Learning one’s true name

In case you’ve never heard of True Names: it is the concept that every thing and being has one true name that represents that being’s true nature and that, if learned by others, gave them power over it. It occurs sometimes in religion but even more frequently in fantasy literature.

This is the story of how I learned my own true name, and the unexpected benefits it brought me.

Before I can get into the how, I have to mention some of the prerequisites. Although I’m a spiritual person, that is not a prerequisite. What is needed mostly is experience with looking inside yourself, and with examining your own life. The best way I’ve found to achieve this is through meditation. If you know meditation, you can skip the next part, if not, I highly recommend you read on.

Meditation has gotten a strange reputation in the West as being a bit silly, somehow slightly embarrassing. It may be this undeserved reputation that has kept this amazing tool from many of us. I can say from experience that meditation is a way for one to become aware of their own thought processes, and then start to alter them. In essence, it allows you to think and feel any way you choose.

In fact, if I were allowed a single piece of advice to anyone I ever meet, it would be this: meditate. It’s really not that difficult. All you have to do is sit and make yourself comfortable, but not sleepy. Those weird poses you sometimes see in yoga may work for some people, but really you can meditate just fine sitting up on a chair. And the most important factor: don’t just try it once. To start out with, try to do it for at least twenty minutes every day, for years.

How to meditate: there are lots of things you can try (look it up, there’s tons of material out there) but really the simplest and most effective thing is to relax, close your eyes and do your best to think of nothing at all. Pretty soon you’ll notice that your mind, when not needed for a particular task, starts to run around in circles. Doing this again and again, you start to notice not just what you’re thinking, but how you’re thinking. After some sessions of this, you’ll develop your own little tricks for quieting that mind down and making it do what you want it to. No special techniques needed: all this stuff comes pretty naturally, in my experience, if you’re just willing to put time and effort into it.

And that’s it. Once you’ve mastered this sufficiently, you’ll be surprised at the new perspective you’ll gain on your own mind, and the control you can exert. For example: I don’t think I’ve been really sad in the last six years or so. When I notice my feelings heading in that direction, I simply relax into a meditative state, find out what the underlying cause is, remove it, and restore happiness. And that’s it. It works.

Anyway, about that name. I’d encountered the concept of True Names a couple of times before. Le Guin’s Earthsea probably, although I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, one night I was suddenly convinced that I’d find out my own true name. I could have gone through some elaborate process, but really what would be the point? I simply sat down, got comfortable, got quiet, and looked inward.

Not that it was easy to do. I had to dig really deep. Questions that I had to answer, like ‘who am I’, ‘what defines me’, ‘what do I like to do’, ‘what is my nature’. In effect, I had to look past all the ordinary stuff and find the deepest, most fundamental truths about myself. Not that I could answer any of those questions in the end, but thinking about it gave me clues. The rest of the experience is hard to explain, it simply felt like struggling against the stream, uphill, while moving deeper inside myself, into the dark.

But then, realization finally dawned. The clues and random thoughts about myself merged together, into a single vision of a person. And the name came with that. I perceived it’s meaning, and what it said about the person I was.

It’s been years since then, but the knowledge of my own True Name still proves invaluable day after day. I have doubts and make bad decisions like anyone else, but I’m never shaken because at the core I hold this existential certainty: I know who I am. That is something that can never be taken from me, and it is a true comfort. It also gives tremendous confidence, I’ve found, to know your own true nature. Finally, it’s also a handy guide when making life decisions, but knowing who you are does not tell you where to go or what to do. It’s more like knowing the departure point of the journey than knowing the end destination.

Now to distill this experience into a lesson that may help anyone. I don’t know whether you believe in such vague concepts as ‘faith’ or a ‘true name’. That’s not really what is important. The lesson to take from this, I think, is that you can turn deep inside yourself, examine your own mind, your life, your ‘being’ for want of a better word, and learn the nature of this being. This isn’t the same as asking yourself ‘what am I doing’, ‘where will I be in 5 years’, ‘what career choices should I make’ or anything like that. Like I said, this exercise will tell you who you truly are, not where you’re going or how you’re going to get there. But knowing who you are will help you figure these questions out next.

So that’s it for today, for those who’ve stuck around this far, thank you for you time. The final piece of advice I can give you is this. Don’t just brood on this information, and don’t dismiss it. Do something with it. If only to do the exact opposite of what I have done, but do something with it. Whoever you are, I wish you nothing but luck. May you find your way, just as I have, and may peace and happiness be with you always.

Blessings on you, and good night.

Redge

A rock stands in a river

Once there was a slow-moving river, and in the middle of the river stood a rock. It had been there for thousands of years, and would stay there for thousands more. Every day, every second, water came up to the rock, then flowed around.

Western Culture: Be like the rock. Be unmoving, uncompromising, in the face of all adversity. Be bold, corrageous. When all has passed, only you will remain, victorious.

Eastern Culture: Be like the water. When you encounter an obstacle, do not think, do not work, but by your very nature, flow around it without offering resistance, then continue on your way.

Books in a word, part two: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Well I’ve been thinking about some of the books I like, or rather series of books because the kind of book I like comes in a trilogy at the least. And it seems to me that if you summarize them enough, they always seem to come down on the main character or characters trying to find their way on a line between two opposites. I want to do a series of posts about what line each of my favorite books comes down to. For my second post, I’ll talk about The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson.

The first thing to note is that Stevenson’s writing is a bit difficult. He tends to use complicated words where simple ones will do, and sometimes he will go off on a philosophical tangent before returning to the story. On the other hand, he is quite gifted in making his main characters come to life for the reader. He will write at length about what the character is thinking, how his entire previous life relates to the character’s current situation, and how his next actions are motivated by these thoughts.

Probably Stevenson’s most interesting character is Thomas Covenant. Covenant suffers from leprosy, a disease that destroys nerves. As a consequence, Covenant can no longer feel parts of his body, not even pain. This numbness alone does plenty to shape his rich psyche, but an even bigger influence is the scorn the disease brings him from his fellow human beings, who seem to implicitly blame him for contracting a disease that has since ages been associated with sin.

Covenant is grim and cynical. Because of his disease, he can easily get wounded without being aware of it. Therefor he must never loose his tight grip on himself, constantly checking himself for little scrapes or nicks. He believes that hope is the one thing that will kill him: it could cause him to forego the iron discipline and brutal realism that is the only thing keeping him alive.

Not to give too much of the plot away beforehand, but one day Covenant finds himself in a fairy tale world, where everyone is happy and healthy and the people think him the reincarnation of a lost hero. Covenant is convinced this world is not real, that he is hallucinating and loosing his precious grip on reality. On the other hand, the world before him is as real to every sense as the normal world. From this conflict, all his actions are motivated.

It is not easy to pick out the true theme of the Covenant stories, because the stories feature a great number of themes. The major theme of the first book, for example, is whether the world Covenant finds himself in is real or not, and whether Covenant is a fool or a hero for choosing not to believe in it. There is one theme, however, that underlies all Covenant books, and it is made explicit in the first book of the second trilogy. It is this: guilt vs innocence  power vs powerlessness. The two are related, in the Covenant chronicles, thus: only the powerless can be innocent. Those with power either use force, losing their innocence, or stand by when they have the power to intervene, and thus gather guilt.

Covenant wants to see himself as innocent, but cannot help but see himself as his fellow human beings see him: guilty, his disease the physical proof of his sins. But once he enters the fairytale world, he is given great power. First he withholds his power, convinced that the world he finds himself in is an illusion, and he not responsible for what happens in it. Tragedy strikes, and Covenant stands by passively, and the guilt for this is more then he can bare. Then he decides to use his power, but in the process, must kill other beings. Again he finds himself guilty.

This theme continues through all Covenant novels (nine so far, the final tenth book to appear soon). Sometimes Covenant finds himself powerless, in which case he can maintain his innocence but is also unable to prevent tragedy from striking. Sometimes he has power but refuses to use it. And sometimes he uses power and garners guilt. The finales of many of the books are when Covenant finds a still point, what he calls “the eye of the paradox”, where he can use power and still maintain his innocence.

 

Like I said, Stevenson’s writing style is quite dense, and as you may have noticed, carries heavy underlying philosophical notes. You’ll rarely crack a smile while reading the Covenant novels. But if you can live with this, reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant can be quite a profound experience.

That is all for now. Next time I will discuss the fantasy trilogy that has made the deepest impact on me of any book I’ve read: “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman.

Books in a word, part one: Discworld

Well I’ve been thinking about some of the books I like, or rather series of books because the kind of book I like comes in a trilogy at the least. And it seems to me that if you summarize them enough, they always seem to come down on the main character or characters trying to find their way on a line between two opposites. I want to do a series of posts about what line each of my favourite books comes down to. For this first post, I’ll talk about Terry Pratchett’s great series: the Discworld.

 

Discworld is one of the most extensive book series I know about. Wikipedia lists 39 titles so far. Although some of these tell one-time stories, most of them are about one of a set of themes, each of which has its own setting and major characters. There are the stories about Rincewind, a wizard, and those about Granny Weatherwax, a witch. There are a few about the adventures of Death, and some are about Sam Vines, commander of the City Watch. The most recent books have introduced two new themes: Moist Von Lipwig, which take place in the same city as the one in which Sam Vines works, and Tiffany Aching, a young witch whose stories always include Granny Weatherwax.

Now the Discworld is a difficult series to categorize as a single set of opposites, because the series as a whole is actually rather a parody on modern culture and fantasy literature specifically. This works wonderfully because Pratchett has a sharp and insightful sense of humor. But it does mean that many of the stories are defined not by themselves, but also by the thing they parody.

But at the core of things, there is one thing that all Discworld stories have in common. They always include, whether it is named explicitly or not, what Pratchett calls Narrative Causality. It means simply that because the Discworld books parody other literature which has a well defined structure, the narrative of each story also has that structure. The unusual thing is that most main characters in Discworld novels are aware of this, consciously or not. Witches Abroad is, I think, the quintessential Discworld book. In it, the Witches travel to a kingdom of fairy tails and encounter talking wolves, princes made from frogs and bakers being sentenced for not having rosy cheeks. Why? Because the secret leader of the country knows about stories, and wants to reshape the world to better fit the stories.

And this forms the line among which Discworld characters must place themselves: to accept their role in the story, or to fight it.

Sam Vimes, for example, is based on the detectives from Noir novels and films. He knows this, and accepts it. If you put him out in the streets, at night, in the dark, in the rain, trying to catch killers and thieves, he’ll be completely happy. But dress him up in fancy clothes, name him a duke and put him in a room full of nobles, and he’ll be miserable.

On the opposite side we find Granny Weatherwax. She is a witch. Therefor she can either be a bad witch, which means cackling and shoving little children into your oven, or be the good witch, which means handing shining swords to heroes and helping lost travelers find their way. But Granny Weatherwax is stubborn. She refuses to be pressed into something she does not want. So she has to be the good one, much to her own chagrin, but she doesn’t have to like it and she doesn’t have to be nice.

Death is supposed to be ominous and frightful, and he knows it. The problem is that he’s not very good at it. He keeps messing up his lines. Trying, for example, to make a little joke to try and lift the spirits (pun intended) of the recently departed. But because his delivery sucks, the ghost in question asks him to explain the joke, and all sense of Death being ominous is suddenly gone.

Rincewind finds himself in the role of the adventurer, but he doesn’t want to be. What he mostly hopes for is a warm meal and no worries, but people keep giving him missions and pushing him into dangerous situations, which he then has to weasel his way out of again.

Moist Von Lipwig is a con artist. He keeps telling the world stories about who he is, and is amazed when the world buys into it. Then, to his dismay, it turns out that he is actually playing the part of the story he has made up about himself, thinking to himself that he can stop at any moment, he just wants to wait a little bit longer.

Tiffany Aching is just a little girl when she finds out she’s a witch, but not quite like other witches. She plays a role in an ancient story about the life of the land itself. The problem is that she doesn’t know the role she has to play, and she finds out as she’s going along.

So that is the core of Discworld novels. Each parodies existing stories, and the characters that can find out what that story is, and how they fit into it, can use it to shape their own destiny.

 

Next time I’ll talk a bit about one of my favourite book series: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. Donaldson has a very dense and deep writing style, making it a challenge to summarize. Until next time!

Via monstrare potest

I decided to translate the first verses of my favorite spiritual text, the Tao Te Ching, into Latin (don’t ask why). I based it on my favorite translation, the one by Stephen Mitchell, but I added my own interpretation. I haven’t translated Latin in years, so my conjugation is probably off here and there.

 

Via monstrare potest non est via vera.
Nomen vocare potest non est nomen verum.
Innomine, veritas aeternus est.
Nomine, mater res decamilles est.

Cupire absolvus, mysterius intelleges.
Cupire irretitus, res decamilles solum intelleges.
Sed mysterius atque res decamilles ab origo idem emaniunt.
Hoc origus calligatius est.

Calligatius intra calligatio,
portus sensu omne.