Labels are the words that we use to describe objects and the experiences that we encounter in our everyday lives. We use labels as a form of communication in order to understand the world around us as well as our life on earth. But do these labels actually tell us anything at all about what we perceive, or do they actually limit our experience and feed an illusion that we call “understanding”?
For instance, if we were to hold up an object such as an apple and ask another person “what is this?” then that person would probably look at us a little weird and say something like “umm…an apple.” The person would be right of course. But what if we pushed them further and said something like, “yes that is the label that we have all agreed upon for this particular sensory object, but that label doesn’t really tell us exactly what we are seeing. So again, what is this?” At this point, if the person we are speaking to remains interested in the conversation and sticks around, then we could both go further into discovering the object by adding to its description. We would probably use many more words in order to describe the apples physical properties (IE. its red or green, it’s spherical in shape, and that it’s smooth and hard). We would also likely describe the apples nature and its function and anything else that we could think of relating to apples in general. We would say things like, “the apple is food, it grows on a tree, it provides nourishment, and it is delicious.” We might even go as far as to say that the apple is made up of matter called molecules and atoms and that it contains within it, a sort of energy. At this point, having exhausted our combined apple related, descriptive word lists, we may at last be satisfied that we know what an apple is.
But here in lies the paradox of labels, because the notion that individual labels do not tell us what an object or experience truly is, applies to all the words used to describe the first word. As such, each descriptive word is a label in itself. After all, what is an atom other than a label and what is energy other than a label? So with this notion, hopefully comes the realization that words and labels are simply a method that we use to communicate an unknowable experience in order to create a sort of illusion that we call understanding.
And so in this way, labels and words actually act as a sort of filter which limits ourselves to the external world. Words in essence, act as a barrier and function as a means to separate our self (the perceiver) from the external world (the perceived). A description of an experience is not the experience itself, it is just talk about an experience. And so, we cannot truly know what an object or experience actually is even despite the fact that we often believe that we understand what we are experiencing. Said another way, though an object or experience is unknowable – it simply “is what it is,” we label our perceptions in order to separate our self from the external and create an illusion that we understand what we are perceiving so that we can communicate it to others.
The true magic of all of this is that if we could realize this notion (even only briefly) then in that moment we would likely stand in awe of our experience. In such a moment not a single thought would enter our mind and we would know that we are seeing the object for the first time and that no label could ever truly describe such a feeling. In such a moment, we would not be separate from the perception but actually a part of it.
Image taken from https://www.thoughtco.com/verbal-paradox-1692583