That's an illusion. You'll see.
She is precisely replaceable. Not only that, but you WILL replace her.
But for a short while you'll suffer. Because that's the nature of irrational attachment. Notice that when you put something up on a pedestal in your mind, you create your own suffering.
The whole key to dating women is: Don't get attached to her AT ALL until at least you sleep with her. Any attachment you create before that will only create needless suffering and usually ends up ensuring you never sleep with her.
All romantic love is pure illusion. It's as illusory as jerking off to a celebrity in your mind. Only here you're using a real person to jerk off into -- which allows you to fool yourself into thinking it is real. Nope. Still pure fantasy.

Las Vegas is a great city. Everything you need with none of the smog and traffic. And good weather most of the year except summer. Close to many national parks. Zero state income tax. The city itself is quite liberal.

Most drugs are illegal because parents are terrified of their kids doing heroin, crack, cocaine, & meth. And to be fair, this is a legitimate concern. These drugs can be extremely destructive. I have an extended relative in Russia who's a life long heroin addict. He's spent a few years in prison and still does heroin. It's ruined his whole life and he's a huge drag on his family because he cannot maintain a job.
Psychedelics got lumped in with all that.
The issue of heroin, crack, cocaine, & meth is tricky. How should we regulate such drugs? Do we allow them to be sold at the pharmacy? Do we ban them, creating a black market? It's bad either way. Ideally we raise the quality of our society such that people never want to do those hard drugs. But that's going to take centuries of growth. In the meantime it will be a problem either way.
People who get hooked on hard drugs usually don't have much of a life and little hope for a good future. They lack a positive life purpose to work towards. Society needs to provide people with more opportunities for success.
One thing is clear though, psychedelics need to be legalized and actually put to use for helping those hooked on heroin, crack, cocaine, & meth. That's a no-brainer. It's proven to work.

Get your blood work done. Check your thyroid and hormones. Many people have thyroid or hormone imbalances. Low energy is often associated with under-active thyroid.
Of course cleaning up your diet is very important. If you eat shit you will feel like shit. Stop eating all wheat products and all junk food. Carb heavy foods make you extra sleepy.
You should also do a urine test for heavy metal toxicity. Heavy metals like mercury and lead cause all sorts of energy problems. There are detox protocols for detoxing heavy metals if you have them.

If we injected snake venom into your veins, you'd also lose some control.
Physiology is more fundamental than your ego-mind.
More fundamentally, the whole notion of "control" is deeply dualistic and delusional.
If there exists only one thing in the universe: the universe itself, who controls it? Who controls the universe?

Everything you're aware of is the Absolute.
You have yet to realize that formlessness and form are identical.

Kriya Yoga
Psychedelics
Those are the two most powerful techniques I know of.
And also week-long solo retreats.

That's very wide question. A whole book could be written about that because there is so much stuff religions say.
God, for example, is not a dogma. But! For most religious people it is.
Dogma is not just about true vs false, dogma is about how you hold it. If a perosn holds a true thing as a belief which he has no direct experience of, it's still a dogma.
For example, if you are absolutely sure the Earth is round, that's a dogma, even if the Earth turns out to be round once you look down on it from orbit.
But if you have actually seen the round Earth with your own eyes, then it's not a dogma.

Absolute Love is idenetical to your true nature.
There are facets to the Absolute. These facets can be realized in any order and at various levels of comprehensiveness.
But don't be confused, all of these facets are identical to one another in the end. But even so, it is important to realize them individually. It is not enough to realize one facet and think you automatically understand all the rest, even though they are one in the end.

It's all very simple: space is imagined within consciousness, just like everything else. The end.
The substance of reality is nothing.

The future is not predetermined. The future will be whatever God decides it to be. Which means, whatever we decide it to be, since we are God. The unfolding of life IS the very mechanism by which God creates the future.
This is it! God is deciding right NOW what the future will be! You are doing it!
If you decide to pick your nose, that's what God decided. Until you pick your nose, God hasn't decided it.

@cle103 The key insight you're missing is that something and nothing are identical. Form is formlessness. All distinction is imaginary.
Nothing has ever happened. And everything that has happened is nothing. The two are one.
Keep tripping and contemplating this. You'll get it. You are close.

This is not merely a question of insurance coverage, this is an issue of wealth redistribution.
The fundamental problem is that the entire healthcare industry's profit margins are way too high. They are artificially high because people's lives are being held hostage in the negotiation and people are negotiating with both hands tied behind their backs due to how the healthcare industry created a cartel.
It would be like if me and a few of my rich friends bought up every source of fresh drinkable water in your state and then charged you 10x to have a drink. And when you complained about how unfair this system is, we'd invest $100 million dollars in a propaganda campaign to call you Communists.
The government is the only organization which has the leverage to renegotiate the terms of the deal.
The bottom line is, doctors & executives will have to settle for earning less money so that more people can live. That's what this whole discussion is really about and no one wants to admit it. A bold politician must rise up who will say, point-blank: "You guys will earn less money, for the greater good. Sorry, not sorry." Bernie Sanders is one such politician.

Hey guys, I just finished my notes for this paper that was posted by Leo a while back on his blog. It's a research paper on developmental psychology, akin to spiral dynamics. I really got into it and I learned a lot, so I wanted to share my notes with you.
A note of warning: the notes are pretty long (more than 20 pages) but there was just so much good stuff in it that I decided to just include it all in.
9 levels of increasing embrace in ego development.pdf

@SunnyNewDay Seems to me that you have more access to other dimensions of reality than most people. Folks with psychic abilities usually experience voices and things of that sort, which they can find overwhelming at first until they learn how to manage it.
This is sorta the shaman's path. The important thing is not to misinterpret this as going crazy or as something that's wrong. You should try to see it as a blessing in disguise, a gift. But you'll have to go through some inner turmoil to fully realize how to make use of this gift for the greater good of mankind. It's a journey of self-discovery. You are discovering hidden aspects of yourself and reality. Don't expect to fit in with mainstream folks. Try to find some shamans or others with these kinds of psychic or paranormal abilities. They would be in the best position to guide you and give you advice. Personally I never experience that kind of stuff, but I know it's a real thing.
It's not that you are developing schizophrenia. Rather your mind is opening up to new dimensions of reality which are not yet recognized by mainstream culture. Become curious about these new dimensions. They might be worth exploring.

These shootings are an expected phenomena of a hyper materialistic society. As stage Orange runs its course, the limitations of Blue/Orange will become more and more apparent in the form of these kinds of ego backlashes. But this shines collective awareness on the problem, which will ultimately lead to its resolution and a transition into a stage Green society.
Banning guns will not be enough to resolve this. What's necessary is to make society more fair and to provide more opportunities and social support for alienated people.
It's an alienation problem. Alienated, nihilistic, depressed, angry, impoverished, poorly-socialized, and sexually frustrated people adopt radical and violent ideologies. Same as in the Middle East.
As stage Orange becomes more and more excessive and unhealthy, alienation will increase, violence and radicalism will increase.
When people lack a proper spiritual connection to life, they become hopeless and turn to drugs, sex, exploitation of others, and nationalist ideologies.
This is why it's important to foster a sense of community and to help those who are in bad shape. Because if they are not helped, they will not simply suffer silently by themselves, they will lash out at the world. These shootings are really a cry for help. Society is failing not only the victims of these shootings, but the shooters especially. The shooters are lashing out because they don't have proper channels for getting the love they want in healthy ways.
And of course Trump is pouring gasoline on this problem because he epitomizes toxic Orange while goading on Blue and demonizing Green.

You need to have an awakening to what Love is.
It cannot be told to you in words.
I understand your skepticism, but all happenings truly are an expression of Love. It's too epic to believe. Even when you awaken to it you will be too amazed to accept it. It's too good to be true. Yet it is Truth itself.
Psychedelics help. Take some DPT and ask it to show what is Love. Brace yourself for a mindfucking of unspeakable proportions.
The only thing capable of understanding the full extent of God's Love is God itself. A human is too tiny to fathom it. Only God understands. Fortunately, you are it!
Your awakening is not complete until you understand why you created it all. It will melt your heart with pure Goodness. It is a Goodness without an opposite.

You can't understand it without awakening. And it's too radical to explain to you verbally.
You have to stop being a self to understand it. Your self-hood is getting in the way.
Self-hood is the illusion. There simply isn't no such thing as a self. It's being imagined.
What I'm telling you is: your birth is imaginary. You were never actually born, you simply believe you were.

You can't avoid the truth of the matter.
What the scientist needs to realize is that all science is mediated through subjective experience and that it could not be otherwise. To skip over this point is the crux of problem. This is a giant epistemic oversight on their part.
The subjectivity of science is the elephant in the room that no scientist wants to acknowledge.
The very belief that science is objective is itself a subjective belief! Science is objective because one imagines it to be so.

You just have to be careful with how terms can have different meanings.
"Self-consciousness" is a mainstream cultural term, not a technical term from spirituality. Mainstream culture does not understand what the self or what consciousness is. So understanding that, when ordinary folks say "self-conscious" they are not talking about spirituality or awakening or Truth. They simply mean: a neurotic sense of social anxiety and self-judgment.
Don't be fooled by the surface similarity of terms. Just because two words look the same or sound the same does not mean they have the same meaning.
Of course the problem is not self-consciousness per se, the problem is an obsessive anxiety over one's self-image in social situations. In a sense, the awakened person is not self-conscious when he acts. He's not thinking of his self-image, he acts spontaneously. The self-conscious person self-obsesses and is stuck in monkey mind.

Name one thing which isn't in your direct experience.
I dare you.
Realize this: there is nothing but direct experience. Nor can there be.

@cetus56 The desire for Truth and understanding is independent of suffering or the quality of one's life.
You can desire to know a thing simply for the sake of knowing it, not because it will benefit your survival.
For example, you can have a desire to look inside a kangaroo's pouch even if doesn't benefit you in any material way.
And who knows? Maybe you'll find a diamond in there

That was a mild samadhi state. Good stuff. Headed in the right direction, but just the tip of the iceberg.
It is true, I am you.
But what is you?

@Truth Addict I'm trying to point you to something deeper that you can realize.
But for that to work you have to be willing to open your mind beyond what you presently know. And you have to be willing to take such existential question as "Why is reality the way it is?" seriously.
If you believe the question isn't worthwhile to contemplate, then you will get no answer and you will not even know what treasures you missed.
It's like there's a pile of flawless diamonds buried under your bed but you are too incredulous to get a shovel and dig under your bed. I'm telling you guys there's a pile of diamonds here which you have not yet discovered.

I would not use them.
The whole point of the trip is to face whatever comes up.
If your protocol is sound, you shouldn't need them.
But then again, if you're the sort of person who might freak out and do something dangerous like jump off a 20 story balcony, then you might want to have some laying around.
But even just having them around will change your trip. Your tripping will be sloppy because in the back of your mind you will know that if things get serious you can escape. This can lead you to second guessing yourself and treating tripping too lightly.
There's an important aspect of tripping where you know that once you've taken the substance, that's it -- you're all in. There's no escape. This helps the surrender process. It also helps you to think twice before tripping because you understand the gravity of the situation. This is no toy or joke.
I would rather not have an escape hatch. But that's me. You might be different.
To me, a large part of the growth I get from tripping is the seriousness of it. It's not a toy to me. And of course I learned this lesson the hard way: by going through some rough trips in the beginning. But I'm glad I did.