What’s your name?

Should our acquaintance not begin as is normally usual?

Because a person’s name is significant. And, although this significance is seldom forgotten or apparently unfathomable, it is never a coincidental and senseless string of letters.

However, the significance of some names exceeds the borders of a language while, on the other hand, some names can only be understood in the language to which they belong. Every language can offer the same or similar, equivalent names; in other words, these names can also be translated into other languages although in most cases we do not translate them.

Every name is at the same time a hurdle and a stimulus. It is, so to speak, a karmic or a cause and effect pattern (the latter term is perhaps easier and more comprehensible for some people), an emotional and mental matrix through which we all fulfil our human and deepest personal tasks in our own way. In every name there is a personal challenge which life presents us with. Seen thus, a name is at the same time a fateful predestination, a given fact which can be a prison but also your personal path which can lead to fulfilment, to freedom.

My name is Maja (Maya) and, from personal experience, I can confirm that I have faced, and continue to face, all the challenges that this name brings with it on various levels of significance.

The generally recognised idea that maya translates to illusion is in itself an illusion because it too narrowly interprets a much richer meaning. On the one hand, this leads to an inadequate understanding while at the same time, on the other hand, this level of meaning does indeed have an impact in real life and this is wide. If I tried to find a common denominator for my life experiences, or rather my attitude to my own situation in life but also to the general, social, historical, political, etc. situations, then I would say: It is a constant toing and froing between naive enthusiasm and the darkest cynicism and in between, of course, the licking of wounds from the impacts of the walls of these two extremes.

If, however, we want to simplify things even more, we could say that we are dealing with an important and unavoidable unmasking and unveiling of the individual and of the world, an unrelenting differentiation of the truth and untruth, the battle with illusions.

The broader meaning of my name (and of many others who share this fate with me) is described in the Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions as the divine power of the creation of worlds. The fact that all worlds are transitory has led many who have looked into this topic to interpret this term in a simplified way as a deception and an aberration. And this is understandable to some extent. But also in this case, I can confirm from experience that, between the mentioned extremes, there is a deep need to seek a path to the truth. And most of the time, this need is also expressed in the form of extremes; as calm or wild inspiration, as an ecstatic and excited desire for fulfillment, as intuition, as different forms of instinct but also as modest or highly uncompromising denial and scrutiny of all things. At stake is, in fact, the experience of the creation and destruction of mental-emotional worlds but also the experience of the corresponding radical changes in life! Precisely for this reason does the essential need to look for constants, for something that is more than merely transitory, arise.
To put it in a nutshell, you could say: for someone to whom fate has given this name, the idea of truth and awakening plays a very important role! (In Buddhism Maja gave birth to the awakened, Maya is the name of Buddha’s mother; here I would like to stress that my parents are not Buddhists).
So let us question together the most multifarious „truths“ and try to penetrate to the truth (the enthusiast and the cynic in me can hardly wait to jump at each other’s throats) using the „maieutic“ method (similar to Socrates, even if this does sound somewhat immodest).

Believe me, the journey will be exciting!

We will work through various conspiracy theories (chemtrails, distribution of goods in the world, organic food, healthy living, ecology, spiritual concepts, all types of social, political and spiritual revolutions….), we will sift through many mental, psychological, social (e.g. the aberrations in love, family and marital relationships; various forms of compliance and non-compliance with different unwritten and established rules but also prescribed laws), political, historical concepts and ideas; the significant events which currently attract our attention (migration, wars, economic crises and their true impact on peoples, societies and individuals), from both a regional and cross-border perspective (among others, e.g. the social paradox connected to the urn of Nikola Tesla and which manifests itself on a social level as a battle between the relatively deliberate approach of the intellectual classes and the traditional Christian-Orthodox tendencies.

And we will try to penetrate to the principles which have an impact on the world of phenomena.

We will approach these topics as both a thinking and feeling individual. Sometimes we will write from the perspective of someone who has experienced a particular event or idea and sometimes we will approach the topic from a scientific-anthropological and journalistic perspective. In any case, we will try to find a path out of the maze in order to discover the truth! Ha-ha-ha!

So, what is your name? What does it mean and how do you connect it to your experiences in life?

Translation German-English: Donna Stockenhuber

Credits

Image	Title	Author	License
	What’s your name?	Patryk Kopaczynski	CC BY-SA 4.0