Suffering beings sin. That’s the simplest bridge I can offer from the Buddha’s world to Jesus Christ. Suffering beings sin because they are overwhelmed and they don’t know better. It’s as simple as that.

The Buddha discovered a really complicated path—a path to living a sinless life that’s almost impossible. Its impossibility is well known, in the sense that there just haven’t been many people who’ve reached enlightenment the way the Buddha described it. And enlightenment is quite unverifiable as a state of being. It was a good attempt, but it’s not scalable. It’s quite well established in Buddhist theology that most people will need multiple lifetimes to reach enlightenment. That’s a known thing.

When I was deep in exploring that, I always found it odd. It felt like an aspect of despair. Why can’t we do better? Why can’t we come up with something that gets people there sooner?

That’s where I resonate with the moves our Father in Heaven took with the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. It’s the endgame. He played the endgame—the greatest endgame possible.

If you’re someone interested in complex systems and how to move through them effectively—if you’re interested in ecosystem design, systems thinking, or systems theory—you have to read the New Testament and get it. Not just read it intellectually, searching for faults like academics completely devoid of the grace of God. But receive the grace of God. Believe in the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then absorb the wisdom of the New Testament.

God played the greatest endgame possible. And you’ll get it if you’ve sat with the question of how complicated collective liberation is from the Buddhist lens. It’s so complicated. And God just short-circuited that entire process.

If you’ve spent time in tantra, you might have encountered the concept of the lightning path. Tantra is known as the lightning path to enlightenment. And that is what was accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was a shamanic act, in the truest sense of the word. Every act we take is shamanic in that sense—anything we do in the physical realm has reverberations in the spiritual realm. It has the potential to change the laws of the spirit realm.

That’s what the crucifixion of Jesus Christ did. It changed the laws of the spirit realm—where we all have access, where space-time isn’t as constraining as it is here. It changed those laws so that now each of us has a lightning shortcut to God’s grace through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Through the blood flowing from His pores while He maintained a completely sinless order of life.

He maintained a sinless orientation toward those who harangued, harassed, tortured, and mocked Him. If you’ve experienced horrible abuse, bullying, isolation, or cancellation, you know how difficult it is to hold that orientation toward the people coming at you. To hold that they are created in the image of God. To love them as yourself. To not collapse into pity for yourself and anger toward the other.

That’s quite the common collapse. And that’s where I had collapsed earlier this year when I was ostracized from my community for speaking openly

about the overlap between the trans experience and repressed sexual trauma. It ruffled feathers enough that my support for Trump in the 2024 election ignited even more. People took steps to convince others to disinvite me from gatherings.

I was mighty upset—angry, vengeful, heartbroken. These were people I’d shared intimate moments with, cared for, felt selfless toward. I couldn’t understand why they turned against me. There were three or four women who took the lead, as far as I know, since it all happened in secretive networks. Over time, as I digested that, I learned the truth of the line: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

It’s true. And I failed. I failed at maintaining a sinless orientation toward them. But I’m grateful now—truly grateful—for how they showed up and brought me to the story of Jesus Christ.

I was astonished by how Christ could have maintained a sinless, soft-hearted orientation while being tortured on the cross. Imagine the pain of nails piercing your wrists. To maintain that sinless orientation—loving the people doing this, in the moment, as yourself, knowing they are created in the image of God. I was awestruck, not unlike the Roman centurion who partook in the crucifixion of Christ.

And that sense of awe is the channel to God. Awe is the channel. It’s so beautiful that God came down and went through something awe-inspiring, on top of all the other awe-inspiring things He’s done in this world.

There’s so much proof of Him. But because of our sinful nature—how much we love feeling pity for ourselves and anger toward others—we often can’t see it. We actually enjoy our sinful nature at some level. It’s like how victims of abuse, partly like the abuse and till they reconcile the part that likes it, they keep getting trapped in one abusive relationship after another.

There’s a line from a song that captures this perfectly:

The journey from discomfort to sin, and then enjoying the sin. That’s the root of all disease in life.

Disease is a tool of death. Disease leads to death. And there’s no picking and choosing between the forces of life and death. You have to fully align with one side. If you choose anything of death, you get all the things of death.

Since I’ve written a lot about men’s sexuality—porn addiction, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation—these are all fruits of the forces of death.

This essay started as a reflection on a meme I posted on Facebook that mocks Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading—which is a sin, as far as I can tell, because it goes against the commandment “You shall not bear false witness.”

It made me realize how grateful I am for technology. As much as people love to hate on it, technology really is just a tool. And the more powerful, scalable forms of it—the ones that receive the most hate, like social media or the Internet—actually serve the purpose of revealing to us the depths of the sinful nature of man.

Technology keeps exposing who we are. Grace keeps offering a way through. The rest is our choice: to align with life or with death.