Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen’s line doesn’t just reject gender; it tries to demote the entire category of difference to a kind of spiritual paperwork. The rhetorical move is absolute - “any and all,” “whatsoever” - a verbal bulldozer meant to clear the mind of identity’s clutter. It’s classic nondual framing: the “true nature” underneath personality is imagined as prior to language, prior to culture, prior to the body’s social meaning. The intent is liberatory, even compassionate: if the deepest self is ungendered, then the wounds and hierarchies attached to gender can’t be ultimate.

The subtext is trickier. Claims of transcendence often carry a quiet impatience with the mess of lived experience. “Free of notions” sounds like enlightenment; it can also sound like an instruction to stop talking about power. In a modern culture where gender is both intensely policed and intensely discussed, this kind of statement can function as a bypass: an invitation to leap over the difficult middle zone where identity is real enough to hurt and political enough to demand repair.

Context matters: Cohen writes out of a Westernized spiritual marketplace that prizes personal awakening as a solution. In that setting, “no difference whatsoever” reads like a universal solvent - dissolving not only gender binaries but also the moral urgency of difference-based struggle. It works because it offers relief: a vision of selfhood untouched by the culture war. It risks failing for the same reason, flattening difference into “mere notions” when, for many people, those notions arrive as laws, medical systems, bathrooms, and violence.