I used to worry a lot about my name. I wanted to be somebody special, and I needed the right name to be somebody special.
My mother's family name was "Grace" from Ireland, and I was really attracted to that. I liked the whole vibe of it.
So I legally changed my last name to "Grace" at one point, and used it for a couple of years. I was "Jamie Grace" at that point, and I liked it.
I had played around with my first name too. I'd been "Jim" for most of my life, although the people who'd known me longest called me "Jimmy." So I started using Jimmy because it seemed more authentic. But then "Jamie" seemed more New Age, and less like a little kid. So I became "Jamie Grace."
And it was fun.
But something kept knawing at me, and to put it into words it went something like this: "Why am I gilding the lily?"
And this whole name issue that occupied me for awhile forced me to keep looking at this whole specialness thing. Why did I want to be special anyway?
There's nothing wrong with changing your name, of course. Perfectly fine. Whatever is, is. Nevertheless, in my case something deep down kept inquiring about this notion of getting things "right" or "special."
And I didn't just want to be special. I wanted to be really special. I wanted to go down in history as somebody famous doing something or other—but very notable. I wanted to stand out. And I needed the right name for that.
But this tiny voice or spaciousness or whatever deep down just kept wondering in a wordless way what all this "specialness" was about. Why did I want to be special? Why did I need to be special?
Then one day I saw that it was because I had bought into the very idea that I was a separate identity. As soon as I thought I was a separate thing—boom!—the desire to stand out and be considered special arose immediately.
Look for yourself. You may or may not have a thing about your name, but if you look carefully you'll almost certainly notice the desire to be special somehow and appreciated by others.
In my case, I saw one day that this whole edifice about there being a somebody who was separate and who was engaged in personally doing something or other, and so on, was completely empty.
Thought by thought I had built it up, like adding bricks to a pyramid in Egypt. Every thought I had about this "me" served to solidify this sense of a separate, individual identity.
It was because I thought I was a somebody that I wanted to be the right somebody. I wanted to be a respected somebody. I wanted to be an appeciated somebody. I wanted to be an awesome somebody.
In all of this journey, the one name I didn't want to be was just plain old "Jim Sloman," which I had been most of my life. Way too ordinary. Nothing special about that.
And so I wrestled with this issue, like one of those Zen koans. In Shakespeare's phrase, was I gilding the lily somehow? Why the need to be special? What would I get from it?
And then I saw it somewhere, sometime, I don't even remember exactly when—
—That literally I was nobody. That literally I didn't exist as who I thought I was. That the whole self-concept was completely made-up, devoid of any meaning or reality.
—And that the ungraspable is one, and it is everything. And there is no "two" in it anywhere. And there are no separate identities in it. And it is the only reality there is, and it is one without a second.
—And we meet it everywhere. It's whatever or whoever is in front of us. It's we ourselves. It's everything else too, inside us and outside us. It's everything and it's all one thing, one energy, one vastness, meeting itself everywhere.
That being so, there are no individual somebodies. It's all imaginary, made up.
To perceive this is to see that you are literally nobody, that you don't exist as who you thought you were. There's no separate anything there. It's over. Death. The death of the imaginary somebody.
The image that comes to mind is like dancing in the rain. You don't care if it's raining or snowing or shining or whatever, you just want to dance with it and as it. There's nowhere in particular to go, nobody to be, nothing to accomplish. Because who would accomplish it? That person doesn't exist, and never did.
Yet doing still happens, that's the amazing thing. The breakfast gets eaten. The car gets fixed. The walk in the woods still happens. Nothing changes.
And of course, everything changes. Because the delight now is just in the ordinary, this ordinary little moment so filled with the presence of the ungraspable, seeing itself.
When you see the essential emptiness of everything you thought you were, you're so happy to be ordinary. Life begins to sing a song. Life meets life. Life appreciates life, in whatever form it encounters itself. Life loves itself through this human form.
And that's why we're here. To wake up to the one life that is living in us and as us and outside of us and being everywhere and everything. And nothing. The least pebble has it. The least little bug crawling along the windowsill has it. The majesty of the twirling galaxy has it. It has itself. It is itself.
And that is you.
—jim sloman, 01/25/01 for Jan 25
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