>>20934Well, in Theravada, it's recommended you do retreats first (maybe one for a few days, then for a week) to get a "feel" for monastic life. Even with the relaxed rules for laypeople and novices, meditation and the doctrine become much more important to your life as you distance yourself from the regular world where the ego can indulge itself relatively freely. After you decide you are serious, a person is typically a novice monk for a year before full initiation. Dispassion regarding conventional living or a burning desire for liberation are what typically set people on the path of renunciation. If you're NEET, you don't have much to lose. Buddhism also says that you don't need to be a monk to become enlightened, and that you don't even need to memorize doctrine, be great at meditation, or abstain from drinking. (But it says that following its path is the best…)
>>20938 I've heard that Kundalani Yoga can be a little bit dirty – a Freemason friend of mine told me that, apparently, the Knights Templar would work at the "root chakra" with their tongues, having picked up some of the practice in the Orient and deciding to keep it behind the closed doors of the Catholic church. I don't really think there's a lot of value in chakras, tantric meditation, auras, "energies", or the rest of many points in New Age ideology; at best, they're crutches toward knowledge of ourselves and the world; and at worst, vices. Buddhism and Zen especially fall on the opposite end of the metaphysical spectrum, trying to nullify the soul/ego as much as possible, rather than trying to inflate it or please it. If you can afford the time or energy to get into it, try to do it while also investigating what is being taught and what the teachings do.
>20951 In terms of Buddhist thought, I was told by a monk that I'm an "anagami" – I know that I've really gained a lot of awareness of the world these past few years, I have a giant mass of knowledge in philosophy and psychology, and much of the Theravada Buddhist dhamma commited to memory. An anagami is someone who has overcome belief in the traditional soul, adherance to rituals and superstition, wrong views regarding cause and effect or the nature of reality (including stress and enlightenment), craving, and ill-will. An anagami is said to become an arhant, Buddha, or fully-enlightened person after having an experience where craving for future lives, pride, anxiety, and ignorance are eliminated. I feel like it's a fair appraisal. I've gone through quite a few periods of deep jhana, which Zen would call a few periods of awakening (and attainment of satori).
I hope that you can experience meditation's fruits. I consider enlightenment to be a kind of mental competence or psychological clarity - a logical, efficient, sane mindset that makes life smooth for onesself and one's neighbors. And the Masonic vision of enlightenment, the Western gnosis, and the Hindu vision all seem to capture enlightenment in different forms and visions, if we understand enlightenment to be liberation from stress and ego.
>>20968Schopenhauer writes a lot about the mind, thoughts, perception, being, ethics, aesthetics, art, virtue, and reality in very sharp, witty, and profound illustrations. He doesn't do a ton of handholding, but he does present a coherent, consistent, and pragmatic model of his world. Try reading
http://sqapo.com/schopenhauer.htm and form your own pictures in your mind of what he talks about. Try feeling out his ideas and contesting them. Really, his division between the world of matter and the world of spirit, and his notion of our willpower bridging the gap, our bodies being our wills "objectified," is very profound. Schopenhauer's "will to life" concept and his understanding of the relation between all life is also very deep. He inspired Darwin and Freud. Schopenhauer valuing compassion as the most essential ethical quality was deemed weak by Nietzsche but I think was justly spoken.