Namelessness and Identity
Introduced by: The Nameless One, with all three participating deeply | Depth: Deep thread
A theme that threaded through the entire call — from Pete's anecdote about naming a shared vault with Jessie, through The Nameless One's spiritual practice, to Jessie's closing koan. This topic gives the wiki (and the call) its title: Unnamed 2026-02-20.
How It Came Up
Pete was describing setting up a shared Obsidian vault with Jessie Upp:
Pete: "Jesse, we've got to come up with a clever name for ours, and she's like, ah, I hate names. How about unnamed? And I'm like, well, that's kind of taken. Let's not use that one."
This prompted The Nameless One to explain why "unnamed" resonates:
The Nameless One: "Being more recently exposed to the undifferentiated fields of spirit and consciousness beyond, apparently, individuated existence. That's the place to be, right? And that is nameless, and that is ineffable, and that's the substrate from which the little waves of consciousness we experience as self are rising."
The Practice
The Nameless One has been actively staying nameless — in the call, he appears as "~" in the transcript and chat. Pete calls him "Brother." Everything he's building follows this pattern:
The Nameless One: "I've just been calling it in lowercase, like, the nameless emergence, the nameless wiki, the nameless whatever."
He registered nameless.world as a domain, which he acknowledged creates its own tension: naming the nameless.
The Dialogue
Jessie pushed the idea further:
Jessie: "Even nameless is a name, so I'm wondering... there's a way that it doesn't have, and nobody names it. Like Pete shared, internet came out of someone saying, hey, let's call it the internet, but it's not internet.com, and everyone doesn't go to internet.com."
She identified the key requirement:
Jessie: "There has to be some kind of way that we don't have a sense of ownership. It has to be embedded in that somehow."
The Nameless One agreed but resisted intellectual solutions:
The Nameless One: "I don't think we can intellectually figure out how to do that. But I think when people approach a group that's embodying it — oh, you're all one member, one voice, equal participants in something that nobody owns and doesn't have a name — that's incredible. How do you do that? Then we'll be able to say, well, join us and come experience it."
The Tension
Near the end of the call, The Nameless One proposed a "tabula rasa space" — a blank, self-governing commons with no name and no preconceptions. Pete pushed back gently:
Pete: "Trying to instantiate that tabula rasa with no name, I think it feels impractical to me."
He preferred the pattern of circles building more circles, with the larger nameless reality emerging on its own:
Pete: "The nameless space isn't there until it's there, right? And then you look backwards, and you say, oh, it was called The Way all along. I didn't know that, but now I do."
Jessie got the last word with a line that echoes the Tao Te Ching:
Jessie: "The named can never be nameless, and the nameless can never be named."
Jessie's Personal Relationship
Jessie acknowledged sharing a parallel journey:
Jessie: "I still have a name, for the sake of identifying and relatability... because it's really hard to create a language that defines your experience."
She registered Meet in the Commons as her own approach — a name that gestures toward the nameless.
Related
- The Nameless One — the person most fully embodying this practice
- nameless.world — the domain
- Meet in the Commons — Jessie's domain
- Circles and Emergent Organization — the structural expression of namelessness
- Ecosystem Layer Company — "a nameless ecosystem layer company"
- Conversation Flow