“Name has conquered everything,
There is nothing greater than name,
All have gone under the sway
Of this one thing called name.”
– Translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda, in Nibbāna – The Mind Stilled
Unskilful naming of experiences (unreflective speaking and thinking)cause us to get lost in a maze of our own making. We learn, when we are very small children, to name ’things,’ events, processes, and so on, in agreement with those around us. In doing so, we enter a particular kind of consciousness, a consensus trance. Consciousness now needs a new development – a waking up.
In the daily new you’ll note many reports of people doing cruel and insane things to others. All these people do their worst based on their ‘naming’; especially in the form of beliefs. Beliefs are based on naming, and maintain naming.
It is tragic really, that we are in a trance about what’s going on, here, and we don’t encourage inquiry into ‘This’(reality, life…) and the way we think and speak about it. So confused are we that when our children ask the ‘big’ questions about death, God, and heads, they get confusion in reply.
Reports that I get from people, in private conversation, show that children are often left feeling that there must be something wrong with them, for not knowing what is going on, not knowing how it really is – this seeing, thinking, smelling, tasting, touching, walking, running, laughing, spewing, crying, and turning somersaults.
Exactly what is this? Few are the occasions when a child’s questions about what matters – the ultimate questions – are met with the respect that they deserve. It’s now acknowledged by some researchers (in Integral Spirituality) that children can have transcendent experiences (that is, quite conscious nonconceptual experiences).
They don’t have the conceptual development to integrate such experiences, but they have them. This means that luminous experiences pass by without them sharing with the adult world – they slip into the shadows, to await a crisis in adulthood.
As a result of the consensus trance, we have a majority of people die confused. Their spiritual line of development remains undeveloped. They don’t grow up in that respect, because our culture doesn’t have a shared language for this aspect of experiencing. I’ll go as far as to say that, the majority of people die without discovering the only thing worth discovering. (”The only game on the block,” as I heard spiritual teacher Peter Fenner say.)
My own life is an instance. My father told me (when I was about 26 years old) that when I was a child (younger than five), I would ask him “Who am I?” He said that I wouldn’t take any answer that he gave me. When he told me this, twenty-one years later, he added that he thought at the time that I wasn’t right in the head.
His ‘help’ (training me in the consensus view), of course, amounted to identifying my experience of myself with my body;, and with the roles of son and brother. He told me my name, as if that was the level of the problem that bothered me.
So, who wasn’t right in the head? The child who had come upon the enigma of the ungraspable immediacy of perception; or the adults who had learned, in their own childhood, to believe in their naming, and to identify with their narratives? The implications are enormous.
The Nikaya Buddha says to his companion in the spiritual life:
“If, Ānanda, consciousness were not to find a footing, or get established in, name-and-form, would there be an arising or origin of birth, decay, death and suffering in the future?”
“No indeed, Lord.”
-Translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda, Nibbāna – The Mind Stilled