I liked your story WayToTwilight and I really want to join a club in college for the same reasons. I did the videogame thing to the extreme: 16 hours straight a day, every day during the summer, as much as possible during highschool. When I quit the MMORPG I felt like my life was over. I just paced around my house for hours and wondered 'what's the point?' In fact, that's pretty much all I did for a very long time. I don't know what level you'd call that. On the one hand, I was trying to determine the point to life to the best of my ability intellectually, on the other, my emotions were always negative, depressed, hopeless... I just disregarded emotions in making my decisions. All of that was necessary though.
But towards contributing to this thread, the key towards advancement is choosing a simple tool, like goodwill and kindness towards all of life, or grow and help others grow (for Steve), and pursue that nonstop. Instead of separating your life into little boxes with 'Spirituality' just being a section on your list of goals, your spirituality determines all of your goals to begin with. And I do mean ALL your actions and goals. It is your most sacred commitment and much more important than your other goals. Everything but the spiritual is temporary. One day you are going to die and lose all your knowledge, money, family, etc. And that's fine too.. you don't need that stuff. So dedicate your regular actions to your spiritual purpose and they are transformed into spiritual actions because of your motive. If the actions are not aligned with your spiritual path, get rid of the actions. So now your list of goals is really under one heading of 'Spiritual Pathway.'
I've done both, and the compartmentalized version leads to uncertainty, procrastination, doubt, and torpidity. The congruent version leads to clarity, certainty, energy, excitement, happiness, identity shifts, and spiritual revelations.
As for me personally, I've experienced around the level of Love or Joy more than once, more frequently lately. It seems so perfect... and that is only at half way towards the Buddha level. I can't even imagine what it must be like at the top of the scale. Right now I'm trying to heal those areas of myself that are currently below courage and that is keeping me busy enough.
Good luck everyone! God bless.
