@Shroomdoctor You need work on the very basics of putting together your life and career. Forget the lofty metaphysical stuff for now, and enough watching theory. Now it's implementation time.
Unfortunately there can be no shortcut for doing your pushups. You just gotta bite the bullet amd start doing them, one baby step at a time. Gradually build up your momentum.
Yew, this work takes lots of work. Accomplishing your highest vision requires a lot of hustling.
Maybe see my video: How To Get Shit Done. You have to be results oriented, not just theortical.
Also see my video: Balancing Theory vs Practice.
You are stuck in a cycle of avoiding emotional labor and there's just no advice that can let you skirt that. You cannot grow up and become successful without emotional labor.

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.

It all depends on how good you are at business.
Many life coaches make zero because they cannot find clients.
Other life coaches who develop a system for finding clients can make low 6 figures.
Someone like Tony Robbins makes tens of millions because he established an massive brand. It's best not to even think of him as a life coach. He a major business guy.
Life coaching is not different than any other small business. You have to be good at sales and marketing to be successful. If you think clients will just come to you, think again. The hardest part of life coaching is not the coaching, it's creating a steady stream of clients.
Most life coaches fail for this reason. But then again, most businesses fail for this reason.

Online dating requires above average looks, REALLY good professional profile photos (no selfies), and massive volume.
Online dating requires serious work. You don't just put up a profile and start getting dates. You gotta game it more than real life.
Online girls are screening you almost entirely on looks because they have nothing else to go by. Your personality has no chance to charm them. In real life you can hit much higher outside your league with charm and boldness. This cannot be done online. The girl has to decide whether she will sleep with you purely based on your profile photo in 1 second.
If you're turning online because you're too lazy to do it in real life, chances are your results will be bad. Laziness is not a viable strategy for finding attractive females.
If you have a classically handsome appearance, you can do well online. If not...

Canada's one of the best places right now for research chemicals.
Costa rica is also an interesting option. They do a lot of ayahuasca and ibogaine down there. They probably allow toads too (not sure).
Spain and Portugal have decriminalized all drugs. Which doesn't mean you can just buy them at the local store. But still far better than most countries.

Letting go is the easiest thing in the world. Just let go.
Start by letting go of your worries of letting go. See Sedona Method for more.

In this case a realistic path forward would involve you first working on commercial videos to build up your skills, experience, and reputation. Then you could branch off and start a company/service where you specifically target more artsy clients who can appreciate what you offer.
When you start business you usually have to send some years cutting your teeth on commercial work.
In fact many filmmakers began their careers working literally on TV commercials. Working on artsy projects is usually something you have to earn.
There are niches for artsy work but you'll have to figure out who those clients would be and what kind of services they need.
But also, don't get too attached to your medium. You should be somewhat flexible about your medium. The medium should ultimately serve your highest impact. If your medium is too limiting, consider upgrading to something which more directly serves your impact statement. Why are you so attached to editing being the way for raising collective consciousness. There might be more direct ways of raising collective consciousness than splicing videos.
Or maybe then you don't really care about raising collective consciousness? Maybe you care more about video? In which case you need to re-think your impact statement.

That's a very good insight about your fear.
But you must take it deeper. What is it about your identity which allows this fear to have any teeth at all for you?
Obviously you've somehow made intellect an significant part of your identity (of who you think you are). So you fear losing that sense of intellectual self.
Contemplate that. Try to get more clear about it.
And of course you know the ultimate solution here will be to surrender that intellectual self. You must bite the bullet that you will have no intellectual advantage over anyone else. At first you will resist accepting this because it will feel like a serious loss of meaning. You will feel like your life will become worse as a result. It will feel empty. But that emptiness is Truth. That emptiness is the True Self which you are avoiding. That emptiness leads to liberation.
Remember, a big part of waking up is surrendering meaning. Especially those things in life you find most meaningful, which for you probably means the meaning which comes with intellectual pursuits and knowledge acquisition. Notice that knowledge acquisition is a subtle form of greediness and materialism. Like the businessman hoards money the intellectual hoards ideas and insights.
Hoarding of ideas and insights must ultimately be surrendered to attain the final liberation. Because your truest Self is more empty and insubstantial than an insight or a piece of knowledge.
Of course don't make the mistake of demonizing or rejecting insight. Just don't build an identity out of it. That's all.

I would actually say just the opposite:
All of your current dysfunctions in life are the result of past events.
It's not so simple as correlating some one horrid childhood event to your current problem. It's much more complex. All problems are the result of whatever the "self" you identify as. This "self" was constructed as a reaction to survival challenges in the past. The "self" is nothing more than a survival mechanism. So of course it's highly conditioned by upbringing, childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood. Whatever stuff happened to you between the ages of 0 to 30 has shaped your personality almost totally to the point where you cannot even know what your self would be without it. Of course your are not just shaped by bad events but good events too.
Of course none of this means you can't change.
It's a bad idea to listen to academic psychologists when it comes to understanding the dynamics of the self. Broad surveys and studies are not gonna cut it here. This requires existential level insight through direct work on oneself.
Ask yourself where your "self" came from? You'll see it was from the past. In fact, your entire mind came from the past. Every word you use came from your past. 99% of the ideas in your mind came from your past. You hardly invented anything new. You are like a snowball rolling down hill collecting more snow and dirt.
But the strange looping twist here is, the past is just a figment of your mind! There never was a past or a self or a world! You made it all up. You sneaky devil, you.
Survival has everything to do with your problems. Without survival there is no problem at all.

I didn't start any large corporation, nor did I ever use investors to start my businesses.
You just gotta be creative. You can run a small biz and do well.
Of course you'll be working long hours to make your small biz thrive. Then you'll understand why long hours are common.
There exist many opportunities for small businesses. There are many market niches which are too small to sustain large corporations so they can't compete with you.
Business is just like the animal kingdom. The biggest animals are not the only game in town. In fact, most animals are small ones. You can be a highly successful small animal. But you gotta be more creative, clever, and strategic than the big guys.

What most people don't realize is that earning $180k is not much easier than earning $5 million.
To even create a business that sustainably earns $20k per year is not easy, and it will involve as much work as a business that earns a lot more. The money is the not main factor.
You can't make a baby is 3 months just by wanting a small baby. There is a certain minimum that goes into building any sustainable brand. And it usually takes years at least.
Chasing after schemes to make cash is not a good idea. If you're serious about making money you need to start a serious business. For that you should plan to invest 3-5 years of your life, full-time, at least.

That's right. God is absolute self-acceptance.
Oneness cannot help but accept itself because it has no other option. To deny oneness requires a limited, dualistic consciousness which divides self into other.
God loves you because God is you. God has no other to it, so it loves and accepts all. God is indiscriminate consciousness.
Indiscriminate consciousness is your true nature. That is enlightenment.
@Consilience You are doing good, but you still have yet to realize Love / Absolute Self-Acceptance as your true nature. This is a very radical mystical state of consciousness. You could equate it to death, immortality, or total God-mode. It will be so epic your whole body will shudder in a cosmic orgasm. Keep following the scent trail and maybe one day you'll reach it.
Psychedelics help a lot with this.

I've been in that exact situation before.
It's gonna be really hard to make that work.
Usually serious depression, anxiety, and low self esteem are a sign of some deeper trauma which she is avoiding/denying. Often it could be sexual abuse, rape, death of mother or father, etc. Serious stuff. This tends to go hand in hand with alcohol and substance abuse. So watch out.
Such women get very needy, very clingy, very emotional, and they are almost impossible to help because they perceive suggestions to get help as an attack on their identity. As in, "Why don't you love me for who I am?!!!" A needy person is so desperate for love they cannot handle truth. The slightest suggestions for self-improvement trigger them. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy effect where their fear of being abandoned makes them so clingy that no healthy relationship is possible, thereby leading to abandonment, reinforcing the idea in their mind that they are unlovable. No serious communication is possible because such people cannot handle truthful communication. They want fantasy and sweet lies.
Such people need deep therapeutic help, enormous self-help work, and lots of spiritual development. Unfortunately they tend to refuse any such thing -- making their relationship impossible.
And finally when you try to end the relationship, there will be huge waterworks and the threat of suicide.
Try to see what you can do. Try introducing her to some basic self-help and self-esteem work. But also understand that this person has deep inner wounds which you probably cannot fix. Such wounds usually take 10-20 years to resolve, and that's IF the person is interested in working on herself.
Try to figure out what the root cause of her depression / anxiety is. Usually it's a traumatic childhood or teenage event. She is likely to hide such an event from you because she's scared that if you find out you will leave her. Such women often lie a lot to themselves and therefore will lie to you. It's part of her coping strategy to avoid deep truth or deep self-reflection.
In practice such women can only be in highly dysfunctional relationships until they do some serious self-help work.
If she has serious low self-esteem, chances are high she's got a history of abusive relationships. Try to dig into her history to get a sense of what you're dealing with. It could be some dark stuff.
Don't blame yourself. Some women are just like this and cannot be helped until they seek help for themselves.

Do all the practices diligently and slowly you will transcend various personal needs.
Or you can also exhaust them to death. Like, go have so much sex you get sick of it. Or go earn so much money that you stop caring about money.

Observe yourself chasing positive states and notice how this subtle duality and attachment creates suffering.
Expecting constant bliss precludes true peacefulness since when your bliss dips you start to complain, "Where did my bliss go? How can I get it back?" Which is the very root of unhappiness: trying to escape the present moment.
It's okay to chase bliss. Just observe this dynamic closely so that you become more and more aware that it cannot ultimately work. Through lots of observation of this clinging you will slowly aikido your clinging into surrender.

@reves I'm not sure what the problem is here. Sounds like a typical trip. You doubt yourself too much.
Drop your expectations for pleasantness or divinity. The trip gives you what you need. Integrate it and conintue tripping. Future trips will be different.
Personally I find 4-AcO-DMT to be a huge mindfuck. Other psychedelics are easier.
For me, the whole point of tripping is to contemplate and get answers. What answers do you want?
It seems you're looking for a good time but you are not serious about understanding what reality is. When you get serious about understanding, how you feel will become irrelevant. This is why a passion for truth is so important in this work, otherwise you start chasing good feelings and you think something is wrong when you don't get good feeling. But notice, good feelings are a selfish motivation.
You must get very clear about what you want out of this work.

Even advanced spiritual masters struggle with taming their sex drive. So for an average person it is basically impossible. You may as well stop shitting while you're at it.
If you become a hardcore yogi, it is possible to transcend. But none of you here are at that level and I would never trust you to do it.
You are better off being honest about your sexual cravings rather than trying to act all noble when deep down we both know you are a horny dog who cannot control itself in the slightest.
If you were presented with an opportunity for sex you would pounce on it like a starving lion on a gazelle.
Don't confuse lack of opportunity for some kind of spiritual transcendence. Just because you got no one to screw doesn't make you advanced. Actually it means you are even less advanced than you think. It makes you a starved devil.
It is funny when a devil pretends to be above sex. You ain't fooling anyone but yourself.

@seeking_brilliance You're talking about being a guru or a Boddhisatva.
Answering people's questions is often counter-productive because people are usually asking the wrong questions, and giving them answers does not actually help them become more conscious.
A good guru goes meta and shows you the limitations of your questioning process. A good guru gets you to see that asking him for answers will not work. A good guru shows you how to find the answers from within.
The problem is that people's questions usually come from a place of survival, which only deepens their problem. A guru must show you how and why to go beyond survival.

There is an infinite number of ways to manifest Love. So I wouldn't limit it to any one profession. The whole point of Love is that is literally Infinite! Everything is a manifestation of Love.
With that said, the ultimate profession is becoming a mystic/Bodhisattva because only a hardcore mystic will ever fully realize what Love is. Ordinary people, including artists, just aren't conscious enough to realize how deep Love goes. They also aren't selfless and pure enough to manifest Love in it purest form. Their bodies and minds are too corrupted by ego, culture, and defilements. So their work is nice, but it pales in comparison to the work of someone like Jesus.
To manifest love at the highest levels you must become conscious of what Love truly is, and then you must completely rid yourself of yourself (see quote in my sig). And then whatever you do after that doesn't matter.
This is usually only achieved by full-time monks and mystics. And even then it's rare. It's not easy for a human to perfectly reflect God. You'd basically have to surrender your entire life to do it. Which is why it's so rarely done and awesome.
If you really care about Love, devote your life to the way of the Bodhisattva and you won't regret it. And make sure you do some 5-MeO-DMT along the way.

Read the Stanford article on idealism. It's explained there.
Epistemtic idealism means that human knowledge is a construction of the mind. Ontological idealism means that physical reality is a construction of the mind.

A friend of mine once did a Tarot reading of me.
It was surprising good.
It's not that it predicts your future, but rather is works by getting your own mind to clarify its own desires and obstacles.
It's almost like an occult form of life coaching, where the answers don't come from the coach but from the mind of the person being coached.
The mistake people make regarding Tarot is thinking of it as some fortune telling device. It's not that.

Responding from a different angle, I've tried to list here, in as few words as possible, what must be "moved beyond" or in some sense transcended, to move past (or perhaps "integrate" would be a better way of putting it) each level.
Beige - Base instict
Purple - Tribal identification
Red - Extreme egocentricism
Blue - Mono culturalism
Orange - Individualistic materialism
Green - Idealistic environmentalism
Yellow - Conceptual distinctions
 

Spirituality is about facing your fears and realizing that all fear is illusion.
The whole function of life is learn how to love vs fear. That is really the only thing you're doing here in life. Everything is just a variation on this theme. Take a look.

@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.

I think this was shared somewhere in the forum way before, but I thought it would be fitting to repost it here, enjoy.
https://www.diygenius.com/mind-expanding-documentaries/