>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]
I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]
I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]
In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?
Extrapolating from the article and associated research, what you're describing as a mental "flex" may be an ability to consciously weight higher-level models over lower-level ones, and vice-versa. I'd be interested to see the fMRI results of a bunch of people who can do that "flex."
>I would feel weird about giving myself a rare and ultra-high-prestige name.
Er... 司馬 isn't that rare, and people would rather advise you to select a rare but prestigious family name, rather than a rare and unknown one.
It's like given names in English: if you pick a rare and unknown name (or even a common one with an unusual spelling), people are just going to go "huh?"
>> I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.
Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.
Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).
鹅 can refer to quite a few birds in Chinese[0], and in this case, since the article noted:
Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) [has a] beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name
鹅 is probably referring to 天鹅 ("swan")[1], which is part of Swanson's family name.
A bit of an explainer: In names, a word that's usually two characters long is often truncated. For example, the name of the kirin (麒麟) is often used in names, but is often truncated to 麟 (麒 is also possible) so that another character (e.g. a verb) can be introduced, e.g. Alan Tam's given name[2], 詠麟, means to rhapsodise about the kirin.
>Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from.
Swanson's an anti-poverty activist,[3] so perhaps that may explain something about why 金玉 might have been appealing as a reference to 金玉滿堂.
Her party "has traditionally been associated with tenants, environmentalists, and the labour movement"[4], so I imagine that perhaps she wanted something green in the name as well, and jade (玉) fits the bill.
She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan and call the thing sky goose instead, but most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
>She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan
I've never heard of or seen this character until today.
>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.
There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.
>I think the Japanese meaning encompasses any kind of roundish object
As in Chinese, 金玉 also means "gold and jewels" in Japanese, i.e. treasure, so the semantic distance to testicles is not any smaller. Presumably someone might have heard of "family jewels".
>For a Chinese speaker, using 金玉 (gold+jade/precious) to describe testicles probably wouldn't be too strange
金玉 is used in the idiom 金玉满堂, which can either mean full of riches or knowledge,[1][2] so it would be rather strange.
>皇非我 (Not-Me Huang). An official of the kingdom of Song. Again maybe a result of traditions trying to protect children from evil spirits, but I still find it rather amusing.
I'd think that, since 皇 means "emperor", the name is protective in the sense that it's trying to say "no, no, I'm not the emperor".
>I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.
Presumably, honorary names are the ones that are recorded, since they mattered more, not the awful names given by your parents or nicknames.
This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.
When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).
>This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.
Good to know.
>When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).
I think the unusual names you've come across are those that've slipped through the cracks. In any case, Chinese men back then would have been given a few names before they reached adulthood: usually, a "milk name" from their parents and another (usually more dignified) name when they attend school. The honorary name comes much later. The unusual names may have been "milk names" that survived the cull because the bearers might not have attended school, for example.
Of course, the practice hasn't survived into the modern age, but you still see this practice in the Arabic world, where people can have multiple aliases. So what you labelled as the "given name" need not be the "given name" we understand today, but just the name that's survived to adulthood that's not the honorary name, which comes later.
>>> The prototypical Chinese name has three characters, a single surname followed by a two-character given name. A smaller number of Chinese people only have a single given name, and a very few have two surname characters.
>I'm not sure if this is correct.
It's not. The distribution of one- and two-character given names is pretty even in China.
>Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).
You know, maybe we should change how we think about the ordering. Instead of family-given or given-family, it's clearly restricted-arbitrary.
>Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada?
I remember watching a comedian doing a bit about this phenomenon of people adopting names from other cultures, where there were two Caucasian ladies at an ashram, both called Lakshmi, and an Indian lady by the name of Pam. I wish I could find a video of this.
NB: OP here, but I didn't write this blog or co-author this preprint.