Now we’re going to start noticing some real ego traps in your life that can affect your mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Labels.

When you come into this world, your brain is starting to piece things together. It totally blew my mind to learn that not only do we have to learn how to see, we have to learn how to hear. 

In reality, everything is just vibrations. Our human experience requires these vibrations to be organized into things we can sense with our 5 senses.

That’s amazing, right? It’s the whole human illusion that actually is just vibrations. But we as a collective society have organized it into this experience as we know it.

Babies don’t enter the world knowing any of this.

Their brains have to start making sense of these vibrations, in order to survive in this new human body.

We help by teaching the baby how to communicate with words, or with signs and signals.

You start labeling things.

• Dog.
• Cat.
• Mom.
• Dad.

Baby learns that this incredibly fun, lovey, fuzzy thing is a dog with a name. OK. We label him so that we can communicate about and with him.

This is just part of necessity, right?

But what if we never labeled him?

Instead of having to use a word for him, the baby would just have the feelings of him.

Ever notice how exciting something new is to the baby, no matter how mundane it is to you? It’s because the baby is experiencing it through feeling, not labeling it at first.

If you walked out the door of your house right now and you had no labels for anything, how would that affect your viewpoint? Would everything be beautiful again?

As we teach the baby new labels, the baby starts to learn that there are words for feelings that are also labeled. She learns “good” and “bad.” She learns “happy” and “sad.”

Would those feelings be more profound without a label? And how does the label affect him?

What he thought was a warm, lovey, fuzzy dog is now “bad dog” for peeing on the rug. And that might affect how he associates dogs, the word bad, or his own actions.

Of course, language is necessary for us to communicate with each other. We have to help babies not touch dangerous things, like “hot stove!” It’s all part of survival in a world with the ego.

But think about how labels may have effected your feelings, whether dumbing them down or giving you judgement about certain things.

It’s just an aspect of ego to consider and know that it’s the way of the world, for now. And to consider labels we teach each other and children as we go forward.