Dogen said it would be like this: 'The mind and the externals are just thus. The gate of liberation is open.' What? Let me explain.

At the Zen center we have a few beautiful tea bowls made by a Japanese potter, all of which are chipped now, because people wash them and stack them in the metal rack, and they’re very fragile. When I talk to our community members about not putting them in the rack, they say, 'They’re too delicate to use. Why do we even have them?' Suzuki Roshi had the same problem with the teacups in his own Zen center. (It must be a Zen center epidemic.) A student complained to Suzuki about the cups. He smiled and said, 'You just don’t know how to handle them. You have to adjust yourself to the environment, not vice versa.'

This is what Dogen was saying, too. The gate of liberation is always open. Liberation from what? Liberation from walking around in a dream, like a zombie looking for contentment outside your immediate and precious life. If only you could actually recognize and receive what is here in front of you, rather than what you wish were here instead. Why is that so hard? I don’t know, but I do know that I certainly have a tendency to want to adjust my environment to myself, not the other way around. Instead, is it possible for us to constantly give thanks for whatever our life gives us? This is how to practice being truly content with what we have — even when it seems impossible.

One of my heroes of practicing this radical contentment is the 18th-century haiku master Issa, who is a beloved poet in Japan. He has a haiku that goes 'Everything I touch / with tenderness, alas, / pricks like a bramble.' Essentially, 'Everything I touch turns to shit.' He had his reasons for saying so. His mother died when he was 3, and he was raised in part by a loving grandmother, who died when he was 14. He was sent away from his home by his father and stepmother, not returning until he was 49. He then met his wife, Kiku. Their first child died in birth. Their second died as a toddler. Then a third child died, and finally, Kiku herself died. It was after their second child’s death that Issa wrote probably his most famous poem: 'This world— / Is a dewdrop world, / And yet, and yet . . .'

Issa was so interested in that 'and yet.' In a body of work inspired by incredible suffering and melancholy, there is also that incredible sweetness of the 'and yet,' which pervades his writing. It’s a sweetness that coexists with sorrow, and it reminds us that sweetness is always available to us, if we’re willing to fully enter our life, just as it is."

Some people can use a theoretical future of themselves as motivation, and good for them. But if it’s not working for you, you need to consider why. Despite not being able to get out of bed sometimes, the person who made this comic still made something. Despite having your periodic breakdowns, you still moved your fingers to reblog this post. Compare and contrast the difference between why you do some things and not others. ‘But that’s different -’ yes, it is different. But there are only actions, consequences and what you value. You value not being thirsty, so you take a drink. You value not being broke, so you drag yourself to work. It’s exactly that deep. Narrative makes you forget that you’re always in a direct 1:1 relationship with your environment. And that feels scary, but it’s not - it’s how we’ve always existed, from the very first rudimentary lifeform whose only sign of life was ‘want nutrients -> consume nutrients’. We want to think we’re more sophisticated than that, but we’re not.

Narrative is a comfortable cushion, because narrative makes you forget that when you ‘start the ball rolling’, you don’t magically become a montage, or a cut-scene version of yourself. You’re still there, you’re still making decisions, you’re still feeling some type of way about the stimulus you’re experiencing. Depression is a narrative cushion, and that’s why it feels comfortable. Never feeling responsible for yourself feels safe, but in doing so you communicate to yourself that you don’t deserve to be here (which becomes literal in the form of suicidal ideation).

In my experience, if I can’t get myself to do something, that’s because I actually don’t want to do it. And the reasons I don’t want to do it might make me feel deeply embarrassed: I don’t want to learn pottery if it means I have to take a bus across town to get to the class. I don’t want to read a certain book because it’s too long. I don’t want to prepare that dish because its too expensive. Sunk cost fallacy is one hell of a drug. And narrative has you always feeling outside of yourself, as if you owe something to some universal force of objectivity which is telling you you’re supposed to do those things: you said you were going to do it, you’ve bought the tools, you’ve told your mum, why aren’t you fucking doing it? It’s so easy, what’s wrong with you? But even that’s an abstraction, because in reality nobody is telling you that but yourself. You might not consciously believe in this universal force of objectivity, but you will find yourself bristle when challenged about it. If someone says ‘you don’t have to do that’, you may want to fire back ‘but I do!’

There are only actions and consequences, and what consequences you value. There is. no. ‘should’. There is no ‘have to’. There is no ‘need’. If you stop brushing your teeth, maybe they’ll fall out, and maybe you don’t give a shit. Or maybe the thought of that horrifies you, and suddenly you’re motivated to brush your teeth. Narratives will have you forget that it’s your prerogative as an individual to want, and those wants are never going to pure or 100% correct. That concept is fake as the narrative is. Make no mistake, all these things are useful for us to make more informed decisions so we can live rich, fulfilling lives - but by that nature that means they come from within us and are how we generated meaning and process the world and our selfhoods.

There is nothing ‘wrong’ with you. And as with everything else, that ‘wrong’ is also a constructed concept and is therefore not ‘real’. I still use the word depression to describe what I went through, but I understand now that believing in what society says being ‘mentally ill’ is is exactly what was holding me back. Society says being mentally ill means that you’re broken and wrong and incapable of making rational decisions for yourself. What I discovered is that I’m always a rational agent, and it’s my prerogative to be an individual, and that narrative cushion of depression was actually preventing me from making the decisions for myself that I’ve always known I’ve wanted.

People who have never had depression yet never have exercised, ‘followed their dreams’ or eaten healthily in their lives will be doing exactly the same shit as you and thinking their life is pretty chill whilst you have breakdown after breakdown. The only difference is, those people will stop ‘bedrotting’ the moment their bestie starts a Zumba class and suddenly they’ve caught the exercise bug. They’re not fundamentally more rational people than you just because they don’t have depression; they’re just not reliant on that narrative as you. They’ve not categorised what they’re doing ‘as not exercising’ - they’re just chilling, living their life, and besides the gym is all the way across town. So when suddenly an opportunity for exercise comes along, they’re not burdened with all this narrative - they just want to do the thing, maybe for low-key ‘bad’ reasons e.g. they don’t want to miss out on things their friend is doing, or there’s a hot guy teaching the class.

What I eventually came to learn is that I’m not living in a separate dimension entirely incapable of being like them. In fact, if you’re anything like me with mental health problems you probably have something they don’t: self awareness. And whilst self awareness feels so deeply embarrassing, remember there are only actions and consequences, and what you value. And you exist in reality first, including the reality of you. You can’t ‘old man yells at cloud’ your way outta this one.

totally 100% with you here. there are a lot of theories going around wether it is TRAs trying infiltrate our spaces and get radfems to agree with those talking points or if it could be actual incel trolls. I'm very much convinced that specifically @youarebased is a male in disguise. I just can't imagine that a woman could post such things. Ofc I could be totally mistaken and @youarebased could be a severely mentally ill woman.

Sadly I'm also convinced of the authenticity of some few female blackpill aligned users on here and I am sure that they truly believe in what they preach.

I remember when I made a post about blackpill ideology some weeks ago saying that it is really similar to inceldom, especially in terminology and the outrage was big, even from some other radfems - but I think they've seen for themselves now.

For the record, I don’t think this means that these TRAs are especially ‘on the pulse’ of what radblr is truly about; rather, TRAs and blackpills operate under the same fundamental ideology - that is, of believing in some inherent ‘essence’ of femaleness and maleness. So, it makes sense that they would come to ostensibly opposing but ultimately synergistic belief systems.

I think this is what people get wrong about ‘horseshoe theory’ - it’s not that being sufficiently ‘radicalised’ in either direction means that you’ll come to the same conclusion (an ostensibly more intellectual way of saying ‘both sides bad’) but rather, that we all operate under the ideology and values of hegemonic power systems, and truly deprogramming yourself from that is actually really difficult. So groups that set out to ‘fight the power’ will often struggle to grasp the depth and extent of said power, and it’s human nature to seek shortcuts.

Socialization is not what happens to men, it is what men DO to each other. Patriarchy is not what happens to men, it is what a social group of patriarchs are called. Men create patriarchy because men create patriarchs. The “patriarchy” creating men are men themselves. It is male peerage that creates and sustains patriarchy regardless of the good ideals parents may try to instill in young impressionable boys. So unless you’re depriving boys of any male contact (even in books, films and music), there is frankly no chance he will not become misogynistic.

It is easier to point fingers and say “men are just like that” than to admit that change requires collective effort, reeducation, and yes, their participation in overcoming this system

Re-education has been provably inefficient when it comes to “changing” male supremacists. It is a nonviable strategy when it comes to re-educating domestic abusers, rapists and pedophiles—primary examples of male supremacist violence. There are many books written by sociologists and psychologists that show that most rapists, domestic abusers and pedophiles continue to re-offend once out of jail/therapy/counseling/rehab.

Furthermore, feminists can believe that men as a species have a natural propensity to rape and still participate in collective action with other women and willing men to effect legislative, economic and social change. They are half the global population. Just because men aren’t the focus of said action doesn’t mean women are not a collective. Men are an oppressor class with their own interests, and losing power is not one of them, so expecting or trying to convince them to advocate for women’s human rights on the basis of our shared humanity will be ineffective. Men will not be incentivized by a sense of morality. Their hands will have to be forced by other means (for example, misogyny will need to become economically expensive and less profitable to the alternative).

No oppressor class in history ever “gave up” their power because they “finally saw the humanity” of the oppressed (which re-education assumes). They’d always seen it. Prejudice is prejudice because it is unjustified. Men are misogynists because misogyny is socioeconomic power, thus there is no behavior women can exhibit that will change these views (which is why women of different beliefs, backgrounds and personalities still get brutalized by men they know)—hence changing men cannot be our responsibility. They will not give that power up easily or willingly unless they are likewise incentivized or forced to pursue the alternative.

it merely seeks emotional comfort in victimization . . . because that would mean letting go of the simplistic narrative of “bad men vs. good women”

“Victim mentality” doesn’t exist (which this statement implies). Only actual victimization. Which in and of itself is never a comfort (though it is natural for victims to seek support and validation for said victimhood as it has been shown to help with trauma—denying a victims victimhood results in more severe trauma, so no, it’s not some manipulative game victims are trying to play when they seek support and acknowledgement). Additionally, victimization is not a moral state. Being an oppressor, however is. For that reason men are immoral on grounds of being male supremacists. The important distinction here is that women are victims of male supremacist violence, and whether or not they’re moral people does not validate or invalidate that victimhood as men so love to imagine it does.

and facing the fact that liberation requires much more than just likes on angry tweets

This is despite the fact males would very much like for females to be passive/vestigial. Their assertions/manifestations do not affect the “nature” of something whatsoever. Males have not “selected” for females to the point of domesticity in any regard. The majority of women have passed down their DNA, which includes the “distempered” ones, the ones who didn’t want to be raped and were raped anyways (literally all of them, by definition. The fact that rape is even a concept proves this lol). More than “women were bred to be raped”, it’s “males have been bred to rape”, since it’s the male’s biological imperative. Especially considering the fact that males are far more subject to selective pressure than females. Most males (in nearly every species) do not pass down their DNA. “Rape” is a male sexual adaptation, “to be raped” as a female sexual adaptation is nonsensical.

What blackpill feminists are doing is confusing conditioning with domestication/husbandry.

To make it more clear: it is like putting a wild animal in a cage and beating it into submission. Once it submits, you can’t then say “we have domesticated it, changed its fundamental nature”. Put its offspring back in the wild and they will do as they’ve always done. This is why they have to fall back on superstitious beliefs ie “your ancestors were raped so much, something magical happened to their dna that made them crave it”. What is the thing, exactly? Wait traits have been selected for and passed down? What traits have been weeded out? Men operate on the principle “whatever works to score a goal in the hole is enough”. If the whip is enough to make a lion submit, he will use the whip. There were no eugenic programs to make women biologically inclined to be raped. Considering the difficulty of doing this on the female half of the population (just by the numbers, and now reproduction works). secondly, eugenics is a fairly modern concept. Certainly men several tens of thousands of years ago would not object to impregnating a woman if she was too “uppity” because they knew to restrain themselves for “the greater good”. Males did not and would not pass up any opportunity to breed for the collective goal of making women more receptive to it. Even men of today are unlikely to reject women on principle.

“Biologically” women are not designed to be raped, and I could include several more arguments as to why this is retarded, and that the opposite is true. Women are conditioned to be raped. This conditioning does not change what women are, or their imperative. Remove this conditioning and observe how stingy they are. Certainly more stingy than “walking incubator to be had by the first male to nab them.” Pickme women exist due to this conditioning. They do not exist because their dna is screaming at them to let inferior men inseminate her. Most pickme women are still very pick-y. They signal deference to males in order to benefit in every other way outside of vying to gestate his inferior offspring. Pickmes will still pick “chad” over the most pitiable “deserving” beta. Pickmes want to pick, they are women. They are discriminatory, and that requires input. If all this rape shit were true we’d certainly see a lot more women hanging out in back alleys desperate for any old crackhead to dump sperm in her.

Sex is just a PvP meta game, it’s how it was designed to be. Disparity within a species accelerates its ability to adapt/evolve. Sexually reproductive species are not just subject to predatory/environmental pressures, but pressures induced by the opposite sex. Most humans are not selected out of the gene pool by way of being eaten by predators or resource depletion, but by failing to find a mate to pass down their genes. To say women are vestigial, just walking incubators for males to use as they please, is to suggest that humans are an asexually reproductive species that just happens to be burdened by the existence of two distinct sexes. No, that is the point. Men do not like it, and they will cope, seethe, mald, etc. about how it shouldn’t be this way (after all they are logical and rational and know what best for everyone, because they say so). The female imperative exists in opposition to the male imperative. This is literally the entire point. The fact that human males, in recent history, have been dominating the meta, doesn’t change this truth.

More women should learn about this shit because men have spent the entire time they’ve had the ability to yap to yap about how it’s sacrilegious. Of course they would say this, they’re male. These misandrists literally just take men at face value because they revel in misery or just don’t know any better.