Dry insight tends to work very poorly in my experience.
The key function of psychedelics is to lube up the mind, placing it in a deep samadhi state from which profound insight becomes almost effortless.
Psychedelics are samadhi in a pill.

@Cykaaaa That's the whole point of epistemology: you don't know what you don't know.
It's very helpful be keep that in the back of your mind at all times.
Closedminded people will of course project their closedmindedness onto you. That is devilry 101. But be careful because you can easily fall into that trap yourself.
The point is that reality is such that you can never draw any clear & stable lines. When you deeply grok this, you stop worrying about drawing lines. Drawing lines is the chief human delusion. All drawn lines are imaginary.
I have not drawn any firm lines. I'm always open to being proven wrong.
But practically, I usually know when someone is bullshitting me because I have a lot of direct experience to fall back on. But even so, I'm still open because my understanding is never complete or perfect.
Someone like a far-right nationalist I would not even bother taking seriously. They are obviously and hopelessly unconscious. It's not worth the time reasoning with them because they are completely in denial about their self-biases.
Just because your mind is open does not mean you have to take every fool seriously.
As a good rule of thumb, before taking a person's intellectual position seriously, I first need to see that he/she has a basic understanding of self-deception and self-bias. If they do not understand the significance of self-deception or self-bias, I can basically guarantee they are deeply deluded and so I will never take them too seriously. I can still learn from them, but it's going to be small potatoes stuff.
Once you have some awakening to the Absolute, that gives you a nice ground for cutting through bullshit. Until then you're really lost in a sea of bullshit with no clear compass to orient yourself because you cannot even know if anything I say is true.

You are not appreciating yet just how relentless survival is. Survival dominates EVERYTHING in life. It's almost impossible to see beyond survival. Almost.
I suggest to you that you do not deeply understand survival, and that should invest more time observing it and contemplating it in action.

Look at your hand. That hand is an example of being.
You must ground this work directly in what's right in your experience. Not abstractions.
Being is the "stuff" that everything is. That "stuff" is consciousness.

Just because you're in some state of no-mind or absorption doesn't mean you have insight into reality.
Meditative states are not good enough here. You have to want insight. Which requiring questioning.
You can bliss out in meditation all you want, but it doesn't mean you understand what's going on and why.

Of course.
Lowercase love is ordinary human love as an emotion. It is limited and conditional. It has an opposite: hate.
Uppercase Love is an Absolute with no opposite. It is the substrate of all existence. It includes love + hate and everything else. It is not an emotion although it can trigger strong emotions of lowercase love.
Uppercase Love is a mystical awakening. It is a kind of enlightenment. This is usually a combination of feeling loving + insight into the nature of what existence is. Afterwards although you may not feel loving all the time, you still know that all of existence is Love. Love no longer is limited to a personal feeling. You can feel angry and still know it is a form of Love.
The highest feelings you get which motivate your life are a little taste of Love. But just a little taste. You will recognize the full scope of Love the moment you realize you just died.
Love = Death

Life is a constant struggle for physical survival. This is true for lions and antelope as it is for an enlightenment master in a Zen monastery. Modern society just allows us to outsource much of the "dirty work" of survival. But survival must still take place if the physical body is to stay alive for longer than a few weeks.
Enlightenment actually deactivates the Default Mode Network in the brain. So it's sort of like getting a lobotomy. You basically go brain dead at the deepest levels of enlightenment.

That was a good start. You must deepen your appreciation for life. Keep at it.
You are surrounded by infinite beauty all day long. You just gotta train yourself to appreciate it. Survival rips your attention away from the beauty of being.

Appreciation of the person's innate beauty. Not physical beauty or function. But the beauty of their totality of being.
When you can look Hitler in the eye and see his beauty, there is your love.
P.S. You are still free to kill him. Love and killing are not opposite. Seeing the beauty of a thing says nothing about what you should do from a survival perspective. You can see the beauty of cancer, but then decide to destroy the cancer. Destruction is part of the total beauty of reality.
Try this: The next time you want to kill a house fly, first, stop for moment and admire it's beauty. Then kill it and admire the beauty inherent in the destruction. Notice that without destruction there could not be life. Admire the beauty of your internal conflict and moral deliberations about killing that fly. That too is love. You feel bad because you wish you could love that fly. Yet you also know you needed to kill that fly because you cannot allow a house full of dirty flies and maggots. Admire the beauty of survival. Yours and the fly's. Admire the inherent conflict between the two of you. Let the magnitude of it hit you. Imagine yourself as the fly being killed. Notice the sad beauty of that too.

Again, that's some interpretation you're creating. I said no such thing.
Feeling good is not the existential Love I'm pointing to.
That is your relative judgment.
What you're not yet understanding is that conflict is necessary and inevitable, even within spirituality.
You cannot have a spiritual school without boundaries and conflict. This has never happened in human history and it never will because the relative domain is necessarily dualistic and exclusionary. There cannot be a fully inclusive teaching because it would become totally corrupt and ineffective. Effectiveness itself is a bias which must be enforced through exclusion.
This problem goes away beyond personal ego or some local dispute between two teachers. This is an existential problem which can only be appreciated after deep contemplation of it. Ask yourself what conflict is and why necessarily occurs. While you're at it, ask yourself what boundaries are and why social organizations must have them.
You're saying that. Not me.
I have never had a problem with the teaching of self-inquiry. I have taught it myself. I have books about it on my book list.

You are wrong.
You have simply not awoken to what God or Love are.
Emptiness is, ironically, just one facet of a much deeper thing which you have yet to access. You have not accessed it because self-inquiry is not a very effective tool to get there. And these various Buddhist and Neo-advaitan approaches which are popular today are fundamentally dogmatic and shallow. The realization of Emptiness and No-self is just the beginning of this work, which you have mistaken for the end.
If you are not conscious that you are God and that you are imagining all of physical reality, your awakening is skin deep. And if you are not conscious that Truth and Love are identical, again, your awakening is skin deep.
Everything I say here on this matter I have personally verified and become directly conscious of. And so have others before me.
I have told you guys many times, you don't understand how deep this goes.
If you do not want to follow my teachings to God and Love, then this is not the right place for you. This is not something I will compromise on. There is enough ignorance around here as it is to have to deal with supposedly awake people who deny God and Love. You can fool yourself, but you ain't foolin me.
God's eye is watching you.
You are being guided here to something far deeper than you yet understand. If you doubt that, by all means, do your own thing or follow some other teacher.

Realistically you cannot trick your way out of this problem. You must do the practices, have multiple awakenings, and do further practices to weed out all attachments, cravings, aversions, fears, clinging, etc.
In other words, by doing all of the Actualized work & practices you can, one day, get to a point where you will be unshakable. But also, to await such a point is going to create more suffering. Happiness can never be found in the future. It exists only NOW! But in order to fully surrender to the NOW you have to spend some years doing practices to calm down your mind.
Yoga, psychedelics, self-inquiry, etc.
Basically meditation teaches you authentic happiness. The happiness of NOW.

Every spiritual school has rules you must play by. Welcome to society.
If anything my rules are too lax and too accommodating of diverse perspectives. This tolerance gets abused by devils.
But I have some limits. Undercutting the highest truth I know cannot fly here. If someone wants to teach that there is no God, that love is just an emotion, that psychedelics are delusion... well... they will have to start their own school. Not in my school.
I hold WinterKnight to a higher standard because he is here in a teaching capacity and representing enlightenment. I would have less problem with it if he was just making random comments as a non-teacher.
In the future I will be screening people on this forum harder when they claim to be enlightened in order to maintain the integrity of these teachings. A lot of people come here, claim to be enlightened, and then they're off to the races with their twisted and half-baked views.
1) Your awakenings were not nearly deep enough, requiring much more embodiment work.
2) Your desire to feel good is never going to work. You cannot use spirituality to feel good. Rather, what spirituality teaches you is that no matter how bad you feel, that is good. This is very counter-intuitive. The ego wants to lock in a happy state. This is not only impossible but it is the very cause of your unhappiness. Happiness is total acceptance of whatever is happening in the present moment. That means if you're getting tortured, you accept it without trying to escape it. The desire to escape suffering is the very thing which creates suffering.
Because this is not as slight a difference as you think, and because this problem, while small now, will only grow larger and larger with my newer teachings until it comes to a head.
I have a very specific teaching I want to offer the world. I created this platform to offer this teaching because I knew that no other platform would allow me to teach what I need to teach.
This is precisely backwards. You are God. Period.
The mistake you're making here is you're still maintaining a subtle distinction between self & other. You're "otherizing" God.
You're missing the most important point of all: THAT YOU ARE GOD!
This is no metaphor. You created the whole fucking universe. But you forgot. Now you must remember.
Thousands upon thousands of people have awakened to Love. Many even on this forum.
But awakening to Love has nothing to do with walking around all loving all the time. Do not confuse Love with some sentimental positivity. You can find Love in a warzone.
Here's one example:
 
No. What I'm talking about is not emotion. It's existential insight & raw Truth. How you feel about it is irrelevant.
I understand that more than you can imagine.
No, it does not matter. Consciousness cannot really cease. It can just be empty. Empty or full doesn't matter, it's all the same Truth. Nirodha Samapatti is identical to NOW.
Existential Love is not a state. Love is all states.

It is being in the same way all concepts are being.
Just be careful not to confuse the thought of a chair for a chair.

Love is simply what is.
If you are a serious student of spiritual texts and teachings, you know that the best of them talk about love. It has nothing to do with fireworks or psychedelics. Psychedelics simply show you your deepest nature -- if you have the courage to look at yourself in your rawest form.
The reason some of guys have a hard time buying this whole love business it because you're still thinking of reality from the materialist paradigm. This paradigm can extremely subtle, such that even people who have an awakening or two -- such as Sam Harris -- still have not transcended it. According to materialism, the universe must be neutral, impersonal, and devoid of any sentimentality. This is a hyper-logical, hyper-masculine, reductionistic way of understanding reality. And it is untrue.
Consciousness is Love. It is not dumb matter or energy or even "simply what is". What is, is LOVE! And why it is, is LOVE!
Be careful not to underestimate God's goodness. That is the key mistake here. God is not neutral as you might assume.

@Matt8800 Thanks for the details responses.
Do you have any sense of whether it's possible to materialize a physical object through pure Will? Like a marble or a coin? And what is it that prevents this?
I'm still trying to figure out the precise connection between Will and physical manifestation. I know that God's Will manifests all of physical reality, but I'm not clear why I don't have access to change it, since I am God -- what prevents this access?
Any insights on that?
And have you had any experience tapping into and shifting collective consciousness? Like the consciousness of the entire human species? Healing the species as a whole, for example.

No, you're misquoting me.
I said:
Being = perception - ego
Being = experience - ego
Truth = perception - ego
Truth = experience - ego
Truth = Being
Perception = experience
These distinctions are subtle but important. Remember, I am not saying that colors and sounds will disappear. They will still be around. But they will get recontextualized.
You can look at an apple and see it as an apple.
Or you can look at an apple and see it as not an apple.
In both cases there is a round, red shape visible. But how you interpret that shape is very significant.
Try looking at an apple while letting go of your idea that it is an apple. Just stare at it in silence.

No, just do it as long as humanly possible.
It's very important that when you do your whole routine, that it be natural and organic. Don't waste too much mental energy criticizing yourself, timing things, analyzing yourself, etc. You must enter a flow state. The whole thing must become silky smooth and effortless. Let go of any self-conscious thoughts and just follow your heart.
Turn off your targeting computer and use The Force

I usually take one slow breath in and out between leg changes.
Just do the best you can, even if it's less than 90. The idea being that you will improve over time so it's not a big deal.
Holding your breath to 90 is quite hard when you're holding all the 3 locks. Your body will get very tense and burn through more oxygen than usual.

@OmniYoga There is consistency only because you deny the inconsistencies by outrageous degrees of self-deception and self-bias.
Your mind has deceived itself so completely that you cannot even imagine what no-self is. Because your very life depends on you not seeing it.
If you understood what I'm saying here, you would experience death.

Conventional human love, like romantic love, or love for your family, is like the tip of an infinite iceberg. You are conscious enough to realize love for only certain objects which serve your ego's survival. But once the ego is fully dissolved you realize that conventional human love was merely the tip of the iceberg. Then you realize that EVERYTHING is love.
The deepest love you have for your family is the love God has for all of its creation. You as a limited human feel a tiny portion of that universal unconditional love. Most of the time you are disconnected from it because you are disconnected from yourself as God.
If you were fully conscious that you are God, your love would be infinite and totally unconditional. You would not even be able to think of anything other than love.
Love is an Absolute and has no opposite. Feeling love is not necessary for Love to be at work. Love is at work even if you are torturing a puppy.
There is nothing you can do to shake God's love. You can be the most evil, egotistical, deluded person of all time, and God will still love you.

Love is everything that has ever "physically" occurred, that you have ever known, seen, or felt. Love is every "physical" object.
Love is Nothing.

You are God. You are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.
It would help if you stopped telling yourself otherwise. Since you are God, whatever you imagine becomes true. So if you imagine you're a limited human, that's precisely what you create.

@Phoenixx The point of human life is become more conscious of what you are and what reality is.
This requires raising awareness of oneself through self-reflection, contemplation, inquiry, meditation, disciplined practices, etc.

@OmniYoga The I you think you are is conceptual. It exists as a concept.
In the same way that Santa Claus exists conceptually.
Which is you say, the human self is imaginary. You are imagining that you were born. This a story you tell yourself to create a sense of self.
Think of it this way: just because you have a thought about something -- like Santa Claus living on Mars -- doesn't mean that thought refers to anything in the real world.
So the question is: why you assume that body is "yours"? Why isn't that body the universe's?
See, you've confused the universe and yourself. Or to put it more accurately: the universe believes it is a human. In the Absolute sense, there is only the universe believing it is a human. The universe is trying to act human to convince itself that it is human. But it's just the universe. The human part is imaginary.