The Named is the Mother of the Nameless

I’ve been turning over a certain thought in my mind for a long while now, one of those quiet realisations that seems to grow deeper and more meaningful the longer you live with it. It’s about this powerful, beautiful, and sometimes very tricky longing that so many of us carry, a longing to rise above the daily grind of our lives, to touch something timeless and pure, to somehow slip the bonds of this noisy, complicated self we’ve spent a lifetime building. We might call it a search for enlightenment, or a wish for inner peace, or a hope to connect with a divine being. But in my work, I’ve come to see it as something even more fundamental: a deep, human yearning to get free.

It’s a yearning I understand completely. There are days for all of us when the weight of our own story feels just too heavy to carry. The memories that bring a flush of shame, the old regrets that whisper in the quiet moments, the constant, low-grade worry that we’re not getting it right, that we’re failing in some way we can’t even quite name. It’s exhausting. And when you live with that kind of inner noise, the idea of simply leaving it all behind, of dissolving into a state of perfect calm, can feel like the most desirable goal in the world. It sounds like finally, finally coming home.

What I’ve noticed, though, sitting with person after person who is drawn to this beautiful, shimmering ideal, is that the wish to transcend often arrives hand-in-hand with a profound wish to escape. It’s a subtle distinction, but a vital one. The heart of the matter isn't in the destination, but in the feeling you're running from. When the pain of being who you are, right here and right now, becomes too sharp, the soul makes a natural, intelligent move. It looks for a trapdoor. It imagines a state of being where that pain simply doesn't apply anymore, where the messy, flawed, feeling person is replaced by a being of light and serenity.

I think this is one of the most compassionate and also one of the most difficult things to talk about. Because who wouldn’t want that? It’s a brilliant solution, really. It takes the ache of a lifetime and offers a kind of spiritual shortcut around it. The problem, I’ve come to believe, isn’t the dream of peace. The problem is trying to build a house in the sky before you’ve ever really learned to live comfortably in the one on the ground.

I remember my own younger years, filled with a restless energy to find the answers, to locate the one true map that would explain everything. I read books filled with grand ideas about losing the self, about becoming one with the universe. And it all sounded so noble, so much cleaner and brighter than the confusions of my own ordinary life. It took me a long time, and a great deal of listening to the quiet sorrow in others, to realise that I was often using these beautiful concepts like a kind of medicine, a balm to soothe the parts of me that felt unworthy, or unlovable, or simply broken. I wasn’t seeking to transcend my self; I was seeking to replace it with something better, something that wouldn’t hurt so much.

This is the gentle, hidden trap. We start to believe that the person we are, with all its history, its wounds, its peculiar and specific ways of being, is the obstacle. We come to see this self not as our one and only vehicle through life, but as a prison. And so we begin a quiet, internal campaign to dismantle the walls. We try to still the thoughts, to rise above the feelings, to achieve a state of detachment from the very things that make us human. We try to think our way out of having a body that feels, a heart that breaks, a past that shaped us.

But what the core of my experience has taught me is that you cannot make peace with a ghost. You cannot come to terms with something you are trying to erase. The work of a life isn’t to figure out how to disappear; it’s to figure out how to appear, fully and completely, with all of our magnificent and terrible imperfections shining. The goal is not to become empty, but to become so full of a genuine, earned acceptance of who we are that we no longer feel the desperate need to flee from our own presence.

Think of it like this. Imagine you inherit an old, somewhat crumbling house. It’s been in the family for generations. The floors are a little uneven, the windows stick, there are rooms filled with boxes of things you don’t understand, and the whole place has a peculiar smell you can’t quite identify. The immediate, overwhelming impulse might be to just walk away, to lock the door and pretend it isn’t yours, to go and find a sleek, new, empty apartment where nothing holds a memory. That is the wish to transcend. It’s a wish for a fresh start, with no dust, no history, no ghosts.

But what if the real treasure, the real work, and the real freedom, is inside that old, messy house? What if the path forward isn’t about abandoning it, but about moving in? First, you’d have to open all the boxes. You’d have to sort through the belongings, deciding what to keep, what to mend, what to let go of with a thankful heart. You’d have to learn the quirks of the plumbing, the way the light falls in the afternoon, the story behind the scratch on the banister. It’s slow, patient, often frustrating work. Some days you’ll feel overwhelmed and want to run. But other days, you’ll uncover a beautiful, old piece of wood under layers of paint, or you’ll find a letter that explains a family mystery, and you’ll feel a profound sense of connection. Over time, the house stops being a burden and starts becoming a home. It becomes yours. Its quirks become character. Its history becomes a part of your story. Instead transcending the house, you build a deep and abiding relationship with it.

This, to me, is the true meaning of inner work. It’s the patient, courageous, and deeply loving process of moving into the house of your own self. It’s about opening up the closed-off rooms of memory and feeling. It’s about learning to live with the creaks and groans of your own soul. It’s about building shelves for your experiences, so they aren’t just piled up in a corner, threatening to topple over. It’s about cleaning the windows so you can see out, and so the light can see in.

The idea of leaping straight into a state of egoless unity is, in a way, an attempt to skip this entire process. It’s hoping to get to the view from the mountaintop without ever making the long, arduous climb. But the climb IS the thing that changes you. The blisters, the thin air, the moments of wanting to turn back, the stunning vistas that appear around a corner, these are what build the strength and the depth of soul that make the final view meaningful. If you could be helicoptered to the top, the sight would be beautiful, sure, but it wouldn’t resonate in the same way. It wouldn’t be part of you.

I often wonder if what we call a “mystical experience,” a moment of feeling utterly connected and at peace, isn’t the reward for this kind of deep, internal housekeeping. It’s not something you can chase directly. It’s more like a grace that descends when you are fully, honestly, and courageously engaged in the business of being human. It’s the feeling that arises when you are no longer at war with yourself, when the different parts of you have finally been listened to, acknowledged, and given a place to live. The silence we find then isn’t a dead silence, an emptiness. It’s a rich, fertile silence, full of life, like the quiet of a forest where everything is alive and breathing together.

This is why I’ve grown a little wary of paths that speak only of annihilation and dissolution. For a soul that is already feeling fragile, already feeling like it doesn’t have a solid place in the world, the instruction to “die before you die” can feel less like a spiritual invitation and more like a confirmation of its deepest fear: that it shouldn’t exist at all. It can turn a natural, healthy spiritual impulse into a subtle form of self-negation.

The healthier call, I believe, is a call to integration. It’s a call to gather up all the scattered pieces of ourselves—the proud parts and the ashamed parts, the strong parts and the terribly vulnerable parts, the child, the adult, the lover, the fighter—and to welcome them all to the table. It’s about making the fragmented self whole. It’s not about killing the ego; it’s about helping it grow up, mature, and become a good, kind, and wise steward of the entire inner world it presides over.

A mature ego isn’t a fortress of arrogance. It’s more like a well-run, peaceful city. The mayor (our conscious self) doesn’t try to exile the citizens it finds difficult. It listens to their concerns, it finds a place for them to live and work, it integrates their energy into the life of the city. When the city is well-run, with good communication and a spirit of care, it can then open its gates and have fruitful, generous exchanges with the wider world. It can connect with other cities, with the surrounding countryside, with the sky above and the earth below. This, I feel, is a better picture of transcendence. It’s not the city disappearing. It’s the city realising it was never separate from the landscape in the first place.

So when I meet someone who is fervently seeking to lose themselves, my first impulse is not to hand them a meditation technique to achieve that. My first impulse is to feel into the ache behind that search. I want to understand the pain that makes disappearing seem like the only good option. I want to ask, gently, what part of your own story feels so unbearable that you would rather not have a story at all? What memory, what feeling, what aspect of who you are feels so unwelcome that you feel you must evict it from your own being?

The work then begins right there, in that very feeling of unwelcome. This process calls for turning towards the very thing we want to transcend, sitting down, right in the middle of the mess, simply keeping company with ourselves, and learning, slowly and with many stumbles, to hold our own pain not as an enemy to be defeated, but as a lost child that needs to be brought in from the cold.

This is slow, unglamorous work. There are no quick fixes, no dramatic enlightenment experiences that permanently solve everything, and the most beautiful paradox is that this very process, this full, loving engagement with the humbling, glorious, and difficult project of being you, is what ultimately leads to a genuine sense of freedom.

The peace from the ego-death gives you the pristine, sterile quiet of an empty room. But the true peace your sense of self needs is the rich, warm, and deeply satisfying peace of a family gathered together after a long separation, a peace that includes the joy and the sorrow, the strength and the vulnerability, the light and the shadow. It’s a wholeness. And in that wholeness, the frantic, desperate need to get away from ourselves simply… dissolves. We find that we were home all along. We just hadn’t yet learned how to live there.