I was awoken this morning at the glorious hour of 3 am with instructions to blog about made-up baby names. I don't really want to do it because people are so easily offended by opinions about names, also did I mention it is literally 3 am and I have three kids? I AM SO SO TIRED but I feel like I was told to be here writing this so here I am. You're welcome.
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
Do you really want to risk smelling a "Buttflower" or "Skunkblossom" or "Poisonfumia?"
Scriptural and Spiritual Importance of Names
John 1:1
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What are words? Words are vibrations. THE Word is the foundation of the Universe. Words are scripturally very important.
Sacrament prayers must be verbally said the exact same way every time in order to get the job done. Because words matter.
Kundalini mantra meditation works with the vibrations, the right words, the naam, shabad, and naad, or name, word, and sound current, respectively. If you have experienced the healing that can come from kundalini mantra meditation, you know that power of name, word, and sound current.
Revelation 2:17Names are words. They are sacred.
17 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.
Think also of Adam, the first man, whose first job is to name everything. Names are so important!
Language forms how we view the world. Names matter.
Morphic Fields
Morphic fields matter too. Basically the idea of morphic fields is that the more something is done in a particular way, the stronger the energy field of it is. Here is Sheldrake on his work, and here is an LDS former "psychic spy" for the US on his work.
Morphic fields are based on the idea that memory is a foundational principle of the universe. With every repetition of a thing, its energy gets stronger. So for example, repeating the sacrament prayers the exact same way over and over again, all over the world for many years, creates a strong energy of the things the sacrament is associated with.
Morphic fields are related to what is sometimes called "The 100th Monkey Effect," which is comparable to the idea of "the tipping point." Basically once enough people do a certain thing, create a morphic field big enough, people everywhere begin to tap into the general consciousness of it, without even realizing it.
I should really blog a whole bunch about morphic fields at some point but anyway: morphic fields are basically the combined energy of "things" and they influence us and our behavior.
Morphic Fields and Baby Names
Names are morphic fields.
Like all morphic fields, the more they have been repeated over and over, the stronger the hereditary memory, you could say. The newer a name is, the less hereditary memory.
In plain English, this means: the older and more established a name is, the more it has been used over time, the more energy is being tapped into with it. And the more stable that energy is. That stability translates into grounding, both consciously psychological (as people identify with their namesakes) and energetic.
A name that is newly crafted does not carry the weight of an established name, so children with less established names are left to create brand new morphic fields for themselves instead of drawing on the strength of past generations who have borne the morphic field.
You can see this for yourself with your third eye. This will feel like "intuitive sensing" or a "seeing feeling," or just plain imagination. But that's okay.
Imagine the field of the name "Sarah." One of the oldest names in the book. A strong blue ball of energy, lots and lots of cords out to many many people. Some dark, some blue, so many cords sometimes it looks like there aren't any cords, just an enormous ball of energy, and that's because the cords lie on top of each other, there are so many of them. So many Sarahs have influenced the field and drawn influence from the field!
And now, imagine the field for my brand new baby name I making up right now: TaeBrynkeeTae. Take a deep breath and imagine this one. Breathe very deeply and inhale and exhale fully. This one will take more effort to see energetically because it is literally brand new. The name of TaeBrynkeeTae has basically no morphic field whatsoever. What you may expect to sense in your imagination is a tiny dot of energy, possibly bluish but really rather amorphous in shape and color. That's because it has no established morphic field to speak of.
Effects
A brand new name has pros and cons. The pro is that the child gets to set up their own morphic field to go along with it. The con is that starting fresh like that can be very disorienting energetically.
The energetic con of having an established baby name is that Baby is now plugged into an energy field that has its own personality, if you will, and that personality can come into play in muted ways throughout Baby's life, even in negative ways. For example, some people tracked the behavior of 60,000 children and came up with the top 10 names for troublemakers and well-behaved children. Check it out here.
The pro is, established names can lend the strength and power of the morphic field to the child in muted ways throughout Baby's life. Particularly religious names that have been passed down in family lines and are inspired by righteousness. Those are good names to draw from.
One thing that pops into my mind is how many names royalty are given. For example, the current Queen of England's full name is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. She gets two middle names. Princess Charlotte is really Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana Windsor. Prince Harry's full name is Henry Charles Albert David Windsor. Etc. Royals usually have several middle names. All family names, all rich in heritage and with strong morphic fields.
And no wonder! They have to draw on the power of these morphic fields to carry them through the rigors of being in the public eye, having every decision scrutinized, etc. To me, it makes a lot of sense.
For my own children, we are committed to Bible names and names with family ties. Starting fresh is not always all it's cracked up to be.
As an example, to draw on the Hebrew example of the Shemitah, during the Shemitah all the debts are wiped clean and everyone starts fresh... sounds awesome, right? No more debt? Starting fresh? But on a wider scale, that in the past has translated as war and devastation that "cleans everything up" and leaves people REALLY starting fresh. If Biblical style Shemitah devastation ever happened here, the "starting fresh" would mean starting with no established government, no established infrastructure such as plumbing or electricity... basically being truly "free" might sound good, but do you really want to be totally free from laws and electricity and modern sanitation? Perhaps not.
Think of using established, positive-connotation family and religious names as hooking your child up with plumbing and electricity. Consider the possibility that "TaeBrynkeeTae" and "KyBrexlerJex" are figuratively handed a whole bunch of nothing and responsible for setting up, in a way, their own energetic equivalent of plumbing and electricity.
Energy of names plus people
I will just invite you to take a loving, judgment-free look at the various people you know with established versus less-established names. Consider how the names make you feel in your body. Consider the energy you get from people with all sorts of various names. (Think of how, when you're naming your own kid, you might think--"I really like Name X, but I HATED a kid named that in high school! I can never name my kid THAT!" You are sensing a part of the energy field associated with that name.)
Whenever I see a kid with a less established name that is also ungrounded energetically and has "out of control" energy, I always wonder how much the lack of strong name association has at least a tiny part to play in that.
At church just yesterday, a lady in RS mentioned that she is a second-grade teacher and that for the first time ever, parents have been coming to her to tell her of their 7-year-olds' anxiety problems. She has never seen that before but all of a sudden all the little kids have anxiety, apparently. Very strange. Obviously this is for many reasons, and also that is a very small sample of 7-year-olds, but I do find it interesting that it corresponds with the rise in the acceptance of less established names. I would be so interested to see the names of those kids with the worst anxiety. Setting up your own figurative energetic plumbing and electricity, to borrow the metaphor from earlier, is pretty stressful.
Obviously I myself have a small-energy-field name. "Allie" is my literal full first name, and my middle name, which I will keep to myself for privacy purposes, is an established religious name but spelled in an unusual (family) way, so the morphic fields for both my names is very small, if you take a look at it with your energetic eyes. At least in comparison to names like "Mary" or "Elizabeth." I do feel like I have felt the unestablishment of it for my whole life. People forever have called me "Alison" or "Alexandra" and they misspell all my names like crazy, and often mispronounce my unusual maiden name and my unusual last name (which is pronounced, for the record, "dooZETT," not "does-it" or "doozit"). I do feel like having a more established name would have helped me get stronger roots faster. When I use my "spidey senses" to consider myself with a more established name, I do feel I would feel more grounded with a more grounding, established name. BUT too late for that now, and in the end, we all get the names that are important for us to have.
I was to say that again. We all get the names that are important for us to have. So if you are a TaeBrynkeeTae, it's okay!!! If you named your kid TaeBrynkeeTae, it's okay!!! We all have the names we need to have at the time we need to have them. No judgment and no beating a self up over it, we have the names we need to have. Names are neutral. Having a bigger morphic field is not necessarily better, and having a small morphic field is not necessarily worse. It's just something to take into consideration when choosing a name--for anything. For people or pets or businesses.
This is just something to consider if you are in the market for naming something.
Also, I feel now is a good time to mention that names can be changed. My mother legally changed her middle name. People retroactively change their legal names all the time. So names are not always set in stone.
What's in a name: Freakonomics interview
Here is an article from the Freakonomics people on names and Google AdWords and how some names are targeted for ads indicating that those people are likely to be arrested just based on what their names are. They were specifically looking at "white sounding names" and "black sounding names." Some interesting excerpts from the article, which is technically actually a transcript.
One thing they discussed was how Googling "black sounding names" leads to ads that indicate the person has been arrested. From the article:
For the record, a Google spokesperson told us that, quote, “AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling… It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads,” end quote. Instant Checkmate didn’t respond to our query but an official statement from the company about Latanya Sweeney’s study says, quote, “Instant Checkmate would like to state unequivocally that it has never engaged in racial profiling in Google AdWords, and that we have absolutely no technology in place to even connect a name with a race,” end quote. So whoever the villain is here – and it may be us, the people who click – the point is that in this case, your name matters.Like they said: perhaps the villain here is the people who click. And perhaps the people who click do so because the ads are relevant to them. And perhaps the ads are relevant to them for any number of reasons, possibly including morphic fields, but in any case, names matter. To me, "black sounding names," like "Utah sounding names," are really just "less established names." It's not that they're worse, by any means, it's just that the morphic fields for them as names is smaller.
A name like "Travontay" has a way smaller morphic field than a name like "Bridget." I invite you to without judgment consider the possibility that small-morphic-field names, and the ungroundedness and disorientation that can go with them, can lead to more unpredictable behavior. Basically: "black sounding names" originated in the mid-1960's, around the same time as the War on Poverty and the beginning of the dissolution of the black family. From the Heritage Foundation:
[Black out of wedlock birth] rates remained relatively low until the onset of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the early 1960s. Then the black out-of-wedlock birth rate skyrocketed, doubling in little more than a decade from 24.5 percent in 1964 to 50.3 percent in 1976. It continued to rise rapidly, reaching 70.7 percent in 1994. Over the next decade, it declined slightly but then began to rise again, reaching 72.3 percent in 2008.As families dissolved, the reliance on names with strong morphic fields dissolved too. If you research further, you will find that many or most of the least established names out there are devised by less-educated, out-of-wedlock mothers. So it's a two-way street as well. If you come to Earth born with a less-grounding, less-established name, AND unmarried parents who are not very educated, your ability to create a strong and positive morphic field is hard.
To continue with Freakonomics insights:
I found the idea intriguing that boys with feminine names act up more in school. Masculine morphic fields and feminine morphic fields are different and placing a female in a male name morphic field or a male in a female name morphic field is going to cause some cognitive dissonance on an energetic level, as well as an emotional level.
But there’s other research which finds that a name may matter, at least on some dimensions. Boys with feminine names, it’s been argued, act up more in school. A girl with a masculine name, meanwhile, is more likely to have a successful legal career. And another study, by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, was called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?” This study found that if you send out a resume with a white-sounding name, it’s about 50 percent more likely to get a callback than an identical resume where all you’ve done is change the name to a black-sounding name.
The whole article is very worth reading, especially because it concludes with a point I would also like to conclude with:
NAMES ARE NOT DESTINY! ...even if your name is Destiny
Names are not destiny. Even if your name is Destiny. So don't be too upset about the morphic field of your name, whatever it is. Names, in the end, while sacred and deeply important, are not responsible for our choices or what we do with our lives... we are.
So, please, no weird feelings about the name you have or the names you have given your children. They matter to some extent but not enough to be worth getting offended or upset over. These are just some perspectives on names and morphic fields. I don't care what your name is or what your kid's name is. If your name is TaeBrynkeeTae, I am glad for you and hope you enjoy it! If you named your kid TaeBrynkeeTae, that is just fine!! We choose and are given names for very personal reasons and like I said above: we all receive the names we need at the exact time we need them. So: no guilt, no shame, no blame, no sad feelings over whatever names are in your life. We can celebrate and love everyone with all our unique names while also recognizing the power of morphic fields. That is all I am getting at.
Morphic fields matter.
Names matter.
But most of all, YOU matter and you are a child of God. So who cares what your name is. Your name is Prince, or your name is Princess, and you are a child of God, and that is the name that matters the most. Love to you, no matter what your name is or what you have named your children. LOVE!
Sat nam!
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