Our first contacts with reality involved a specific set of accessible elements which were the effective ambassadors of the concepts both of identity and category. These initial inceptions, made in the image and name of a complex tree of orders of culture from the human to the national to the filial and personal, carried with them covert implications which would deeply inform our intellectual and relational capacities. Where we encountered draconian, threatening binaries, these faculties were damaged or even amputated. Where we encountered broad, flexible, structural intimacy with phenomenon and other beings… these faculties tended to flourish. Our capacity to modulate the existing processes related to categories in our cognitive activity, but particularly our conscious thought, represents one of the specialized and largely untapped promises of cognitive activism. As these relationships form foundations of our cognitive abilities, we must attend them closely, and nurture the broadest and most deeply powerful developmental opportunities, not merely those whose efficacious primitivity provide ready access to solving some particular problem or producing some conveniently salable proof.