Having consciousnly observed myself and others for quite some time, and having read two books by Steve Taylor - The Fall and Back to Sanity - again this week, I've become fully convinced that the majority of human beings are suffering from one serious collective disease - unconscious obsession with categorizing and labeling everything and everyone, including themselves. Mankind should better be called homo categoricus rather than homo sapiens. We seem to be programmed to be unable to perceive reality except through the lens of our mind.
This seems to be the price human beings pay unconsciously in exchange for the acquisition of language. Mind is supposed to be our servant, and language its servant, so our subservant. But for the majority of human beings mind has become their master, and language its gatekeeper.
Almost everyone I meet for the first time in any place seems to be obsessed with knowing about others instead of knowing them. Of course, the worst manifestation of this obsession is categorizing and labeling themselves!
It's getting more and more painful to me to find myself in such a context where I meet more than a handful of people for the first time as I have to go through their "inquisition" with the same result with few exceptions - the more they know about me, the more they categorize and label me, and the less they know me, for mental categorization and labeling only distort reality.
But nothing is more painful to me than to see them so sure of what they think they are though in reality they are only identified with the illusions of their egoic mind.
Whether they categorize and label others or themselves, they are equally trapped in the false self, including the body, its place of birth, family background, etc. The true self, on the other hand, is free from all these "identities" and nothing but pure presence.
Naturally, such an explanation doesn't help them understand what I mean as there seems to be nothing I can do to help them if they are not only "asleep" but also totally unaware of this very fact.
This is my biggest life challenge I face now. Though I have no patience any more for go through this same process of "inquisition" followed by categorization and labeling again and again with each new person I meet, I've been trying to find the best way to "neutralize" this obsession without sounding judgemental to them.
PS: Of course, I'm fully aware that this way I myself may be categorizing and labeling these people.