How we label things and people PART 2

Another thing that we label is behavior. This can also include speech. It goes something like this: “This is what you’re doing is called.” And we often add: “And that means this.” And perhaps: “And that makes you such and such a person.” We can even discuss the label that we’ve slapped on someone with our friends, what it means and get them to agree that the person is bad because of it. 

A funny thing is that we can even do it in the following manner: “What you are doing right now is called labelling. That makes you a labeler. And labelers are bad people.”

What I’ve come to realize, is that the less you label, the more open you become to the world. It does of course not mean to indiscriminately say yes to everything. There are lots of things in the world that I’ve chosen to reject after careful consideration. And some after not so careful consideration. There are certain beliefs that don’t need much deliberation to be dismissed, such as racism or the belief in authoritarianism. But what we should be careful about, is slapping the label “racist” on someone that doesn’t consider him- or herself as such. 

We can even develop whole thought systems around why we are allowed the luxury of labelling someone while someone else is not allowed to do so. Why not, instead, just meet people with an open mind and assume that they mean what they say about themselves. In an existence that is so governed by unconscious forces anyway, it’s better to turn one’s eyes towards oneself to see if what one says or does means something else that what we think, than to try and extract the hidden meaning behind someone else’s actions or words and slap a label on them. And you can ask yourself how many times confronting someone’s behavior with a label. 

But by not labeling, you try to look at things simply as they are and not through a filter of pre-conceived notions about them. This is difficult and I’m certainly no expert at it. It is rather a habit that we need to keep reminding ourselves of over and over again. But with time, just with any change of perspective, we become conscious of it more and more often. The first step is of course to understand that there is such a thing as labelling, that we engage in it and that it affects how we treat other people and life in general.

How we label things and people PART 1

We use labels to judge things or people as good or bad. When we label something it invoke images in our heads with different degrees of clarity. 

This is a part of our inner life that I find interesting. Because when we attach a label to something we can dismiss it without looking into it any further. I like to use examples that have relevance beyond just serving as an example. Therefore I would like to use the label “New Age”. “New Age” is a label that has been attached to a variety of works within spirituality, of which many have very little in common. If we stick to books, they can be anything from books about interdimensional aliens, lost civilizations or spirit guides, to very practical books about mindfulness or how to release emotions. 

I’m very skeptical towards the whole “smorgasbord” approach to spirituality that we often find within the New Age. Because if we can just discard anything we don’t like, we risk missing learning hard but valuable lessons about how things work. And we also may end up with a lot of width without depth in our spiritual lives and hence end up going nowhere.

But this is just my experience. It might work well for someone else. In the end, all we can really talk about is our own experience. And even that is subject to loads of potential for error.

But I’ve also found much of the more practical stuff in the New Age very helpful. Because there are a lot of teachings that have just brought out the essential of much older teachings. And these can quite easily be tested. I will not get into too much detail about how very different teachings get labelled New Age, since this is not the topic of this post. So I will just mention briefly that this in itself is another problem with labels. That they easily become very broad, so that very different things get dismissed under the same label.

The thing is that for a long time, I tended to dismiss anything labelled New Age as a bunch of mumbo jumbo, practiced by people that have very little understanding of what they are playing around with. I equated it with more or less living in a fantasy world. And so I missed out on a lot of things and judged people before hearing them out.

My point is simple. What I said above can be applied to anything in life where labels are involved. Especially if we attach a label to someone that does not define him/herself as such. Labels close us off. They make us stop listening. They make us right and others wrong. They make us think that we know what others stand for and what they are going to say. They affect how we interact with other people in a very negative manner. I know. Because I’ve done a lot of labelling throughout my life.