It's occurred to me that a lot of what I've been writing about lately has to do with labels. For example, last week I asked about enlightened beings. There's a loaded label if there ever was one. I say that when we affix that label, we're creating something with our minds, and we need to be careful about that.
Also awhile back, I posted a snip of a poem --
The crucial thing: the ending of desire.
Labels stay in their own sphere and don't intrude.
The mind, unenthralled with anything, stops its struggling.
I really like the line, "labels stay in their own place and don't intrude." Relating to things and beings through a thicket of labels and names and identifiers gets in the way of direct experience. Labels have their function, but they are all just expedience. Quoting Norman Fischer again,
"In the end everything is just a designation: things have a kind of reality in their being named and conceptualized, but otherwise they actually aren't present. Not to understand that our designations are designations, that they do not refer to anything in particular, is to mistake emptiness."
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