I've never been in such a situation. 
All I can say from the absolute perspective is that everything happens due to cause and effect 
Learn to let go and understand that we are all flawed deep down. Some are more flawed than others. 
 

It's a combination. There were strong innate capacities which tend required years of cultivation.
I just know that my core intelligence is not something anyone taught me. It's also effortless, like breathing. It's not something I trained per se. It's something I applied in my self-education.
I've also always felt more intelligent/wiser than everyone around me. I didn't understand why until I realized that I'm just more conscious as a baseline than most people. This is not something I trained. I was born with it.
Innate intelligence is like height. It is what it is and you won't change it. However you can do a lot to cultivate and make whatever intelligence you got shine. You can also practice good health in order to maintain and maximize it. For example, if you consume metal metals your intelligence will drop.

It sounds like you have an underlying health/chronic fatigue problem. This could be due to diet, heavy metal toxicity, low vitamin D levels, low thyroid function, etc.
You should get some comprehensive blood work done and start studying chronic fatigue.
The #1 thing to try is drastically cleaning up your diet.

Yes, but I also just have innately high holistic intelligence. It's just not measurable by IQ.
There is definitely a big genetic factor to intelligence. Like I said, if you had the genetics of a mule, you'd be stupid.

I feel like, since this pandemic started, I don't get to live my early 20s the way I want. I wanted to have interesting life experiences, love, live life to the fullest, travel with friends/a bf. This pandemic started when I was 20. I am freaking 22 now. I am annoyed quite frankly that this is happening.
This has also lowered (my already low) chances of meeting potential bf. (I say "already low" because I live in a city of 200,000 people, where more than half are older people).
And the guys I do manage to meet, it seems like we are not a a match, which is starting to frustrate me quite a bit because, when are they gonna find me more attractive than now? And when am I gonna have these beautiful romantic experiences? In my freaking 50s and 60s? It's ridiculous. This was supposed to be my best years lol.
It's easier for guys, they can settle later in life, but for a girl, I feel like young years are their best time to find their partner. It's freaking depressing and this is stressing me out to no end.
I feel like I'm not using all my potentials too and I'm spending my best years at home most of the time. I do go out, but the amount of people I see out is quite depressing. Almost noone is going out because of sudden peak of new corona cases here. And what is funny is that, rarely does it happen that I meet new guys through my social circle (that consists of mostly girls). I don't know if this is universe playing tricks on me lol.
What is even a solution to this? What can one do about it? 
@soos_mite_ah
 

If heavy learning doesn't suit you, no problem. Work on all the other parts of your life. Heavy learning is overrated and not necessary to live a great life.

@Consilience good insights man! Your schedule is intense, I like it.
As far as a the whole psychedelics debate, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I’ve used them in the past and plan to use them again in the future. The insights are radical and often genuine. And I do believe they can create true healing for people, as seen from my own experience and from the experience of others. People have literally cured hard drug addiction with a single session of Ibogaine or Ayahuasca. 
At the same time, I’ve also seen people who have spun their wheels with psychedelics. People who may have had deep insights, but seem to still struggle with many basic emotional problems, limiting beliefs, etc.
I don’t really know why some people seem to get better results than others. Lack of “manual” practice and integration perhaps. Lack of proper intention. Or perhaps this debate goes deeper than any technique or substance. Perhaps it’s simply the soul’s will to have that experience. And all our arguing about what method is best is just laughable.
What I do know is that I currently resonate with more of a manual approach as well. That feels like it gives me the deepest integration and embodiment, which is what I’m really interested in. And if I can sprinkle in some peak psychedelic experiences every once in a while to see what that brings, I’m happy with that as well.
 

The problem isn't your height. The problem is that you don't understand female psychology and attraction.
I'm 5'7" and I've made out with girls at clubs that are easily 5'11" or even 6 feet.
Is it because that girl likes short guys?
No.
My height literally has nothing to do with the equation at all.
I focus 100% of my energy and attention on expressing myself playfully, authentically, and being social, charming, clever, seductive, flirtatious, etc.
While it is true that some girls say shit like "I won't go out with a guy unless he's AT LEAST 6 feet."
Those girls don't understand that they aren't attracted to height. They're attracted to masculine energy. 
For most of these girls who say they're picky about height... they'll get really turned on if you just know how to embody the right energy.
For the ones who are really adamant about their arbitrary height rule...
Ask yourself this:
Why would you even want a girl who's obviously so shallow that her primary metric for evaluating a potential mate is his height?
If you have nothing else to offer a girl except for the literal length of your body... God help you.

Well it may be a little late, but today and tomorrow I would increase your daily sitting to around 4 hours per day as a means of building momentum before the formal day 1. Unless you’re looking for the whip lash of not as intense practice to extremely intense practice.
Id also recommend letting go of all expectations of how the retreat is supposed to go or feel. It’s common for people to be blissed out, go through excruciating difficulty, total neutrality, or some combination of those three. Remember, (and this is a HUGE insight I would guess the majority of meditators don’t understand about meditation) what is happening in one’s experience or mind at the surface, what is clear and recognizable moment to moment, is not always indicative of what is happening in the depths of mind and consciousness. 
 
Imagine the surface of the Earth before an earthquake - many shifts in tectonic plates are taking place underneath the ground, the overwhelming majority of which cannot be felt or perceived. All it takes is one tiny shift in the tectonic plates and suddenly a massive earthquake erupts. Likewise, deep transformations and “progress” can be made with meditation despite the fact that no surface level or gross manifestations of mind are changing. Many people give up on meditation before these profound earthquake moments can happen. It’s best to keep practicing despite what is happening at the surface level of mind and emotion. 
 
In my opinion, it’s best to not take seriously our surface level emotions and thoughts. The deeper, more intuitive clarity and wisdom as a result of the retreat will emerge on its own and be self-validating. Yet in order for that clarity/wisdom to arise, we need to let go and surrender to the practice, retreat structure, and all attempts at manipulation. Let the pain, fatigue, boredom, and doubt filter through you without resistance, thereby purifying the mind rather than creating suffering.  
 
Last thing, sign up for your next retreat immediately after you finish. To get the most out of serious meditation practice, annual retreats are the minimum. 
 
Have fun!

Im at a point in my practice where meditating can feel like 50 - 70ug of LSD and that’s just.. normal. Wild, outlandish meditative experiences just happen, regularly now. Less in a perceptual intensity but in the awareness of direct consciousness; this consciousness is extremely palpable, obvious, self illuminating, self liberating, and effortless and continues to increase in intensity as I keep up the rigor of practice. There’s a spaciousness and emptiness to experience that I walk around with. The idea of life being a dream is not a philosophical concept but an experiential observation and embodiment. Solipsism is a joke compared to Absolute Unity, and interdependency. The sense of self is fluid, expansive, contractive, I can detect people’s emotions much more easily. Because Ive also been doing a large amount of strong determination sitting, my relationship with pain is radically transforming. Basically pain tolerance is much much higher than it was even 3 months ago. Craving for junk food, porn, masturbation is at an all time low. Very high amounts of emotional ease, happiness, peace. Im more honest with others and how I communicate. I literally just dont feel bored now. At this point Ive accessed deeper “states” of “God” meditating than many of my earlier psychedelic trips. 
 
When I see Leo shitting on meditation I find it both hysterical and sad because he’s leading so many people away from the path that actually Awakens us. Using 5MeO for the rest of your life just isnt it, and observing Leo’s lack of embodiment and shadow come out on the forum and in videos makes this increasingly clear. It‘s blind leading the blind, yet because of his success with Actualized many assume he must know what he’s talking about when it comes to spirituality. In many ways he does, in many ways he’s utterly and completely deluded, like with how meditation works and how to achieve crazy results with it. He’s cornered himself into such determined arrogance, that Im not confident he’ll ever snap out of the self-deception. 
 
Anyways, the thing about this intensity of practice is that it’s become extremely pleasurable not in an overt perceptual sense, but in the radical recontextualization of basically all facets of life. I see the relationship between how much Im suffering in the background of life, and how by purifying the conditions of this suffering, Im also coming into deeper union with truth. And this authentic (re: watch out for neo advaita bullshit) union with truth that transcends all states is the path of Buddha’s, and is the path the self most deeply desires. Im realizing how precious and rare it is to actually be on the path pursuing it at full force and feel immense gratitude that reality somehow manifested the conditions for me to be legitimately on it. 

Intro
One quick clarification - Many of these days of practice have involved not only the 90 minute SDS sit, but a 60 minute SDS sit as well. I'm currently practicing both in the morning and evening which have provided multiple opportunities for this practice. The results mentioned in this post are most likely a result of doing this kind of intensity of practice twice a day rather than once. My morning SDS sits are 60 minutes, while the evenings have been the 90 minutes. Moreover, it's difficult to determine how much of these results come directly from the SDS sitting and how much stem from the overarching intensity of training (currently living at in a monastic training environment). Leading into this training approach was a 7 day meditation retreat where I practiced 8+ hours of this kind of sitting; not all at once, across multiple sits. Ultimately, all of the training feeds on and cannot be separated from itself, yet the consistency and challenge of the 90 minutes seems to be at the root of these results. 
It's also worth pointing out, while practicing I'll let my spine naturally straighten and adjust on its own, trusting the body's natural intelligence. All other body movements are off limits. The function of SDS is not to not move; the function is to purify the mind. The spine adjusting does very, very, very little to the pain one's experiencing and can even at times make the pain worse. However, sitting in good posture, strengthening the supporting back muscles and ingraining proper body positioning is more important to me than any minor benefits I may or may not get by not letting the spine move.
-
As I've mentioned in this post, I've been taking a step back from my engagement with the community. The recent fixation on psychedelics as a viable means for awakening has felt out of alignment with my integrity in so far as listening to my inner wisdom about what steps need to be taken in order to align with my highest value - Truth. My gut tells me Leo's path and mine are very different and that trying to brute force my way into awakening through psychedelics is a path of spiritual foolishness. This isn't to say it won't work for Leo, or that it couldn't work in general, but from what I've observed within myself, within this forum having taken a step back, and from what I've observed living with serious practitioners for the past two months (check out this post for why I become a semi-monk), my skepticism about psychedelic's leading to legitimate awakening is at an all time high. This isn't even to mention all of the strange Neo-Advaita energy on the forum. As such, my resonance with the Actualized community feels more distant than it's ever been since discovering Leo's work.

Yet despite this skepticism, and dis-resonance with the community, I'd still like to offer perspectives that may help many. Because despite the fact that we may have differing opinions or beliefs about awakening, one of the most beautiful qualities of Actualized.org is our commitment to discovering the truth about reality. Additionally, I truly believe Leo's work has been a gift to humanity and I would not be here writing a post in contradiction with Leo's position if it weren't for all of the earlier Actualized.org material. This post is an offering about the effects of hardcore daily meditation practice and what happens when one relentlessly commits to purifying the mind.
 
Themes:
Purification
My daily practice schedule
Why am I doing this?
Pain Tolerance
Emotional Rewiring
Integrity
Pain, Compassion, Interdependency, Solipsism
Psychedelics vs. Practice
Conclusion
 
Purification
Purification in this post means the process of the cessation of craving and aversion; in other words, the process by which we stop the mind's pushing and pulling on perception. One of the key axioms of Buddhism and many spiritual traditions that emphasize contemplative practice is that the quality of one's mind is a key variable with one's ability to directly perceive reality. For example, the "direct consciousness" of an awakening experience, the experience of God, or Nirvana will be unavailable to the degree one's mind is constantly at odds with experience.
By purification, I don't mean to suggest that the mind's activity is somehow impure, or wrong. In fact, once one begins to truly purify the mind, one sees that even the defilements of the mind (qualities such as hatred, greed, and ignorance) are themselves pure and of "one taste." This is where the Non-duality would come into play; every experience is of God. Unfortunately, because the mind has brilliant, deeply sophisticated self-deception mechanisms that keep the self-activity endlessly churning, this insight often gets co-opted by the ego. This is what is happening in many of the Neo Advaita community. I will concede, however, that as one actually purifies the mind, these defilements are seen as self-liberating; hatred, when experienced completely without resistance (hatred in its most "purified" or direct form) is no longer hatred. One cannot hate when hatred is experienced is its actuality. As such, this process of purification is not necessarily about permanently elevating one's state into wholesome mental qualities like metta, happiness, joy, tranquility, but is instead about a deep rewiring of one's mind and this mind's relationship with all phenomena regardless of quality, quantity, or activity. Purification at the highest level is the radical recontextualization of one's relationship to experience.

That being said, learning to cultivate wholesome mental qualities is a very powerful method of purification because it forces us to confront our twisted addictions to various forms of craving and aversion. For example, one cannot be deeply absorbed in a jhana without first having dropped the activities of craving and aversion; in this way, we could say the 8 jhanas are states of mind in increasingly more direct relationship with reality. This is one framing of jhanas and not the only one, nor 100% true.


My Daily Practice Schedule
Below is a standard day of training at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth, MAPLE (where I'm currently living). The SDSs are not mandatory; rather they are something I do for myself. Most in the community don't do regular SDS sitting. Because I am living there as a guest, I am actually not practicing as much as the apprentices and residents. I am living within the community and working remotely.

4:30 - 5:00am Silent practice
5:00 - 5:30am Chanting
5:30 - 6:30am Silent practice (SDS)
6:30 - 7:30am Exercise + Cold shower
7:30 - 8:15am Silent mindful eating practice, breakfast
 
12:30 - 1:15pm Silent mindful eating practice, lunch
 
7:00 - 8:30pm Silent practice (SDS)
8:30 - 8:45pm Chanting
8:45 - 9:15pm Self practice/Bed
 
Why am I doing this?
Before coming to MAPLE, there was something inside the depths of my mind that knew my aversion needed to be addressed if awakening was my goal. My meditation practice had developed sufficiently enough to where despite being able to consistently reach radically profound states, these states were fragile, completely dependent on conditions being favorable enough to see clearly. Despite being able to experience formless jhanas, emptiness, and God without chemical augmentation, this clear seeing was only available when I wasn't suffering. As pain, whether bodily or emotional, increased enough, the availability of this clear seeing disappeared.

The first week of being at MAPLE was a 7 day meditation retreat. The first day I was sitting and ruminating about how I wanted this retreat to go. I told myself that this first retreat would be a great warmup, but that on the second retreat later in April, I would focus on SDS and my relationship with pain. I starting getting pumped about how great this experience was going to be and how my mind would be after April. And then some sort of higher power, or higher self phenomena smacked me in the face and forced me to acknowledge nothing was holding me back from pursuing this SDS goal now, in the January retreat.

Over the course of those 7 days I sat in so much pain, unbelievably intense pain and emotional distress coupled with waves of perfect equanimity and peace. Hours and hours of physical stillness giving rise to waves of pain, struggle, and breaking free massive amounts of grief and love in my heart. By the end of those 7 days my mind was more clear than it'd ever been. Something in my being wanted to keep the momentum going though, seeing that the fear and aversion towards pain had not been fully uprooted.
 
Pain Tolerance
When one examines the actuality of pain, there are broadly speaking two flavors of phenomena going on. #1 The sensations of pain. #2 The mind's resistance to pain.
The key to purifying pain is by bring awareness (mindfulness) to these two interpenetrating sensations and untangling them. Most people experience these as one movement which is what creates the suffering. #2 can only resist #1 when both are tangled up together. The mind can only suffer when #2 is allowed to merge with #1. The reality of #1 and #2 cannot be seen when both are tangled up precisely because of the illusory nature of their entanglement. They are not actually tangled, existing as one movement; they are already distinct phenomena and therefore the suffering one experiences from pain is an illusion. Yet to uproot this ignorance, one must see the constituents of the illusion clearly.
When one begins to directly experience #1, the pain takes on a flavor of fluidity and spaciousness. Pain starts to be experienced almost like liquid, as though there are little microcosmic waves making up each millimeter of the body's perceptual shape. As #2 is experienced directly, it begins to literally evaporate. The mind's resistance, #2, is spatially located right within the pain itself. When one penetrates this supra-subtle experience of #2 and it is seen directly as itself, it no longer has the infrastructure to ground itself. Hence the evaporation of #2 as one brings mindfulness to it. As strange as this may sound, #2 can only exist while #2 is actively resisting #1; it's a microcosmic strange loop and in Buddhism is called Dependent Origination. #2 Resists #1 which reinforces/gives rise to #2. Of course, this is a process dependent upon time which when we perceive reality with perfect mindfulness, time and space are seen as illusions as well thus the whole thing falls apart.
Unfortunately, I don't have complete clarity on the exact dynamics of what is going on beyond what I mentioned above. I am still studying suffering and my relationship clearing seeing the causes and conditions of suffering, and therefore the causes and conditions obstructing my awareness of God. However, as a result of this practice and the aforementioned experiential observations, I can sit in much larger amounts of pain and for longer periods of time than I have ever been able to in my life.
Pain and my fear of it just feels vapid, to some degree.  I feel a confidence and determination in my practice to continue uprooting this wrong view. Death, decay, and the pain of impermanence feel remarkably more peaceful.
 
 
Emotional Rewiring (Infinity)
Because #2 is an emotional/conceptual experience, bringing mindfulness to this emotional activity has a natural, automatic rewiring effect. Mindfulness rewires the mind; it is truly an activity of grace and a miraculous miracle. Not only does one begin to build an enormous amount of mental resiliency sitting with this type of challenge, but there is a confidence, faith, and uprooting of doubt about the power of meditation, the path, and what one's natural mind is capable of. Because this practice forces one to examine and bring equanimity to challenging emotions, this practice has immediate and direct carry over to living in a the state of this world.
 
The world is painful, harrowing, horrifying, and terrible in so many ways. How does one see God in all of it without becoming numb to it all? By coming into right relationship with God. As long as there is a lack of equanimity with the actuality of God, one will not be in right relationship with God. As long as one is resisting the various forms of pain in this world, one will be unable to grieve for its horror. As long as one cannot grieve at this existential scale, one will be unable to love God. And if one cannot love God, one cannot love themselves. If one cannot love themselves, one will be unable to know what they actually are in its totality.
 
By deeply rewiring one's emotional system to experience large magnitudes of pain, we begin opening up the heart to experience the collective magnitude of suffering, that this suffering is of God's nature. As bold of a claim as this is, we won't be able to truly love and therefore know truth until this collective suffering is held in the deepest, unfathomable depths God's mind and heart. The aversion we have towards pain is also an aversion we have towards accepting what we actually are not just individually, but in the infinity of our true nature.
 
Integrity
A primary operating principle of mind is to provide answers. A primary operating principle of the body is to be comfortable. Integrity is developed when one can sit in not knowing and when one the body can sit with discomfort. SDS prevents the mind from providing answers. With this much pain, there are no answers. SDS prevents the body from finding comfort. With this much pain, no comfort can be found.
As we cultivate this equanimity and let the pain naturally work through our system, we purify the mind. As the mind is purified, integrity is developed. It's pretty simple. We won't be able to trust ourselves or our word as long as our minds are out of alignment with actuality. At the root of this lack of alignment is one's relationship to pain.
 
Pain, Compassion, Interdependency, Solipsism
As a matter of direct experience, there are no others. There is only the aggregation of sight, taste, touch, sound, smell, and mind. As a matter of becoming directly conscious of what one is, it is experienced that the consciousness "inside of me" must be the same consciousness "inside of another." Why? Because this consciousness is completely pure, complete without quality or form. When looking into another being's eyes and questioning what they are, we can come to directly realize this consciousness looking out of each other's eyes shares the exact same nature and therefore by necessity, must be the same consciousness. It is paradoxical and a mindfuck.

When one directly experiences Absolute Unity, all is seen to be one. It's not that other's don't exist. And it's not that you exist. And it's not that I exist. It's not that you are me, or I am you, nor is it that you are God and I am God. It's that there is a movement of infinite unity, and interdependency. The activity in one's mind is at the end of an infinite, interconnected chain of causes and conditions giving rise to outcomes and effects. All movements of relative reality interpenetrate and connect with all other movements of relative reality, at all levels. The personality cannot be separated from this totality. So when it's seen that there is no such thing as 'the' "personality" or the self, that the self is just a purely spontaneous movement, when we TRULY experience our real nature, what we are on all levels of relativity and absolutely cannot be separate from anything or anyone else. This is Solipsism. But that word and its philosophical implications are a poor conceptual framework for the unity I speak of.

When the ego mind intellectualizes this, all kinds of resistances, fears, and twisted interpretations arise. When consciousness awakens to its own nature, a reservoir of endless compassion begins to open. Why? Because the suffering of another is, to some degree, experienced as one's own suffering. The suffering we find within ourselves is the suffering underneath the mind activity of other. There is no separation. There is no duality. When we see the necessity of alleviating our own suffering in order to come into union with truth, we see the necessity in alleviating the suffering of others, and perhaps all beings. For it is impossible to truly end our own suffering and therefore truly awaken to our true nature as long as a single being remains lost in Samsara. At least, this seems to be where my experience is going.
The pain I've experienced from SDS has shown me glimpses into such horrific atrocities throughout the history of humanity and by extension, the endless eternity of infinity's activity. Samsara is like an infinite set within the infinite set of infinities. It has an end in its endlessness. Yet this end is impossible unless we merge, come into marriage with, and move towards our own pain, our own suffering. Awakening without this unification is incomplete, half-baked, and ultimately a pitiful substitute for what our hearts actually yearn for.

The compassion born from embracing hell with love and the direct realization of unity is the source of energy needed to awaken to a depth and degree too grandiose for words, and too heart wrenching for tears.
 
Psychedelics vs. Practice
Psychedelics have played such a crucial role in my own process. They've played such a critical role with opening my mind up to the infinitude of consciousness and what the mind is capable of encountering. They've shown me the divine to a depth and degree I cherish. The grace and blessing of having experienced what I've experienced on psychedelics almost hurts to acknowledge, as though I am unworthy for the amount of wisdom they've provided.

But for my own path, the real work has just begun. The boredom, fatigue, craving, aversion, resistance, numbness, addictions, and defilements of the human mind must be dealt with head on. As is becoming increasingly obvious from Leo and those who have consistently used psychedelics, psychedelics do no uproot these defilements of mind and in some cases, they can reinforce certain defilements. As long as these defilements exist in the mind with a lack of mindful clarity, ignorance and suffering remains.

I hope that by reading this report, the great psychonauts of Actualized.org can realize the importance of manual practice and perhaps start to see more clearly what needs to be done manually, and the ultimate limits of psychedelics.
 
Conclusion
The fastest way to make tangible, powerful, and exponential results with this work is through rigorous meditation and the relentless pursuit of purifying one's mind. I cannot stress this enough.

You don't need a $1000 course, you don't need 5-MeO DMT, and you don't need endless amounts of over conceptualization and arm chair forum philosophy. What you need is to take the emotional hit of doing the work. 2+ hours of meditation per day and going on annual week+ long meditation retreats is a start, but as you can tell from my daily schedule and the fact that I'm living in a monastic training environment, I do a lot more than that. However, the results have been utterly undeniable. And you will make profound results without needing to go join a monastery.

Further, I would make a bet that the community of actualized.org responds extremely well to rigorous meditation practice, contrary to Leo's beliefs and what he encourages. Because we have such powerful philosophical frameworks and because many of us have such ample experience with altered states using psychedelics, I believe this potentiates the effects of meditation. I could be wrong, but this is based on examining how practice has evolved within the context of my aggressive use and history with psychedelics.

Depending on how this is received, I may make an additional practice report going into more generally how it's been living and training in community at MAPLE. There is so much that could be said, but I'll go on ahead and end it here. I hope this report helps inspire you to take meditation more seriously, and provides a glimpse into what is possible with rigorous meditation practice.
 

Atoms, Earth, forces, mass, matter, energy, space, time, the Big Bang, evolution, birth, death -- all purely imaginary. As real as unicorns.
It happens in the sense that people hold some ideas in their minds and use these ideas to manipulate reality. Similar to religion.
If you want to really get it, take a psychedelic.

That's cause you haven't become conscious that it is.
You guys do not appreciate the depth of what I said about science. You still basically believe in science.

And no such claim of uprooting defilements has been made.
The claim made was simply insight, consciousness, and God-realization. If you want to transform your mental habits, that's decades of additional work.
God-realization is a distinct event from changing your human self. You can have one without the other, and vice versa.

You and 4 billion other guys.
Or maybe some people just enjoy marriage and kids as a lifestyle?
Doesn't mean you have to.
Burn through that karma. Pursue and fulfill some of your teenage desires. Just don't be sleeping with underaged girls.

I will have trip reports on pharmahuasca, mescaline, ketamine, MDMA, toad, and iboga in the future.
I can also report on every 4-ho, 4-aco, 5-meo subtype.

No idea about the enlightenment part tbh but keep in mind Sadhguru comes from a different era and culture than most of us here. Also keep in mind that he doesn't have a partner. If you want to prioritize your union to the world itself than I guess go down that path but if you want a high quality sexual/romantic/intimate relationship with another human partner than I have a hard time seeing how you'd do it without first a lot of experience.
The guy I know with the healthiest and most grounded mindset when it comes with women has a lay count of 500+, not that it's necessary to get that high but it does follow the principle.

Of course it's your job to make them intimate/sexual.
It's not just about "making a move". You must set the entire frame of your interaction with her to be intimate/sexual from the very beginning of meeting her. And then you build on it at every chance you get.
You should be looking at her like you're in love with her. Build a bubble of love between you and her. It's you and her against the world.
Yes, you're failing to lead, which in itself is unattractive in a man.
Don't wait for anything or any indicators.
If a girl shows up to a date with you, she's willing to sleep with you, as long as you lead it properly.
Yes, you need a lot of escalation experience. Force yourself to escalate quickly and stop doubting yourself. You need to get in touch with your desire for her, and then just act on that desire and take her. Stop hesitating. If her ass turns you on, start squeezing it. If you feel like kissing her, kiss her. Etc. Treat her like your doll. And watch her face and reactions as you escalate to see if it is turning her off. If it's not turning her off, keep escalating. If you over-escalate just back off a bit and start escalating again in a few minutes.
A girl is not going to let you escalate like that unless she likes you.
Fundamentally your mistake is that you are not being true to your desire for her. If you were, you would manhandle her appropriately and this in turn would turn her on. She wants you to claim her as your own. But you are too scared because you're still too weak as a man. So you gotta become a stronger man -- which means you act and lead without a bunch of self-doubt. You've become pussified the way you were raised, so you doubt yourself way too much with women.
For you, you should escalate and even risk getting slapped. Get slapped a few times for over-escalating. This will be good for you. It's better to over-escalate than under-escalate on a date. On a date you should be pulling her panties down. See how much you can get away with.
If you are not occasionally over-escalating, you're being too meek.

I have no problem with sticking with one partner. But first you gotta find the right partner.
You are not just gonna sleep with one girl and find your partner.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with who you sleep with.
And learning game is not about getting one girl, it's about becoming a strong and attractive man. This requires experience and practice. If you sleep with 20 girls you will become a stronger man in the process. If you settle down with the first girl you sleep with, you're gonna stay a pussy forever. And eventually she'll leave you anyways.

Don't ask her unless you actually care.
Cut the shit and be genuine about why you are talking to here. Don't invent excuses to talk to a girl, own your desire for her. Become the kind of guy who needs no excuse.
"I just saw you and felt attracted." No other justification necessary.
Work on making your game as genuine as possible.

@Yali Muse is the best if you want something cheap. Used Muse is about $200.
Neurosity Crown is the best if you have more money, but want a neat-looking commercial device.
But If you have money for Crown you can also choose a 2-channel EEG device. It can have more channels, but 2 is all you need.
You don't need medical-grade equipment, something like OpenBCI or Neurobit or Q-wiz will do. Maybe you can find something used in your area on craigslist or Ebay or whatever you use in the US. Remember that for devices other than OpenBCI you often also have to buy the software.
Here's a book about meditation using EEG:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35254171-meditation-interventions-to-rewire-the-brain

1) Stop listening to women on this matter. They are not conscious of what makes them attracted nor will they give you accurate guidance on what is required to attract them. It's like you are asking an enemy castle to tell you its weak points.
2) Once they fall for you, women backwards rationalize that you are handsome and hot.

What I said is not polygamy.
As with anything in life, experience is king.
A typical attractive girl will have way more sexual experience than you anyways because sex is so easy for them.
You have no idea what you even want in a girl.
You would be a fool to buy the first house you see. Apply this logic to girls.

What females are attracted do is not arbitrary, they are attracted to specific things.
Beauty is not what females are attracted to. The problem is that you fundamentally misunderstand female attraction and what women need from men.
Also, more practically, the reason girls haven't yet found you attractive yet is because:
1) You haven't talked to enough girls.
2) You are not good at exhibiting masculine energy, strength, and value which girls are looking for.
3) You are waiting for a girl give you strong indicators of interest and lead you into sex, which will almost never happen. You haven't learned how to approach girls and how to lead them into attraction sex. You are the man, it's your job to convince a girl to sleep with you even if she gives you no indicators of interest from the start.
4) Girls may find you attractive but if you don't lead they'll never even tell you.
You need to learn how attraction works and you need to become proactive about attracting women. You don't wait for them to like you. It shouldn't even matter to you if they like you. You approach the ones you like and you do your thing. Some will hook. Most will not. It's like fishing. You don't sit around wondering if a fish likes you. You just cast your bait over and over again until something hooks. And you make the bait as juicy as possible.