Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen’s move here is a classic spiritual bait-and-switch: he starts by validating the thrill of self-authorship - “a special, unique path” - then yanks it away by reframing that excitement as mere “attachment” to an identity. The sentence is engineered to puncture. “As a woman” isn’t treated as a social location with stakes; it’s treated as a psychological hook. By the time he lands on “ultimately all ego,” the reader has been walked from empowerment to suspicion in three steps.

The specific intent is disciplinary, not descriptive. It’s a warning shot aimed at a particular kind of modern selfhood: the identity-driven narrative in which gender becomes a source of purpose, community, and moral clarity. Cohen is trying to relocate meaning away from biography and toward transcendence. The subtext: if your liberation feels personal, if it feels like yours, it’s spiritually compromised. “Special” and “unique” are loaded words here, invoked to suggest vanity rather than vocation.

Context matters because this is a recognizable pattern in some nondual and “evolutionary” spiritual circles: liberation is framed as disidentification, and disidentification can become a rhetorical solvent that dissolves not only narcissism but also history, power, and embodied reality. The line doesn’t just critique ego; it smuggles in a hierarchy of legitimacy, where gendered experience is downgraded to self-concern while a supposedly neutral, disembodied vantage point is treated as the grown-up option. The result is a quote that sounds like enlightenment while quietly policing which kinds of meaning-making are allowed.