After years of pulling against the elastic chains of a Buddhist identity I succumbed last June to the exquisite recognition (not that I hadn’t been exploring this, writing about it, teaching it – for years!) that no single idea is fundamentally better than any other; that perceptions, and the ideas that we derive from them, are overlays, projections, extraneous extras!
I understood on some new, and much deeper level, that identity/ies really are overlays. We can simply peel them away. You’d think that after decades of Buddhist practice, and after changing my sex, I would have understood something about this. Now doubt I did; it's just that such things are like journeys, always inviting you further into uncharted lands.
It’s strange and interesting how change itself gets reified, charted, fossilized into the constructs we make of it – ‘impermanence’ as an item of faith among Buddhist dogmatists, or gender deconstruction as its own version of tyranny in the hands of certain feminists and gender queer folks.
And still we live in a world of monumental violence and destruction, oppression, denial and mind-boggling stupidity. So I have also come to appreciate, more than ever, the essential need for exquisite and complete accountability and flawless integrity.
And that’s another can of worms right there!
Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski
Drive Yourself Same by Susan and Bruce Kodish
