About Your Secret Name

Your 'secret' name usually is also referred to as either your Soul-name or your 'true' name. There are a few ideas behind them, which run in parallel to how people Carry many names in their life; The name given to you by your parents, The family name of where you come from, your nickname which is often a play on your given name, or inspired by your personality or as you are seen by your peers. For people of a spiritual bent, they often have a chosen name, a name used to be symbolic of their ideal self or the path they see themselves following. More recently, with the overwhelming presence of the internet, I would include a person's online name as well-arguably it is used as a personal monitor within an otherwise anonymous medium. People choose their name as the core of their identity, and they often are representative of an individual's nature and personality.

All these names represent you and your overall nature, but only a fragment at a time. Each name represents you, how you present yourself, within the context that it dwells but not from any other angle. Online I am Spiritrunner. And here, it represents me. My attitudes and goals, what I practice and do. People read that name and associate it with the summ of their experience with me. But if I were to be called that at work, or by my mother, or among my friends, it would not fit nearly so well. It isn't associated with me as a professional. 'Spiritrunner' isn't what a friend would yell as they grab me from a shadowy doorway to make me jump and scream in a *ahem* manly falsetto.

However someone's true, or secret, name is all of these things. It is a name that would represent the entirety of you. In all of your contexts, attitudes, presentations, roles, and actions. It is a name for the 'you' that is everything about you. A true/complete representation of who you are in mind, body, and soul. Including across your many potential identities across many potential lives/incarnations if you ascribe to such ideas (as I do).

As such it is a name that is not just some word or title. It is a sound, an image, an idea, a collection of energies and emotions and associations brought together into a representation of the whole of your identity. Which means, in essence, it is neither chosen, nor given. It is just you, and everything about you now, as you were, and as you wish to be.

Heavy philosophy about the nature identity aside, what this means practically is that your true identity is both always safe, and always present to be seen. You can't give or take your name away because you would have no way of reproducing it by word or sound alone. There is no word that can be applied to you that would represent the whole of you.

Yet as I said, your true name is always present. Always there to be seen. Well... experienced is perhaps a better term. Because it is you. As you are. Right now. In this moment.