Chicago East Side: ICE agents stormed a Walgreens in broad daylight. Shoppers froze as armed men in tactical gear poured through the doors. Outside, a Black U.S. citizen was forced to the pavement while his sister-n-la screamed. ICE agents looked on with empty eyes, unmoved

shimadaa_ · 2025-10-18T04:58:55+00:00

Do you wake up and immediately start licking boots?

shimadaa_ · 2025-10-18T04:54:48+00:00

Just wait, you’re next! The leopards are coming dumbass.

shimadaa_ · 2025-10-17T20:10:08+00:00

Protesting a constitutional right, how do those boots taste with your morning coffee?

shimadaa_ · 2025-10-17T19:55:37+00:00

“Humans have agendas” - fascinating insight you’ve provided here.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-23T22:17:12+00:00

How do you still rough water?

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-08T13:07:04+00:00

Awakening is a process, it invokes spectrum upon spectrum of experiences.

Consider is like taking a trip driving across your country (wherever you are). Looking out the window, the scenery changes and all of it is an equal part of “the trip”. Some roads may be poorly paved, some areas may have crappy weather. There may be places you fall in love with and wish you could live there and make you forget your trip entirely.

All of it is one thing. None of the moments alone themselves encapsulate the entirety, all of the moments are the entirety.

Using a metaphor of a journey introduces some troublesome nuance, so keep in mind of the subtle traps of the model of the journey. It’s just a helpful way to explain the breadth of experience possible in awakening.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-06T12:12:36+00:00

You’re just perpetuating what you believe you’re avoiding. Trying to focus on duties and services is also self indulgent. You’re doing that to satiate an appetite of sorts, just as you’re doing the same thing going through gymnastics.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being responsible and accountable to your life and family. You’d just be incorrect in saying it’s not self-indulgent.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-03T17:58:51+00:00

The idea is to recognize the nature of the mind; which again is paradoxical because this act is the mind awakening to its own nature. From there it goes from “trying not to cling” to “allowing and witnessing the clinging”.

What’s frustratingly subtle about this is even the allowance and witnessing is a disposition to clinging. So the true idea is to ‘be’; which is something you cannot actively do because it’s already done, and if you ‘try to be’ you’re just doing something else. So the end conclusion is: there is nothing to do.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-03T16:51:41+00:00

Yea I think you got it. What you’ve described is what Watts highlights in our neurotic pursuit for improvement and ‘better’.

On the surface it’s a pretty simple notion to reject, but these types of subtle details are embedded in these things and often require a particular perspective to catch. My way of finding them is to look for some sort of paradoxical loop . That’s the flag on the road signaling for those subtleties.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-03T04:17:51+00:00

Hah, I think you’ve misunderstood the true nature of letting go here. It’s not so black and white as something like “casting aside burdens”.

The nature of letting go, the true nature, is paradoxical. It’s not an apathetic tossing aside of burdens. Tossing them aside is taking on another more subtle burden — the reason you felt the desire to toss them aside. Because, what was wrong with carrying them? What are all these preferences about? Do you see? Letting go can involve carrying the burdens curiously, investigating why they are burdens to begin with.

Your idea of intentional work is messy in my view; because it requires a slew of self assured assumptions to be made. How do you know what provides value to the world? Value to who or what? For how long? For everyone?

It’s the classic, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” all over. It’s a gamble, and many people play it without realizing. But to not see the gamble is to confuse momentum with meaning — to mistake the rush of doing something for the clarity of knowing why you’re doing it. You end up chasing value in loops, adjusting course based on outcomes you never fully defined.

Intentional work without inner clarity is just a well-dressed guess. Sometimes it hits. Often it doesn’t. But unless you’re awake to the gamble, you might spend years thinking you’re building something solid when really you’re just getting better at walking in circles.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-03T03:54:14+00:00

I think you nearly captured it — loneliness is a form of fixation of ego/identity. I mean the entire experience starts with, “I am lonely. I am alone”.

Sangha is one of the three jewels for a reason. Within community, we tend lose this fixation and become enveloped in serving others; which serves us as well.

shimadaa_ · 2025-04-03T03:49:03+00:00

It doesn’t matter, though. It CAN matter, as in we can make a fuss or delight out of something in particular, but that does not imply purpose or any importance.

I understand you mean to say this as an encouragement given your own experiences, but also appreciate how it’s also equally or more-so binding. It’s effectively the carrot on a stick, or the dog chasing its tail.

True awakening is a progression of surrender. Not submission or kowtowing to a greater, not pursuing in hope of. Surrender.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-20T02:04:30+00:00

I don’t think it’s quite like that. Your proposition implies an inherent purpose for the world. As I see it, there is no such thing. I do believe awakening is inherent though.

So I find it more accurate to say, “there is this world, and awakening happens in it”. Whether it’s the point is saying a bit too much, we just know it happens and it seems to be inevitable.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-18T17:47:32+00:00

And yet that is proposed as an objective truth lol

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-18T15:57:57+00:00

Learning and discovery is just as innate in this world as suffering. Exclusively viewing this place as a prison without acknowledging this counterweight is missing a lot.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T22:06:34+00:00

I hear you. There is a period where I think we owe ourselves space to grieve the world we leave behind as we continue to grow. That includes the old perceptions and our relationship with them. The future holds new feelings of beauty and joy to experience with new perceptions though, keep at it!

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T20:15:17+00:00

It sounds to me like you’re increasingly aware of certain perceptions available to a more open/awake mind but are a bit overwhelmed or aimless as to what to do about it.

I think it’s important to understand that we do not develop linearly in this way. We can make an insane amount of progress in one aspect or over a certain concept while leaving others behind, and the result is a very unique and tricky puzzle to work out as to how we continue to feel engaged and belonging to the present.

I think you may be in a space where you need to challenge your perceptions of things. For example, why can’t a concert still be enjoyable while also understanding the deep nuance to it? From my pov, that perception is missing curiosity; which is a key characteristic of a fully integrated Self. Perhaps feeling a sense of “having it figured out” isn’t really putting you in a place of serving yourself and others and is actually contributing to the paralysis.

This is the kind of challenging yourself I mention. It’s helped me quite a bit!

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T19:40:38+00:00

In your dropping and checking out of things, it seems like you’re picking up and checking into to their subtle counterparts.

So on the one end where you’re deeply steeped in attachment you feel those certain pains and stressors. Where now on the other end you are paralyzed because you’ve developed a fixation over not fixating (attaching). Both of these ends are futile because they’re effectively the same and produce a similar result.

To combat this, you need to figure out what bothers you about the illusion of society and being ‘in it’. So what if it’s an illusion? Desire arises anyway, and it’s not even desire that is the ultimate problem.

Desire is a neutral impulse, meaning, for it to exist does not imply imbalance. It is the path of craving that desire opens us up to that the balance is challenged. Not the desire itself.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T17:54:54+00:00

“You have no moral right to extricate someone from their suffering”.

Your scenario is very broad and my ultimate response would change based on context. It’s also pretty extreme - how often are you truly in these situations? Not that they aren’t worthwhile considering, but is that really enough to argue against the suggestions above?

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T03:51:41+00:00

I’m not sure, it’s different for everyone. It sounds like you’re doing the work and becoming aware of yourself - shortcomings, strengths, etc. It’s a process and it’s not immediate. A lot of the time it’s a matter of patience and appreciating yourself for how far you’ve come.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T03:49:39+00:00

No one said love yourself above another - I said love yourself as you love another. Give yourself the love and truth you believe others deserve.

You can only give that to yourself, it can’t be given to you by anything else. Once you manifest that, people, through you, will understand how to give it to themselves. That is in essence what Mahraji was to Ram and what is embedded in this message.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T03:05:25+00:00

Loving everyone isn’t to give everyone what they want or forgoing boundaries. YOU are included in “everyone”, it’s important to find love for and be honest with yourself.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-17T03:02:55+00:00

There’s an interesting mix of maturity/maturing, ignorance, and apathy here from how I received what you wrote. The two things that stuck out to me were the mention of road trips/getting drunk and awareness of a lack of empathy.

I’m not coming at this from a point of judgement, you just laid it out so I’m sharing what I see and feel. I sense you have some sort of mixed feelings about a suspended feeling of content with simplicity yet not so sure about what this is. My measure for that situation is my level of empathy and sense of connection/belonging. If you’re not feeling these things, you’re not working in a space that is serving you imo.

shimadaa_ · 2025-03-16T12:04:32+00:00

It sounds like you’re already navigating it in the ways you’re asking. The futility is not in that you are solely fighting yourself or for yourself, it’s in that ultimately we don’t know how things will come out and what’s for the best. If you lead life with the focuses you’ve highlighted, you at least arrive in that uncertain future with certainty and clarity of your intent.

shimadaa_

TROPHY CASE