I don’t believe that we humans have an enduring self, or soul. We’re too changeable and impermanent for that to be true. However, each of us certainly is something unique, a person unlike any other on this planet.
In other words, we possess an individuality without being an Individual — the capital “I” pointing to an unfounded conception that there is some inner essence within each of us that, if not divine, is our True Self.
Narrow-minded people who subscribe to this rigid outmoded view of humanity claim that (1) there are only two sexes, male and female; (2) at birth it’s clear which sex you are; and (3) our sexuality has to match up with that sex.
Meaning, if you’re a male, you’re attracted to females. If you’re a female, you’re attracted to males. Any deviation from this is a deviancy to be condemned. As a sin against God. Or at least as an affront against how nature intended us to be.
Thankfully, I don’t know anyone who thinks this way. My friends and acquaintances are firmly in the pro-LGBTQ camp where gender and sexual attraction is separable from sex.
Men can be attracted to men. Women can be attracted to women. A biological man can feel that she actually is a woman. A biological woman can feel that that he actually is a man. (Other variations on this theme are possible, as in bisexual people who are attracted to both men and women.)
When I read an essay in the November 10, 2025 issue of TIME magazine by Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez, “My eight years in conversion therapy,” it opened my eyes even further to how religious dogmatism harms people who don’t conform to a traditional view of sexuality. Here’s a PDF file if the link doesn’t work for you.
I Spent Eight Years in Conversion Therapy | TIME
The whole essay is well worth reading. These excerpts comprise most of the essay:
On Tuesday, I stood on the steps of the Supreme Court with advocates from The Trevor Project, the Human Rights Campaign, and other conversion therapy survivors. Inside, the justices heard oral arguments for Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Christian therapist in Colorado argues that the prohibition against conversion therapy is a violation of her First Amendment free speech rights.
When I first started conversion therapy at age nineteen, I thought I was pursuing healing for what I was led to believe was broken in me. I didn’t want to erase myself. I wanted peace. I wanted to stop feeling like my faith and my sexuality were at war with one another. I sought it out of my own accord. My parents and pastors didn’t force me into therapy, but everything in the culture around me convinced me it was my only option.
Conversion therapy sells a promise of transformation, but what it really delivers is a slow disintegration of the soul. You learn to measure your worth by how well you can pretend. You learn to call shame devotion. And you learn that love has conditions.
I was in conversion therapy for nearly eight years. I was taught to artificially deepen my voice, second guess my every action, and replace my hobbies and interests with more “masculine” ones. My life became all about being faithful and doing everything I could to become like the man I was told God wanted me to be. Ministry leaders, therapists, and pastors prayed over me. They said I was brave. And when nothing changed, they said I was the problem. So I prayed harder and tried to fake it until I made it.
The irony was that this performance followed me into my career. I worked for some of Evangelical Christianity’s largest megachurches, like Hillsong, Willow Creek, and Elevation Church, where I helped craft messages of belonging for millions. But my presence in these spaces operated by unspoken rules: I was useful in the shadows, but unacceptable in the light. I was selling the idea of love and acceptance while practicing self-exclusion.
For almost a decade, I did individual therapy, attended conferences, joined support groups, and listened to testimonies from people who claimed they had changed their sexuality with God’s help. I told myself I could, too, if I just had enough faith. I was told repeatedly that the opposite of homosexuality wasn’t heterosexuality, it was holiness, and I strove to meet that impossible standard.
But the truth was that the more I tried to heal, the further I drifted from myself. My prayers became bargains. My faith became a performance. I started to believe that peace might only exist if I ceased to.
It took years for me to understand that what they were calling healing was really a kind of harm. The turning point came when I finally recognized God’s failure to answer my prayers to make me straight was, in fact, the answer. I had to stop seeking a miracle that was never going to come, and start acknowledging that I had been worthy all along. This was the difference between chasing holiness and choosing wholeness. Healing meant embracing the self I had spent almost a decade trying to bury.
…Some people say bans on conversion therapy take away choice. I understand why that sounds persuasive. But a choice made under shame and spiritual fear isn’t autonomy, it’s about survival. When a young person has been told for years that God will only love them if they change, consent isn’t free. It’s coerced by the culture that raised them.
As I listened to the arguments from both sides, I couldn’t help but think about that version of myself. I wasn’t a child when I walked into that office, but I was still young and afraid and shaped by years of teaching that told me God would only love me if I changed. I thought I was choosing therapy. What I was really choosing was survival in a world that had convinced me I didn’t deserve to exist as I was. I took on shame and self-hatred disguised as faithfulness.
The harm isn’t abstract. Youth who experience conversion therapy are almost twice as likely to attempt suicide. I remember what conversion therapy did to me. It taught me to mistrust my own heart. Even now, years later, I sometimes flinch at joy, second-guess love, and brace for punishment when life feels too good. That shame eventually led me into addiction.
In 2013, Exodus International, the largest network of conversion ministries in the world, shut down and apologized for the harm it caused. Its president admitted that few people had ever successfully changed their sexuality. But the ideology behind it never died. It lives on under new names, in new churches, and now protections against it are being considered by the highest court in the land.
When we talk about conversion therapy, the debate often centers on freedom of speech and whether counselors should be free to say what they believe, or whether people should be free to seek whatever help they want. But freedom without truth isn’t freedom, it’s confusion. And there’s nothing free about being taught that the only way to be loved is to stop being yourself.
The danger of conversion therapy isn’t just the trauma it causes. It’s that it disguises shame as healing. It teaches people to doubt their own goodness. It tells them peace is possible only if they become someone else.
Real healing isn’t about erasing what’s wounded. It’s about telling the truth about where it hurts. That truth didn’t come easy for me. I had to rebuild a faith that could hold my full humanity. I had to learn that love and shame cannot exist in the same space. I had to believe that God’s love was bigger than the box I’d been told to fit it inside.
When I finally stopped trying to be someone else, something shifted. The peace I had been praying for didn’t come from perfection. It came from honesty. I finally felt a true sense of belonging in a community that celebrated the fullness of who I was.
We live in a culture obsessed with fixing things. We treat discomfort as a disease. But our sexuality, identity, and capacity for love were never meant to be cured.
Conversion therapy taught me that anything built on shame will always collapse. Real healing comes when we stop apologizing for who we are and start believing that we were never broken in the first place. And healing, I’ve learned, isn’t becoming who others tell you to be. It’s having the freedom to become the person you were meant to be all along.
As the justices debate the case before them, I hope they remember that there are people behind those words, people like the 19-year-old I once was, who mistook fear for faith and control for care. What I needed then wasn’t the freedom to change. I needed the freedom to be myself.
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Brian I truly appreciate your efforts in this blog.
You lived an exceptional life both within fold and otherwise.
Don’t let mundane worldy things bother you.I don’t think you think love at this age the way I do, But truth of santmat is if you conquer by the Love, You conquer everything.
Keep posting.I love your content and other posters here.
I couldn’t find open thread so posting it here.
Conversion therapy stopped being a mainstream thing back in the 1970s. Last week, you were saying that RSSB prevents its members from leaving, which has never been true. In fact, you did 2 essays on that imaginary issue.
Anyway, if I may add to the general topic: I recently read a couple of excellent books on Buddhism by Professor Donald Lopez. Here is one of them, Buddhism: A Journey Through History.
https://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Journey-Donald-S-Lopez-ebook/dp/B0DQXFJDDF
How does this book on Buddhist history relate to the topic of truly being who you are? Well, Prof. Lopez’s book opened my eyes to just how much Buddhism is a work of human creation rather than revelation. I must say, it definitely helps to read works by scholars like Lopez who are truly agnostic. As we’ve seen with studies on Sant Mat, no much how the scholar pretends to be impartial, his works end up being a homage to his own Guru.
Not being a Buddhist, Lopez is able to give a dispassionate accounting of the history of Buddhism. The warfare, the slavery (yes, the Buddha had slaves), the sexism, the pandering to royalty, and the inevitable friction with civic leaders (eg, the Meiji Restoration, when Japan came to terms with how Buddhism monasticism was killing their society).
Then there’s the matter of what we can say we know about the Buddha or precisely what he taught. The answer to both is virtually nothing. What about the 1st council? It likely never happened. What about all those Buddhist scriptures we have? All of them are ahistorical and essentially meaningless — they may read like poetry, but all of them are creative works of literature bolstered by lies about their provenance.
And what about the supposedly core Buddhist doctrine of no-self? I was surprised to learn that there’s been argument over that doctrine for thousands of years. Here’s the problem with no-self: Buddhism teaches that karma exists, and rebirth exists. If there’s no-self, who or what is reborn? Most Buddhists of today have never deeply looked into that huge and glaringly obvious philosophical contradiction. That’s because it’s not so glaringly obvious to the Buddhist who has read nothing but Buddhist works that hand-wave away that contradiction.
Lopez covers all this and much more in the book. I found it fascinating reading.
Many people have turned to Buddhism because of its promise to be who you really are. You could say that Buddhism is a kind of conversion therapy. One intends to convert from being a person to being nothing. Most Buddhists will take umbrage at that synopsis, but if they’re honest, they’ll have a hard time disputing it. If the early Buddhist scriptures can be trusted, they tell us that the Buddha had one goal: Utter personal extinction. Otherwise known as nirvana.
Some argue that it doesn’t make sense to try to change one’s sexual orientation. Does it make any more sense to take up a program that promises self-extinction?
Hi Brian:
You wrote:
“Narrow-minded people who subscribe to this rigid outmoded view of humanity claim that (1) there are only two sexes, male and female; (2) at birth it’s clear which sex you are; and (3) our sexuality has to match up with that sex.”
That may be true of some in Religion who believe their superstitions, and the literal texts of their ancient writings. And it may be true of some Atheists who only see evolution’s physical purpose to our existence.
But from a spiritual perspective, our best, highest, true selves are light and divine sound. These coverings of flesh are temporary and hardly consequential.
Therefore it is of no matter in the greater scheme of things. We will be leaving these shells soon enough for others, just as we left those for these.
But while we are here, in this tiny space of time, what is the point of getting on anyone’s case about the clothes they wear? That is all this is about.
Wear the clothes you are comfortable in, live and let live, and live where the people around you aren’t so hateful that this is a problem for them, or you. They are your clothes, and while you may only be able to wear them for a season, you chose them, you choose them every day; so choose them, and once you have chosen them, sewed them carefully by every act of will, accept them, be happy in them.
For those who feel their destiny is to become someone or something else, something better, and feel they are somehow misplaced here, that is all our destiny! We all have such a destiny, if we are honest with ourselves. These bags of chemicals hardly reflect our dreams. And to emerge from this shell into who we really are, or at least what we dream to be, ah, yes. What could be a higher purpose? But each of us may see that differently. Viva La Difference.
Many of us Know, right down to our toes, that this isn’t our home. It’s been a condition for a very long time, and each individual interprets that condition, and finds their answer in their own way. It is indeed a spiritual journey, however you resolve it, and worthy of the highest possible respect. It is an act of courage to acknowledge things aren’t right as they are, for you or I.
“They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”
Hebrews 11.
It’s OK to know for yourself you belong in some other state, even another body. That is to me a step on a courageous journey.
““The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”
Andre Malraux
Jesus tried that and look what it got him. ( Being Jesus frfr)
“Inside, the justices heard oral arguments for Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Christian therapist in Colorado argues that the prohibition against conversion therapy is a violation of her First Amendment free speech rights.”
Every sympathy with the victim of so-called ‘conversion therapy’. The sheer arrogance of the people who ignorantly believe they have to change a person’s nature to one that fits into their narrow religious belief system. I’ve no problem with the person who attends their particular church and is comforted by their beliefs and gets some peace through being a member of their community, but to proselytise aspects of their belief which are damaging and against nature is so backward thinking and primitive.
***
Just a quick word to Spencer who believes that: “Many of us Know, right down to our toes, that this isn’t our home.” Well, I have to say that I for one am very comfortable with and feel very much at home on this earth – along with every other creature. It’s a great pity that people don’t understand their deep connections to nature, but instead ignore it in favour of some mind-created thought patterns.
And sant64. It is common knowledge that the scriptures of religions are mostly writings of later scribes – including our precious national histories. And to add – the question of no-self has nothing to do with “the promise of self-extinction, that’s ridiculous. No-self hinges on the Buddhist (and science) concept that no intrinsic independent self can be found. Also, with being reborn; rebirth or reincarnation is not a doctrine of all Buddhists – notably those of China and Japan. As they point out, no intrinsic self can be found, so there is nothing to be reborn. For them, the term reborn is something that is acknowledged where ‘what is’ is realised to be the ever-present yet changing moment being all there ever is and what we can only ever know.
Hi Ron E.
You wrote
“Just a quick word to Spencer who believes that: “Many of us Know, right down to our toes, that this isn’t our home.” Well, I have to say that I for one am very comfortable with and feel very much at home on this earth – along with every other creature. It’s a great pity that people don’t understand their deep connections to nature, but instead ignore it in favour of some mind-created thought patterns.”
But Ron, it is the very connection to nature I’m speaking of. We are all connected, but witness it at different levels of wakefulness, consciousness, awareness.
You wrote that every creature is quite at home here. I suggest taking a closer look. Many are living lives of desperation at best, marked with momentary rest, and prolonged meloncholy.
It is a weakness of human thinking to project one’s own situation upon others. A little open minded observation will reveal how diverse the experiences of many if not most others are from ourselves.
What is theoretical and conceptual to you cannot become the basis for any belief. Until you discover something you hadn’t seen before, until that reality tears right into your system of beliefs about “nature”. Then the rude awakening that “nature” provides, that becomes a whole other chapter of our journey.
We are all ignorant of different things, and therefore we are all, at best, students. That means what you know tomorrow is not going to be quite the same as what you know today. And for that reason we can be cautious in suggesting anyone is ignorant or mistaken. We ourselves are mistaken relative to our view tomorrow.
To address again Spencer’s comment where he said: “Many of us Know, right down to our toes, that this isn’t our home.” Well, I have to say that I, for one, am very comfortable with and feel very much at home on this earth – along with every other *creature. (*Omitting humans as they are beset by issues arising from conditioned thought, mind-invented beliefs and abstract concepts.)
Walt Whitman expressed it quite nicely in the first lines of his poem – ‘I Think I Could Turn And Live With Animals’
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
Ron E., are you actually suggesting animals are all happy? Have you never owned a pet?
And how did that creature’s life end? Did they leave at their choosing? Did they leave satisfied and comfortable?
It is rarely so. And most owners must make one of the most difficult decisions of their lives to end their friend’s, when they see them suffering.
If this is how our beloved pets pass, are you so sure it is even better for those creatures in the wild? Hunted, in fear, anxiety, or out of hunger, angry, hunting others, destroying innocent lives just to survive?
They do have many sleepless nights when the brood’s protector passes.
Your understanding of nature is quite romantic but quite far from what I see hiking through the woods, or visiting the pound, or witnessing suffering in Emergency Departments and intensive care units where pain comes in waves of humanity. Even there with the gifts of modern medicine, gifts far exceeding what is available to animals, suffering is inevitable, and with it fear, endless fear, crushing loss and disappointment.
That is no one’s fault. But it is certainly no better for people of different persuasions, be they lions, dogs or others.
Just make sure that you’re comfort level here isn’t just smugness and actual pride in your lack of empathy for others. Or would that be too condescending.
Accepting that ANY life in physical form , on planet earth is a wonderful experience is nonsense. Sant Mat exposes life on Planet Earth the most accurately of ANY other Sect or Sacred Scriptures I have ever read . Those who haven’t recognized that yet, either have their heads in the sand with their butts in the air, or haven’t suffered enough yet.
I agree with Spence about animals. Life with pets and taking care of them and feeling their unconditional love towards you, during their short life spans of 10-20 years max. and when their latter years quickly arrive, and no matter what you do, trying to keep them from suffering, right up to the last , when their hind legs go limp, and they can no longer Stand , or even urinate or dedicate, you either do what Charan Singh said to do, or rebel, and have them Euthanized, as I did with my last two loving cats, who adored me more than any other human I ever met! I shared a couple of posts here, about how difficult it is, to watch your pets suffer and die, or hurry up and help them die. Either way, leaves holes in our hearts.
As for other lower species, from birth through death, they never have any peace from being hungry or eaten by Predators, including by humans. Even Insects struggle to survive.
For I created OM
But can’t cage it
Work of Soham
Net is in grip
Maya where will you go
O Brother what you got
I am the Goat
For GOAT is with ME