To be fair, wanting to grow financially is still a form of growth (just a relatively low one). But hey, many people need to start low. Moving from Blue to Orange will often involve growing financially. Remember, financial growth is not simply about earning more cash. To really grow in this area usually requires some significant and serious mindset shifts. For example, for a person to go from working a 9-5 job to being a successful entrepreneur usually takes a lot of inner growth. It's not simply a matter of money. You have to start to think about the world and yourself differently.
Starting a business is one of the best and most practical ways to grow yourself as a person, especially within Tier 1 of the Spiral.
The problem is that many people who want more money do not even understand that money is a function of one's being. So when you ask them, "Do you want to grow as a person?" they don't make the connection between that and earning more money. They think they can just have lots of money while staying the same inside. Which would be disastrous even if it ever came to be.
A powerful way to help people grow is to show them how things like money, sex, success, fame, a good relationship, a good family, good physical appearance, and happiness are best achieved through deep inner growth, not by chasing externals directly.

I have no serious criticisms of him. He knows his shit.
He doesn't deny love. He talks quite a bit about Eros (his term of Love), and he says that the driving force behind all evolution is love. Which is correct in my view, although even that doesn't go far enough to underscore the importance of Love in all of Creation.
He might not be as explicit about Infinite Love as I am, equating Love & Truth. But that's probably because he has not accessed some of the deepest insights I have accessed via psychedelics.
I think his understanding of reality would be deeper if he went deeply into psychedelics. But oh well. It's good enough. You can only ask so much of a guy. He has done several life-times-worth of amazing work.
Ken is one of the greatest Western philosophers and intellectuals who has ever lived. We are lucky to be alive alongside him. It's sad that his health as deteriorated so quickly.

YES! This is exactly what awakening is about.
Awakening is not something you think. It's more felt. It's pure, raw experience. Ideally the mind is shut off or at least sidelined.
Awakening is nothing other than the present moment, observed intensely for what it is.
It sounds like this Kratom helped you enter a mild samadhi state. It's not an out of body experience, it's a nondual state of consciousness. Which is exactly what you want in this work. From this state you can now contemplate metaphysical questions and get profound answers -- not verbal answers but actual answers!
That was your answer to the question: Who am I?
There is much deeper to go. You are only seeing the tip of the Ox's tail. So keep exploring.

@Matt23 Expand your definition of technology to include psychedelics.
That is the most powerful technology. Nothing else comes close.
Keep in mind that any technology which truly worked at radically altering your consciousness would be made illegal because it would destabilize the mind and undermine the illusion of society and its power structures.
If a technology can make you awaken, it can also make you lose your mind.

Outflow of love.
The more conscious one becomes, the more one's life becomes about spreading love to others.
At the highest level, God creates selflessly for the benefit of all living beings, needing nothing for itself. There is no greater joy or purpose than this. Nothing else is worthwhile for an advanced intellect.

Femininity is attracted to masculinity.
Being nice does not exude masculine essence.
Which is not to say there's anything wrong with being nice. Just don't expect it to make a girl wet.
Women get attracted by boldness, confidence, and assertiveness. And other things, like wit and humor.

As soon as you start rating happiness, you'll lose it.
The proper answer is: who gives a fuck? Reality is whatever it is and you feel however you feel at any given moment. Don't confuse true happiness with mood. That can be a serious error.
Trying to "lock in" a happy mood is very counter-productive. You are guaranteed to fail at that.
If you want real happiness, stop caring whether you're dying or being tortured. Then you'll be happy. And nothing less than that will hold up.

That's how it is. Takes a lot of practice to overcome that. Usually years of rigorous practice are required.
This problem of boredom is existential. It goes very deep. It can't be avoided. The point of meditation is to face it directly, which creates suffering -- which is why hardly anyone meditates.
Meditation is supposed to be so boring it kills you.

In practice this is solved simply by over-satisfying your needs.
So if you're needy with girls, go sleep with 10-20 girls and your neediness will drop significantly.
You cannot just wish your neediness away.
The process you go through to successfully sleep with 10-20 females will cure you of much neediness. But it will be challenging process. Don't expect it to be easy. You will fail a lot. And that's exactly what will beat the neediness out of you. Every girl you lose will teach you a valuable lesson. You will come face-to-face with the ugliness of your own neediness.

@Bridge to Infinity Right. That's very common for newbies. As you fail over and over again you'll start seeing patterns in how your needy and weak behavior turns them off.
It takes a lot of practice.
At this point you would benefit from learning a bit of the fundamental theory behind female attraction. Most important for you is correcting your sub-communication: your eye contact, your body posture, your tone of voice, your physical touching, your smile, your attitude, your presence, etc.
This is the most important part of game. It's not the things you say, its how and why you say them, and the things you don't say.
You can attract women just by looking at them in the right way.
If your interactions are dominated by fear, neediness, attachment, trying to impress her, trying to get her to like you, meekness, or being a dancing monkey -- you will lose a lot of girls.
It's important that your interactions carry a man-to-woman sexual charge/intent. When you look at her in the eyes, she should feel like if you are ever alone with her you will fuck her. This is very different from your typical friendly chit-chat. You don't need to say anything sexual, but your intent needs to be clear from the very beginning. Look at her like you're going to fuck her. You have to risk getting rejected. Those who don't reject you will hook hard.
When you are fearful, she can see it in your eyes and hear it in your tone of voice.
Work on your smile. Make sure you're able to smile a lot and on cue. Always open with a smile.
Learn to pump up your own emotional state so that you're in a good state when you're talking to her. State is huge. If you're in a bad emotional state she will sense it off you and react negatively.
The ideal state is playful, carefree, yet decisive.

@ugreglo Dude, you're WAY overthinking it.
Sex happens all the time for the dumbest reasons. All you need to do is go out and talk to girls.
Sex cannot happen while you sit at home on the internet.
All your attention should be on going out of your house and being face to face with lots of new girls. That's it. Do not worry about anything else.
If you put yourself in lots of social situations girls will want to sleep with you.
Tons of girls will reject you. It doesn't matter. Don't even think about it. Get rejected 10 times a day and you will stop caring.

Ideally you'd get to a point where you are satisfied with just sitting silence. But that's a tall order to fill.
I like to take late night drives around town and look at the city.
Act activity you do you're gonna eventually "wear out" unless you're able to be satisfied just sitting in silence like a cat.
The ego-mind constantly craves stimulation, excitement, and newness -- which creates suffering. A large part of the function of meditation is to train that out of you so you can be more cat-like and thrive off of presence and being alone. But again, this takes lots of training and it will come with suffering through lots of boredom which the ego-mind will create.
Imagine a state of mental development in which you are happier sitting like a cat than others are playing video games, watching movies, smoking pot, or having sex. Can you see how powerful this would make you?

There's a bit of a hypocrisy about sex in the woman's mind. She likes it. She will often have it frequently will random dudes. But then she will deny having done so because she doesn't want to appear easy or slutty.
From the guy's perspective it's frustrating because the more a guy tries to be a nice guy, the less his chances of sleeping with the girl. She often sleeps with the fun asshole instead because he makes her feel spontaneous. Girls rarely reward nice guys. So we are incentivized to be jerks.
The more a guy cares about a girl, the less likely she is to sleep with him. If a guy is totally detached about a girl, the higher his odds of sleeping with her. That's the paradox of attraction.
From the guy's POV, total detachment until sex is necessary for success. You cannot invest in her at all until sex. And the guys who are best at that are total asshole players. So they get laid the most. It requires an almost sociopathic level of detachment. So ironically, the hottest girls reward sociopaths the most. And of course that makes perfect sense from the POV of survival. The more selfish the better, until it comes back to bite you in the ass. The problem with dating a sociopath is that he also doesn't give a damn about you.

Pickup is a lot like Zen. The harder your try to act how you should, the less you will succeed.
It's very counter-intuitive.
Ultimately all that good pickup is teaching you is:
1) Go talk to lots of girls!
2) Be authentic, don't be a dancing monkey, and be willing to get rejected for who you are. This will look different for each guy because authenticity is relative.
3) Don't be socially awkward or creepy.
But to really learn these lessons you gotta go out a lot and fail a lot. You will try to impress girls a 1000 different creepy ways until you learn it.
95% of your results from pickup simply come from you going out every night and approaching. The theory only accounts for the other 5%. So don't waste too much time worrying about the theory. You learn by going out and talking to females. The theory will tend to put you inside your head, doubting yourself.
The reason you've been having success is simply because you've been going out. If you go out long enough, sex will randomly fall on your lap. Some nights you will get laid for no good reason whatsoever, simply because you happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Spinoza was a European philosopher in the 17th century who was one of the first of his time (in his culture) to propose a pantheistic understanding of God or Nature. His magnum opus, Ethics, directly challenged fundamentalist, traditional Judeo-Christian religion (and all religion in general) and tenets of God being an anthropomorphic being with characteristics of man. 
His understanding of God or Nature was that of an all-encompassing, eternal, infinite substance. He denied humans and even God as having free will, as everything is dictated by causes. 
Is anyone familiar with his work? If so, what are your thoughts on this great philosopher? It is my opinion that he had a certain degree of spiritual enlightenment.

Careful... this is incorrect.
Thoughts are distinct from feelings. You can have a thought without a feeling and a feeling without a thought.
Thought is also possible without language. Thought can be in the form of images.
You are on the right track, but this stuff is more nuanced than you think.
Of course language is used to divide up reality into categories, all categories are dualities, and then those categories are reified or made "objective" through the creation of these categories, and then language is used to construct meaning. And all of this is ultimately imaginary.

Mating is an arms race.
Both sides manipulate to get the most they can while trying to minimize their survival risk.
There's nothing personal about it. It's just unconscious selfishness.

There's nothing honest about that. Plenty of people care.
Counselors are supposed to be trained to handle situations like that. This is what basic life coach training is for.
Being gay is a great thing and there's nothing depressing about it. A good counselor would help her client reframe the situation and see it in a loving and truthful manner.
If a client hates himself, that's not honest or truthful, that's falsehood and delusion. The coach's job is to show him the error of his thinking.
Sounds like your counselor friend needs better training and a deeper understanding of consciousness work.
Many counselors and coaches deeply care about their clients.
How you reply to such a thing is you guide the client's mind out of his delusional thinking by getting him to become more conscious of how his mind is creating this negative meaning. It's not about saying something positive to cheer him up. It's about helping him discover the Truth! -- which is that all is Love.
Self-hatred is a misuse of the mind.

@Nadosa Start practicing mindfulness with labeling. That is the surest way to deconstruct thoughts.

Not all thoughts are automatically bad. There is a sort of higher intelligence at work in you, guiding the mind. For example, you might get the thought, "I should really start to eat healthier." And that can be a message from your "higher self" which would be wise to listen to.
Thoughts may not be absolutely true, but they can be relatively true, which is important from a pragmatic perspective. You need healthy thoughts to set your life straight.
Only at the very advanced stages of consciousness can you start to transcend thoughts altogether. And even then, you'll still return to them for pragmatic reasons.

No, actually you don't control them AT ALL.
Notice that you actually have ZERO control over your thoughts.
Notice that you have no idea what thought will come in the next 3 seconds. Let alone any further out than that.
BIG HAIRY PURPLE ELEPHANT.
See, I just implanted a thought into your mind. You had zero control over it. In fact, I have more control over your thoughts than you do!
FAST JUICY WEASEL.
See! I did it again. I am in control of your thoughts!
The thought that "I control my thoughts" is itself a thought that you did not control, did not will into being, but that just arose spontaneously.
Apply more awareness to your actually process of thinking until you break this illusion that you have any control over them.
Here's something to try:
Stop all thoughts for the next 30 seconds.
Notice you cannot do it. That should make you very suspicious of this idea that you control thoughts. If you had the control claim you have, you should easily be able to stop your thoughts for a measly 30 seconds.
The entire notion of control is one big fat lie. You've never controlled anything in your life. You've only thought you have.

It's hard to find magic pills in life. Technology usually comes with trade-offs. The trade-off here is time and money.
It shows you what true meditation feels like. Without the machine the mind wanders around far too much and tends to stray from that narrow groove which is true meditation.
The machine experientially guides you into the groove and keeps you there. It is a state of total thoughtlessness. It's very tricky to stay in that state without the machine.
Really, in the future, all meditation will be done with a machine because it's too ineffective otherwise. This is why most meditators don't go far. They are unable to hit that groove even after years of practice. It takes talent to hit that groove. A talent most people lack and don't even know they lack. Most meditators don't even know what this groove is that I'm talking about. But a machine with the right training program and show it to you in 15 minutes.
It will probably take 50-100 years for cheap, powerful, yet user-friendly meditation machines to develop. Right now they don't exist.

In practice the peak of an LSD trip only lasts up to 6 hours. After the 6 hour mark you will exit deep tripping territory and remain in the after-effects zone with a long gradual tail.
For LSD you definitely gotta take the entire day off and start your trip pretty much as soon as you wake up that day.
For deep tripping, just sit still in a room and contemplate reality. There's no need to go anywhere or do anything. Staring at the carpet is basically good enough. You shouldn't be left disappointed.

No, it's deeper than that. The entire self/other distinction is imaginary. There is no one in the universe but yourself. By this I mean, you are the entire universe and all "others". Universal Mind imagines your body and all other bodies into existence.
See my video: What Is Reality?

To get good with girls at any cost.
When you're trying to solve a serious life challenging, it's a good idea to approach it with the attitude of "at any cost". Do not think about the cost of things you really want. Just work five times harder to pay it. Some things in life have absurdly high costs which almost no one is willing to pay. This allows you to set yourself apart from your competition simply by being willing to pay that cost.
You won't really appreciate a thing unless you work your ass off for it.