To Label or Not To Label

So the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. It’s soooo easy to confuse the two nonetheless. It’s one of the first things people do when they get onto any sort of spiritual pathway. For example, in Christianity, some claim the Bible IS the Truth. In non-dual circles, you’ve got folks who think that “All is one, duality is an illusion, and there is no separate self” literally IS the Truth. It’s the same thing… confusing the pointer with what the pointer is attempting to point to… It’s okay. It’s one of the most common errors people make. It’s how dogmas and rigid teachings are born.

Here’s an excellent video by Anthony de Mello talking about how much is lost when we use concepts and pointers in place of really LOOKING at Reality as it is.

Recognizing this, we can begin the valuable and effective practice of letting go of our labels.

Letting Go of Labels

Remove Your Labels by Bob Seal

When it comes to removing your labels, the idea is that you stop perceiving things through the filters of your mind and instead begin observing what is more purely. In this way you begin opening up to seeing things as they are, as they naturally show up, not the way your mind perceives things with its stories, memories, descriptions, ideas, boxes, and conceptual understandings, all of which actually limit the fullness of what is.

One of the biggest misconceptions is the label “me” as it points to a separate self. The discovery of what “I” really AM is the essence of the spiritual journey. All other stuff regarding karma, past lives, angels, chakras and crystals, the law of attraction… that’s all secondary to the clear knowing of the I Am That I Am and consciously being That.

Along the path of remembrance of who we are, dropping our labels can be a very valuable practice. It is like a boat designed to help us get across a lake: It’s very useful in doing what it is designed, but once you get to the other side, you don’t pick up the boat and drag it with you on the shore! No no, leave it in the water and keep walking freely!

Readopting Labels

Once it has been seen directly that All is One, the very same one indescribable unnameable presence that just IS, then we find that our labels become quite useful again, ironically enough!

See, it’s pretty hard to have a conversation when you’re not using any labels or nouns! Communicating with one another becomes incredibly challenging, if not altogether impossible, without using words like tree, food, apple, you, me, body, car, store, earth, wife, etc.

In terms of sheer practicality and being able to hold a conversation in day-to-day, it’s actually quite useful to talk about things in terms of you and me and this and that, even if those “things” are only conceptual pointers that exist solely in the mind. When we see beyond what the pointers are attempting to point, into the underlying unity of All That Is, we can freely use our pointers again without worrying that what we’re saying is somehow *literally* supposed to represent the *Truth.*

For example, when we look at a garden salad, we can call it a salad, or a random mishmash of vegetables, or a delicious meal (or not, depending on one’s preferences), a collection of molecules and atoms, a unique bundle of vibrational energy, a particular manifestation of the one, and so on. Is any one description somehow more true than any other? Of course not. They’re all just different ways of pointing and labeling. In fact, these pointers can actually be quite useful.

The words that we use are taken very lightly. Every label is used with an underlying grin and a knowing wink, like a game of pretend and make-believe that we’re all playing together as we collectively agree that something is what we say it is.

We can recognize that in terms of using our words to actually speaking THE Truth, our best possible outcome is complete and total failure… so why try so hard or take things all that seriously!?

By saying that something is a chair on the level of form, that does not need to imply a denial that this particular manifestation is something other than everything else. This chair is this chair, and yet it is simultaneously everything else as well. I can say “I am the One and the All” without needing to imply that you are NOT.

A thing IS what we say it is AND it is NOT. Non-duality is paradoxical. It’s not either/or.

The dropping of labels is simply designed to help us see more clearly both what a thing simultaneously IS and is NOT.

The dropping of labels allows us to see what every so-called thing is, beyond name and form.