What’s with your name?
People often ask, “Is that your real name?”
My parents named me, Susan Irene McMahon. Mom wanted to name me, Daphne. Dad thought I’d get the nickname, Daffy, so he overruled Mom. Throughout my teens, I was called, Sue. Two people have ever gotten away with calling me, Susie.
In 1981, I was given the name, Nirvana, by my Indian teacher, Osho, aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. (Yes, the one with all those Rolls Royces.)
“Osho is the most dangerous man since Jesus Christ… He’s obviously a very effective man, otherwise he wouldn’t be such a threat. He’s saying the same things that nobody else has the courage to say. A man who has all kinds of ideas, they’re not only inflammatory - they also have a resonance of truth that scares the pants off the control freaks.” “Wit and playfulness are a tremendously serious transcendence of evil, and this is one thing that Osho understood better than any contemporary teacher that I can think of. Gurdjieff had an element of that in his teachings, but certainly in the past fifty years there has not existed a teacher in the world who understood the value of playfulness and wit quite so well as Osho.”
When Osho gave me the name, I couldn’t believe it and thought, “S***, the gig is up!” He held my hand as I learned to embrace being visionary. He taught me how to be a “majority of one” - useful for the nearly 30-year journey in which I was often believed to be daffy. The meaning he gave with my full spiritual name, Ma Anand Nirvana, was “the bliss of dropping the self.” Two days after receiving the name, I was kicked out of the ashram. (I tell this story over glasses of red wine - and preferable sprawled on a sofa near a roaring fire.)
Seven years after being named, Nirvana, I married Mr. Cable. Existence has a wicked sense of humor! :~p
My mom nicknamed me, Nirvy.