving. Don't just say you're alone and then let it hang. You gotta immediately follow up with some other conversation topic as if her question was nothing at all.
In general what you're lacking here is confidence. A confident man does not let some random girl judge him or frame control him. You gotta feel that you are way cooler than her no matter how many sheepish friends are around her. Her sheep friends are all fools and so is she for herding up with them. Be the badass lone wolf. And treat everyone in the club as your friends. You can make instant friends with some random guys in the club.
When you are in the club you gotta walk around like you are the owner of the place. Exude that kind of confidence and comfort.

@Stenne When you are being most fully yourself, you are not being self-conscious. You are actually acting without egoic calculations in the moment. You are not thinking. In fact there isn't even a self in the moment. Which is why it feels so good. But these moment are rare because mostly you're thinking and calculating so much.
Think of a moment when you are laughing hard with friends. In that moment the ego is absent. In that moment your personality shines the most.

@Inder Human survival is not primarily about physical survival, it is about survival as a unique persona. That's what ego is mostly doing: surviving the complex social persona of you. And it's doing it perfectly. All of your thoughts are about that.

Sounds like a form of autism. There is an autism spectrum. I have a good book on my book list about it in the Sexuality category.
It's not a bad thing, but you have to learn how to fit in with society.

It's not bad, but it will simply never work because you are assuming reality is a static objective thing when it fact the very language you use constructs reality and no two people live in the same reality.
See video: Why People Seem Crazy

Language only works for sharing common experiences. You cannot communicate something which another person has never experienced. So what we need to get more people having more mystical experiences easily.
Which is why psychedelics are the best way of creating a common spiritual language. But of course they are demonized precisely for this reason.

Yes, it's all God's imagination. But you are God, so it's your imagination.
It's not all "ego stuff" any more than you seeing a cat walking down the street is "ego stuff". That's not ego, it's the "world".
Some people who trip can of course do so in a dualistic way, where they might see an alien and assume that this alien is somehow "other" to them. But that alien is just like any other being in "real life". It is BOTH an entity other than you, but also it is you, since all people are you.
If you look at the world dualistically, other people are not you.
If you look at the world nondualistically, other people are all your own projections.
There's really no contradiction. Both are true in a sense.
Of course if you trip with a weak spiritual foundation the ego can co-opt the trips and do a lot of egoic stuff and projecting. So you have to be careful about self-deception. Just like you do in "real life."
But seeing a DMT entity is not ego any more than seeing a cat is.

It does change you for sure, but in subtle ways.
Mostly what I have gained in not equanimity but understanding, humility, love, God, authenticity, wonder, and overcoming the fear of death. The body is more at ease too.
But I still have much work to do on myself. My equanimity is not great and I still have plenty of cravings.
Without 5-MeO I would not have the understanding of God's mechanics as I do. To me that was the most delicious and important thing. I care more about understanding God than I do about anything else. And so for me my deepest desire was fulfilled with total omniscience.
So according to your definition of enlightenment Christ was not enlightened until after he was cruxified and died?
You don't see some absurdity with such a definition?

Of course. I don't see people confusing those two.
Someone who has a few awakenings is not a master. But also this should not be used to disparage or deny their awakenings -- which are genuine and important, although incomplete.
No one is claiming this either. Self-deception is always at work. Perfect clarity is not how this work works. We are doing the best we can under conditions of limited knowledge and various biases.
The issue I have with your advancing of "enlightenment" is that you're stuck on this notion of mastery or total enlightenment as you've chosen to define it, and dismissing anything shy of it.
Virtually no one here is going to become a master, so talking about total enlightenment is basically pointless here. It's so exceptionally rare that it is irrelevant. If someone is serious about becoming a master, they ain't on this forum, they are in a cave or forest meditating full time and they don't need any outside guidance. They understand how to do the work.
Dude, chill. By shamanic work I was simply referring to Martin's sessions where he guided clients.
You get really hung up on technicalities without seeing the bigger picture of the conversation.
What Martin was doing is just a variation of shamans offering medicine. Call it what you will.
I have read his books, I'm just not hanging on his every word as you seem to be. I read his books and quickly moved on to greater things. I am not interested in following his books as a step by step instruction manual. Precisely because I have other perspectives to consider and I saw problems with some of his methodology, including the dismissal of insight and intellectual integration of trips. I was also not interested in energetically overloading myself. I asked him about the possibility of energetic overload in an email a long time ago. He said it wasn't a problem at all. And I decided for myself that I don't believe that. It is a legit problem from my POV. And I take that into account whenever I trip and with how I suggest others trips. Because it's pretty obvious to me that disregarding energetic overload can be dangerous and reckless for other people if not for oneself. Which is why I developed the plugging method.
I don't blindly follow people, I learn from them and adapt it to suit myself. I recommend you do the same, otherwise you might end up following someone off a cliff.

Too long to explain here.
I talked about my 1st in an old video.
Sorta, but it's so much more radical than what people usually mean by LoA. I don't like that word applied to God's creative capacity.
It doesn't even need to think. It is totally direct, even prior to thought. It is pure being.
God's "thinking" is just being. It is immediate manifestion via no mechanism whatsoever.

I have never claimed that 5-MeO will clear you of all defilements or produce mastery. My claim was much more humble: that it produces genuine and very deep awakening experiences which are helpful and healing.
If you want to purify all defilements that will obviously require far more work and it is not likely to happen through psychedelic use alone, although psychedelics ARE very effective at curing certain defilements. But probably not all of them.
To cure all defilements would require lots of daily, near minute to minute practice. It could not be a peak experience. There is value to peak experiences as well as more gradual and mundane daily work.
All of this was quite clear from day one. I don't know why anyone would assume that 5-MeO would do all that work for you. That was never it's purpose. It is not a replacement for inner work, it is a catalyst. Which I have said from my first videos on psychedelics.
Be careful with setting the wrong expectations.
Awakening is not the same as moral perfection or being Christ-like. Awakening is literally just this: becoming conscious of the true nature of ultimate reality. It is not behavioral reform. If you still crave smoking, that's a separate issue.
Many of you guys are talking about mastery, which is something that will take you a lifetime of work.
It is foolish to equate enlightenment with mastery. And no one has ever said that Martin had mastery. This was quite obvious.
Buddhist maps are also poor at taking into account psychedelics. The psychedelic path requires drawing new maps. Actually what psychedics reveal is the inadequecy and partiality of Buddhist maps. The Ten Ox Herding Pics do not work well for psychedelics.

It doesn't necessarily gain any ability. Any siddhis gained are an independent factor.
Awakening alone does not clear up all energetic issues, or shadow, or ego, or emotional issues, or bad habits. Nor is it development. So there are many factors herw besides awakening.
All of this I have stressed in the past.
Many awakened teachers have weird personality flaws and shadow issues and pathologies.
Awakening does not mean there cannot be a pathology. As history shows.

@Paulus Amadeus
This is significant, but also keep in mind that this is just one case study, and people can be very different, especially when it comes to health issues.
Awakened people can have health complications and even mental issues or energetic issues or shadow. Do not expect them to be impervious to stress, and under enough stress even an awakened person should be expected to crack at some point.
Again, a lot of this confusion is caused by having overly simplistic and binary notions of awakening/liberation, where you guys think that it's total and there is zero suffering and you are a Terminator. That's a very cartoonish understanding of awakening.
It is not clear what the cause of Martin's issues are. So don't jump to hasty conclusions.
Let's monitor his case and see how things turn out for him and what larger lessons his situation holds, if any.
It seems like this might be part of his spiritual path. This might be his way of purifying himself even further to reach deeper levels of self-mastery. Or it could be some rare health condition. It's hard to say.

@Arcangelo If you are self realized why bother what jesus said buddha said ? what it has to do with christian,muslim,man,woman?
Throw away all what you read heard.
Hell heaven are just stories.
Everything is happening its happening.
You as self - nothingness is just one aspect of the Infinite.
You as a human or form dont have any control over whats happening.You dont have creation powers.
Enlightenment doesnt give any answers about Creation,Why evil nature is created and infinite questions mind will keep poping up.
Enlightenment is supposed to bring the wisdom that all questions are futile.
All knowledge is ignorance and will not bring peace.
Try to go to samadhi as often.
Abide as self and be at peace.
Live as a liberated uncared soul free from every emotions,suffering.
Peace,Equanimity at all situations is that what matters.
This is my understanding so for.
-  I am not realized.