Success Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen’s line reads like a dare disguised as spiritual instruction: strip yourself down past personality, past the social tags, past even gender, until the remaining “you” evaporates. The hook is the abrupt escalation. He starts with “still,” a word that sounds gentle and wellness-adjacent, then yanks the reader into “abyss,” “no notion of self,” “the world disappears.” That whiplash is the point. Stillness isn’t presented as calm; it’s presented as annihilation.

The specific intent is evangelical, not descriptive. Cohen isn’t offering one possible mystical experience; he’s prescribing a single destination: “the only place to go.” That absolutism functions as pressure. If you’re not aiming for ego-death, you’re not just missing out, you’re wasting your life in the wrong neighborhood of consciousness.

Gender enters as both a provocation and a credibility play. By naming gender as something that can fall away, Cohen signals a radical unhooking from identity. It also carries subtext: contemporary identity debates are noisy, personal, and politically charged; he’s positioning enlightenment as an exit ramp from that entire arena. The risk is that it can sound like bypassing - treating embodied, lived realities as mere distractions. The rhetorical move turns a deeply social category into an instrument for making “self” feel optional.

Contextually, this is classic nondual/Zen-inflected language repackaged for a modern self-help marketplace: edgy, totalizing, cinematic. The abyss is doing marketing work. It makes transcendence feel not just serene but inevitable and, crucially, superior to ordinary life.