You Are Not Your Name
I’ve been thinking about reality a lot, or more specifically illusion. The Buddhist idea of self is not that there is no-self, but that the self is not all. Anatta means (not) self. Just as (not) Steve doesn’t deny the existence of Steven, An-atman doesn’t deny the existence of atman. It just asserts that atman is not the end-all and be-all.
To stick to names, this reality is somewhat obvious in Asian cultures, where people have many names, most of the relative. I have five names that I go by on a regular basis—Appa (father), Patiya (child), Jit (nickname), Indi (nickname), or Indrajit. I have a dozen more names I go by infrequently, and these only increase as more children are born. In this context, it is somewhat obvious that there is no fixed self because, I mean, which one?
With the standardization of colonialism we got first and last names, and we still have to use them or we get beaten, exiled, or tortured. So a melange of identities get brutally shoehorned into a government form. I notice this in Kerala where relatives have one name which is exclusively for government use, and is often something random someone wrote down when they were five or six. Someone’s name is Mathew Mathews because, fuck it, I just call him Appachan.
