"To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need to know anything about them - their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness." - Eckhart Tolle
I realized this truth independently after being targeted by others (and targeting others) for conceptual labeling. I haven't met many people who seem to both understand the difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone and behave accordingly. Many people seem busy instead trying to digging the past, history, and story of others they meet for the first time, believing that this way they will know them better.
The most subtle, hence problematic, form of this confusion is concepually labeling ourselves. So many people seem so sure of their self-identities, which are nothing but illusions of their egoic mind. The truth is that to paraphrase what Christ Niewbauer wrote at the end of his truly insightful new book entitled No Self, No Problem, we aren't the name someone gave to us, we aren't the gender that was assigned to us, we aren't the job that we work at, we aren't the social roles that we play, we aren't the age society tells us we are, we aren't the intelligence society defines us as, we aren't our level of education, we aren't the body that others define us as, we aren't the thoughts in our head, we aren't the memories that we think happened, we aren't our preferences, we aren't our desires, we aren't our emotions, we aren't our beliefs, we aren't our reactions, we aren't our expectations, and we aren't the movies that play in our mind.
Since I came to fully realize this mental distortion of myself and others, I've been both careful not to conceptually labeling others and reluctant to cooperate with others in their unconscious attempts to know about me for conceptually labeling me. I have been quite successful in preventing myself from falling into this trap, but I haven't been equally successful in saving myself from becoming a victim of conceptual labeling by others.
In most cases I could discern a drastic change in the way they relate to me the moment they unconsciously gave me their conceptual labels. Then I stopped being a unified being and became one tiny fragment of a whole they have disected conceptually. In some cases they even shared with me, again unconsciously, the conceptual labels they gave me by verbally categorizing me. Some of these labels were really ridiculous, to say the least. I was intrigued with the mental ingenuity of certain people.