BECOMING WHO I AM PART TWO

The solvent for ego is love. Love melts the boundaries of the separate self and reveals the true nature of self as soul. Soul is not something that we have: soul has us.
There is a time for silence and a time for words; a time for keeping a secret and a time for releasing secrets. When something unbelievable happens there is always a conflict which can arise as to whether to share it or not and who to share it with. It is unpleasant to be ridiculed for what we say but at least we don’t have to worry about being burnt at the stake these days. There was a time in which to share the secret which had been revealed to me might have cost me my life. I quickly realised that the worst that could happen to me was that I wouldn’t be believed. The first person I told accused me of talking bullshit. There was nothing more I could say so I said nothing.
The next person I mentioned it to clearly grasped the truth in my words. She was someone who had the same experience years earlier. When we compared notes we found that we were using the same phrases to describe the experience like “It was nothing like I imagined it would be.”, “It is our birth right.”, “It was as if a bubble had popped.” and “It was like a layer of Clingfilm had fallen from my body.”
But I have run too far ahead of myself. I need to wind back before I spring forward. I changed my name from Patrick to Patrick. It was meant as a joke in response to people changing their given names into exotic spiritual names. There is some validity to taking on a Sanskrit name if you are being initiated into a Buddhist or Hindu spiritual tradition or taking on an Arabic name if you become a Sufi. Each new Pope takes on a new name. And why not? It’s traditional. When two of my closest friends including my flat mate made an announcement that they were to be known by new Sanskrit names I thought… Well, I won’t tell you what I thought. It was quite rude.
So I said, “I’m changing my name from Patrick to Patrick.” It was my flatmate I was talking to. His new name was Muni which means saint or holy man in Sanskrit. Although he did like to think of himself in those terms he was neither. I would know. I shared a flat with him for almost seven years. You get to know someone in that amount of time. He wasn’t the opposite of a saint either. He had many good qualities. I learned a lot from him, including how not to do things. Some of our very best teachers are those who, by their own example, help us to see how not to do things. I’m sure I have also taught many people, by my own example, how not to do things. In recent years I have mastered the art of teaching myself how to not do things by making as many mistakes as I possibly can. It is good to get the middleman out of the way. I always try to make my own mistakes now. I’m self-sufficient in that respect.
The Muni thing didn’t last long. It helped that no one ever called him by that name. I certainly didn’t. Another mutual friend of Muni and I, the initiator of this name-changing craze, changed his name to Anaris. Anaris does not seem to mean anything in any known language. A Google search reveals this from a site called Lexicanum: “The sword Anaris is a special Eldar sword, said to have been the last (and mightiest) of the 100 swords that the Eldar God Vaul forged in his pact with Khaune. It is presumed that the Eldar god Khaine now holds this blade. Anaris is not to be confused with the Wailing Doom, which is the weapon of the Avatar of Khaine, not Khaine himself.” I have no idea what any of that means. Perhaps it is a fantasy novel or a computer game.
A day or two passed. Then one night, just as I slipped unto that space between waking and sleeping, a voice emerged from the silence: “Patrick”.
A woman’s voice, more beautiful than I have ever heard, it filled my heart. It wasn’t an imagined voice in my head; it was a voice which spoke my name in the very room I was lying in. By saying my name the speaker sanctified it. From that moment the name Patrick was not just my given name, it was my spiritual name. Yet it took 25 years for that to become clear to me.
“Patrick.”
She spoke my name again. There was no way I could dismiss it. It was the same beautiful voice filling my heart with love. It was perhaps a years since I had asked the question “How can I become who I truly am, how can I fulfil my birthright?” Becoming who I am and fulfilling my birthright seemed to be connected to the transition from Patrick to Patrick; that is, from a label which was attached to me soon after I was born indicating who I appeared to be and what distinguished me from others to an affirmation of a hidden identity which had remained concealed from everyone including me.
Words stumble and stagger in their attempts to explain this. It is a slippery truth which just cannot be adequately grasped by superficial words. When this invisible voice spoke my name from the silence something indefinable was included in those two syllables. Ordinarily our words are just fragmented and jagged utterances which cannot express holiness or wholeness. Our words reflect our fallen state. They are shattered remnants of a lost language of the soul. Since that time I have increasingly found that words, when spoken from that hidden holiness, our original completeness, carry with them the wholeness we are all searching for or seeking to express. Deep in our hearts we know the difference between superficial words which skate across the surface of reality and those words which emerge from the depths of our Being.
The words which emerge from the depths have power.
When the beautiful voice spoke my name I was empowered. But the true nature of that empowerment was not clear at that time. It took a number of years before the cloud of unknowing dispersed.
The naming of me by this mysterious voice was to direct me along a path toward an awakening I could not have imagined. In Part One of this story I talked about how a spontaneous question led me, with the help of astrology, to buying a computer. Everything about that horary chart spoke about a spiritual transformation through technology and communications. All of that would come true. However, there is more. Awakening was to be just a beginning. My birthright is a return to who I already am but also a promise of what I can become. The source from which we come resonates with our destiny. It determines the specific nature of that destiny. The arrow finds the target only when the aim is true. The moment of our birth is when we are released from the womb of possibilities. That moment determines the direction our lives will take and our target is who we truly are, arriving there is being who we are.