by Dr. David Sanders
The filmmaker, Alan Berliner, in the preamble to his documentary film (The Sweetest Sound) about the names we are given, referred to his own name as that “simple label assigned to me the day I was born.” He went on to say that his name, “has worked itself deep inside my bones. In moments of strength, it is my source of power. In moments of self-doubt its power is what gets tested. I can’t separate it from who I am and what I do. And one day it’ll be impossible to separate it from who I was and what I did.”
In contrast, when asked about changing his name, Bob Dylan, responded that he never saw himself as Robert Zimmerman. “Some people,” he said, “are born in the wrong names, wrong parents.” So why, was he asked, did you pick Bob Dylan? His reply: “You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
In the mystical lore of Kabbalah, there is a notion that one has a given name and also a hidden name. There are a few examples of God calling people in the Torah by a hidden name when the time and circumstance demand it. Jacob’s hidden name is revealed to be Israel. When a name is repeated, as when Moses is confronting the burning bush, his name is said twice, it is not just understood as reflective of drawing his attention. The Zohar takes this to mean that every name has an aspirational aspect, the “Moses you are and the Moses you can be.”
Even God is called by many names and, similar to the story of Jacob’s name revealed and changed to Israel, God revealed to Moses the ineffable name, a name for God that was had not been revealed to Jacob. The ineffable name appears in the Torah text well over a thousand times. While that name was hidden for generations, is there a hidden name of God that has yet to be revealed? Does God have a “hidden name” that is yet to be revealed?
Over the last few years, I have been guided through a number of psychedelic and mind-altering experiences with the purpose of spiritual exploration. The most profound for me were the two guided journeys I undertook on MDMA in which the theme of my “hidden name” was prominent.
In each of these experiences I had the distinct feeling that I was in conversation with an intelligence who was sharing knowledge with me to further my spiritual growth. I share these conversations with you to open for you a similar inquiry I have with myself: Who was I communicating with? Is it an aspect of myself that I neither encounter in my waking life or a dream state or is it the voice of an unseen reality beyond myself that I have yet to apprehend.
In my first experience the voice, though it was not audible, began by saying: “I’m showing you things that you teach about, but you haven’t fully seen yet and now you’re going to see it. Are you willing to see it?
One of the most striking pronouncements was: “David is your given name. Your hidden name is Moshe (Hebrew for Moses).”
When I heard this about my hidden name it made immediate sense to me, even though I had yet to consider any name, let alone Moshe, to be my hidden name. When I was born, my father wanted me to be named after his father whose name was Moshe Eliezer. My paternal grandfather had died two years before my birth. But my maternal grandfather was still alive, and he was also named Moshe, so my parents didn’t want to give me the name of a living relative and instead chose to name me David. My middle name, Eliezer, was my paternal grandfather’s middle name.
Moshe Eliezer (Sanders) was not my biologic grandfather, but he raised my father as his own. He and his wife adopted my father as an infant due to my father’s mother, who was Moshe Eliezer’s sister, died shortly after birthing my dad. The inaudible voice said: “Your father was adopted so that your hidden name would be Moshe.”
When I returned for the second MDMA journey I went in with the intention to learn more about my family history, particularly about my father’s adoption and his mother’s death. All of my siblings knew that our paternal grandmother had died giving birth to my father. It had only been more recently discovered that she had died four days after his birth, the cause still unknown.
As the medicine entered my system, the voice that had previously communicated with me made a rather obvious point, but one that left a deep impression on me, nevertheless.
The voice conveyed that we all must die for the sake of future generations. “Every death,” it said, “leads to a birth. Many have died in order for your life to exist.” Afterward, the voice related that my grandmother’s soul came into me. Remarkably, I saw an image, or more accurately I felt a presence, and distinctly heard my long-deceased grandmother instructing me, “I wanted you to take care of your father.” The sense I had from her was that I was destined to carry out her unfulfilled responsibility to care for my dad.
I started to think about my father and wondered how I nurtured him? I loved him for sure and maybe that was all that was needed. On reflection, as his first-born son, I could see that I had been his companion in a way, intellectually, emotionally and physically. We played chess and sports together and often stayed up late discussing philosophy and religion. My father grew up as an only child. I was the brother he never had and maybe even the mother he never had, I don’t know. It felt very clear to me that I was born to help him heal from his trauma.
What the MDMA experiences revealed to me was that there is so much hidden behind and beyond our seen reality. It brought the question I have about the nature of God front and center. Whose voice was that? Was it an aspect of my own consciousness that I don’t access in waking or dream life? Was it what people refer to as God? Either way, it pointed me in directions that have further confirmed how much is yet to be discovered and revealed; through David, and through Moshe and by the most hidden name of all, “I will be who I will be.”
