Are You Really Your Name?

The beginning of knowing who you are

Living among the ten thousand things as we do is confusing. The nameless is everywhere, is everything, but it’s invisible to us because we have attuned ourselves to what can be named. We come into the world without language but we very quickly acquire one and forget we ever lived without naming everything. We develop the strange habit of ceasing to look at anything as soon as we can call it by its name because we think that naming it is knowing it. In this way we step back from the world and language becomes a screen between us and the world that we don’t know is there... Attempting to name the nameless is bound to confuse. I remember when I first encountered descriptions of meditation that sounded like complete gobbledegook. Only when you come upon the ineffable yourself will you see how much is implied by those inadequate statements. It can’t really be talked about except by saying what it isn’t. — David Price

Please tell me your name. Yes, your name. Your birth name. Your personal, authentic, or official name. The name you prefer and answer to. Do you know what it means?

Have you really checked and looked it up to get the general meaning? Is the name, you?

Do you vibrate in the name? If you know what it means, have you asked how and why it came to be your name? Does it represent your person and personality? Does your name deeply resonate with you?

Does it evoke your aspirations and the way and what you want to be?

It is only a name. Isn’t it? Do you think it would have made any difference to your circumstances if you had a different name?

No matter what it is called, a rose will smell the same (to paraphrase Shakespeare). But would it really?

The Igbos say the name you give your dog is what it answers to.

Is the name you bear simply an accident of birth? (Ah, accident of birth! Any such thing?). Is there a story behind it? Is there anything that indicates it is not just ordinary? Does the name in any way connect your past to your future?

We buy a telephone line and are allotted a particular phone number which when dialed correctly connects us through the networks, if there are no interferences, to the caller. The connection allows us to pass messages to the one at the other end of the line.

There seems to be a precision here which means no matter what is going on in the world and the number of calls, our phone rings each time and every time our number is dialed.

When somebody correctly calls out our name, we answer or give an indication we hear them.

That suggests there is some specificity in the arrangement of the letters, words, and sounds in our names. We are eager to ensure our names are written and pronounced correctly so as to hit the right notes and evoke the right meanings the name connotes.

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” — Albert Einstein

So apart from the importance, we attach to our names and sometimes our emotional investment in them, do they not have a psychical and spiritual overtone beyond the mere symbolic representation of presence and being?

Is it not then very important that we should then take steps to guard how our names are depicted and used?

What if in the symbolism, significance, and connotations of our names, there is much more than we have assumed up to now?

“Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.” — Salman Rushdie.

If we dig up the true meanings and examine the significance and circumstances of our names we would be surprised to find there’s buried in there a lead to who we really are, who we were (even in previous earth lives), and who we should be as a pointer to our life purpose and what we need to do.

Your name conveys your identity, affects your personality, suggests your ethnicity/nationality, and influences your acceptability. Any wonder why some change theirs or prefer an alias while others bask in the charm of the names their parents gave them.

In an ordered universe like ours (oh yes), coincidences and mere happenstances are indeed very rare. Part of our tasks here and now is to pay attention to the paths we tread starting with where we are if we hope to find out who we are and why we are here at this time.

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” — José Saramago.

So tell me your name. I ask again, what is your name? Do you really know? Would you dare to find out and reflect on that on your journey?

Would you want to share that with all in the comment section below?

You have a right to remain silent as everything you say here tells us something about who you are.

Come on! Be brave!

OU102021