The Labels Are All In Your Head

Anything you encounter in your life as an experience is always neutral-It is neither good nor bad. Nature makes no Judgement. All judgment is the creation of our minds.

If you were an animal, say a tiger, you would experience everything as just that- an experience. Living in the jungle, if you manage to capture a goat, you will eat it, and your hunger is sated. If you fail to catch a goat, you will remain hungry, and you will look out to catch prey again whenever you come across one.

But If you were a tiger with a human mind, the same experience would come with a label attached. You capture a goat- It is good. You don’t catch the goat- it is bad.

As humans, we have this unique power to categorize and judge everything we experience. Good and bad are categories we impose on the world. Whatever we think as good or bad is just a figment of our imagination.

• Someone is let go in an organization; it appears bad. But if that person goes on to do something on his own and succeed, the experience of being let go is good.
• A child loses a parent. It isn’t good. But, because of the loss, the child is forced to become independent and grows up to be a fine adult, the experience of losing the parent when young is paradoxically good.
• A natural disaster destroys your livelihood and looks bad. But, it opens up the door for your to restart your life from scratch without anything to lose. The aftermath of the bad feels good.

The trick is to make peace with the labels and judgments we have going in our heads. They are creations of our minds. The reality is neither good nor bad- it is what it is.