LIFE BEYOND LABELS

One of the main pastimes of the mind is to label. It loves labeling, in fact it thrives and exits on labeling. Labeling is a wonderful tool to learn concepts by making it simple, but when it comes to experiencing life, it doesn't work so well for us especially if our labels of life are negative.

Simple words, labels affect us in ways beyond our wildest imagination. They shape our views, color our lives with different perspectives. These mental labels affect practically every aspect of our life - be it personal, relationships or our experience of life in general.

The mental labels start right from our birth. We identify ourselves as our body, our name, our gender. Then as we grow older, so many other labels add up to our identity. Our education, our profession, our economic status. What others tell about who we are slowly become important to us, our new labels. If someone repeatedly calls us 'useless', slowly that turns into a label. It's not that only others give us harmful labels, but we constantly keep giving ourselves more and more negative labels because most of our talk with ourselves is negative in nature. If we peacefully observe all the labels we have accumulated, we will be shocked.

We can see these labels as different roles we play in the drama of life. The problem starts when we get so carried away by these roles, these labels that we forget our original identity. Are we all these falsely accumulated labels or are we beyond these labels? In answer to this question lies the answer to our many problems in life.

Labels also affect our relationship with others. How do we see our family members, relatives, friends, colleagues and bosses? It all depends on how we have labelled them. The list of adjectives we tag on people is unbelievable. We label people as 'arrogant', 'lazy', 'irresponsible', 'useless', 'talkative', 'over-smart'. The list can go on and on. Our vocabulary seems to be never short of negative words but when it comes to positive words we fumble badly. When we see someone, we actually don't see them, we see the label we have put on them.

We cannot have healthy relationships without changing the negative labels we put on people. We have no clue on earth what the other person is going through. What we need to understand is that if we were in the same situation as a given person with the same kind of upbringing, environment and perception we would have also behaved in a similar way or worse. We need to see people with compassion and empathy. That's what Jesus Christ meant by saying - Hate the sin not the sinner. We need to be very careful not to reduce people to mere labels. That's a type of cruelty on oneself and others.

Our minds also labels different situations as either good or bad. But is there any situation that is good or bad. Who defines what is good or bad? What we think, is a bad situation soon turns out to be good or vice versa. Problem is not a problem but considering a problem a problem is a bigger problem. In truth there is only the situation as it is. Our mind interprets the situation and adds a label to it.

In fact we don't even see beauty that is all around us because for us everything is reduced to concepts and labels. A tree is 'just a tree', a flower is 'just a flower', clouds are 'just clouds'. We don't see the divinity, the 'God-essence' everywhere. We are fully wrapped-up in our own minds.

You see, the mind is good servant but a bad master. As long as the mind is used by us it's a great tool but as soon as we are taken over by the mind, our life goes haywire. It's time to take control of our life from the mind, then we will realize that real life is beyond the mind, beyond it's labels.

- Achyut Gopal Das