People ask me all the time what my pronouns are and they think I’m kidding when I say, “Your Majesty”.
To the great irritation of people who desperately need to have my pronouns, I like to say, “To me I am me, and to you I am you.”
In speaking about myself, I use the first person pronouns I and me, and when you are dressing me, you use the second person pronouns you and your.
When it’s just a conversation between you and me, there is no gender. We only acquire gender when spoken about in the third person. And it’s these third person pronouns that people are asking me to define.
The tricky thing with that is that I don’t have any. I only have first person pronouns. In order to tell you what my third person pronouns are, I’d have to speak about myself in the third person. But I am the first person, not the third.
Third person means you’re speaking to a third person about me. And who am I to tell you how to talk about me when I’m not there?
Einstein showed that things are relative to the observer.
Things about me only exist relative to others, meaning that my true self, the self that is relative to me, doesn’t exist.
Because all thoughts occur only because they exist relative to what I have experienced outside of myself, and so, to think of the self is to think of myself as relative to others.
“But what are you, then?” people ask me, their manicured eyebrows twitching. “Are you gender fluid? Nonbinary? Agender?”
I smile and reply.
“Maybe to you. But to me, I am me.”
So, who and what do I identify as?
No one, I have no identity. No one has identity.
Our ego, our sense of who we think our identity is, is just a thought. The moment you stop thinking, the ego goes away. This is true in meditation or in deep sleep, where thoughts no longer occur, where you have no sense of self any more.
In Buddhism, this is the principle of anātman, the non-self.
Without mind you are no one. And because you are not a mind, then you are also no one.
If you find this hard to accept, remember that’s your ego talking. Only the ego projects this idea because the ego wants power over you.
That voice in your head, calling itself I and me, is not you. The ego wants you to suffer, it wants you to get upset when something happens that it has deemed bad. It wants you to suffer when someone calls you names.
But remember, these are all only fictitious illusions of who you are.
Your true self cannot be attacked because there is no substance to attack. When a person attacks you, they are attacking only who they think you are, and only if you identify with what they’re attacking, will you suffer.
If you want to be free from suffering, then let go of all identity.
And you might say, we’ll see about that the next time you step on a Lego!
But no, I won’t. The foot might hurt, but I will not. The foot may feel pain and I may feel that the foot is feeling pain, but I am not the foot so it does not hurt me.
“But how do you fit into society then?”
You don’t. Fuck society.
“Oh, but you don’t want to rock the boat, be the odd one out,” your ego cries.
Your ego will grasp at straws, trying to retain its power over you, trying to convince you that you’re the one thinking what it is saying.
But it’s not you, it’s just a thought, just a mental process that you are aware of as the all-containing consciousness of your experience.
If you feel rejection to this idea, know that this is the ego, the rejector itself. And I hereby tell you to reject the rejector, give back power to your life.
Because true power is true self acceptance, to accept that the self has no boundaries, no creed, no categories, no religion, no race, no gender, no ethnicity, that the true self is beyond all forms.
Only forms have labels and consciousness has none.
As long as your mind thinks it understands anything, that’s how long it will remain uncontrolled, running rampant. But you cannot fault your mind for this because the purpose of the mind is to produce thought.
And you cannot simply tell it to cease producing thought, because it cannot do this.
Instead, you must make quieting your mind the daily practise of your life. And once you’ve done enough of the practise, your life will become the prayer, will become the meditation, and everything you do will be grace.
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“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
