The Wrong End of the Stick
If anyone has the ‘wrong end of the stick’ it means they’ve misunderstood something. Even in the daily exchanges between people at home or in the workplace, words are so often misinterpreted creating confusion and negative feelings. On a global scale, is it possible that the human race has got the wrong end of the stick as to the purpose of life and is heading towards an inevitable confrontation with its self?
How many of us have looked at the news and despaired at the condition of the world. Things out here are not supposed to work for good – only to create division and provide the distractions for the unhappiness of life on earth to fester. Because that’s the way we as humanity want it as the progressive drive into this existential world of our own making.
The way we govern the nations in a democratic society is absurd, but it’s the best we’ve come up with. Our politicians picked up the wrong end of the stick a long time ago and have been running ever since, hounded by the media who in turn are pursued by the masses. The whole drama of living is really a subterfuge for what’s happening behind the scenes within the psyche. It’s only when there’s been sufficient dying to existence that the truth of life can be perceived. This is: without the false the truth would be impossible to be realised.
The most glaring demonstration, in a worldly sense, of perceiving the wrong end of the stick is science’s big bang theory. The suggestion that the universe exploded into existence four billion years ago is absurd. The universe and the whole of existence is created anew every moment and not in the past. When unconscious or in dreamless sleep, the universe disappears and reappears upon awakening in the senses. In other words, I as the intelligence in the body create the world as my self.
To be identified exclusively with the sensory appearance of objects is an avoidance of the other side of existence. To the surface perception, the spiritual domain of inner space appears as nothing. This is true until the observations of the external universe are matched with a comparable degree of self-knowledge. Until then, the mind will be stuck by default in the materialism of the world – and inevitably get the wrong end of the stick.
Great title and the world at large never has found nor will it, the right end of the stick….
I don’t quite get your point.
We are at odds with self and other, struggling with the false ideas, the conceptualization of the mind and trying to fit ourselves into these concepts, as if the concepts are reality. Religions are the most glaring example of this, arguing over whos concept is the “right one” and killing one another over our different concepts, none of which are able to tune us into our own experience. We seem to be conditioned by our respective societies to these illusions of the mind and have come to believe our concepts are real.
We are evolving but our concepts are in the way of our direct experience, our own neurobiological sytems ability to tune into the energy in us and around us and to guide ourselves through the experiences we are actually having. l
We are trained to disconnect from our own experience and to follow some conceptual idea fabricated by our society that has nothing to do with our own experience.
We have to tune into our self, into our own experience, our own energy and the energy around us, if we are to experience and know reality directly and this requires getting out of our head and the conceptual movie into which we were conditioned from birth.
Meditation, yoga and hypnotherapy are attempts to do this, to tune us into our own experience and what it is showing us and guiding us toward.
Direct experience is the immediacy of truth, which by-passes the analytical thought and mental processes. Meditation, yoga and other stilling techniques may have partial results but never quite do the job. Otherwise everyone who practises these various methods would be completely free of the human condition of unhappiness.
To realise the highest truth requires the greatest sacrifice – the mind’s wanting to know. Everything I write is an endeavour to strip away another concept to eventually get to the idea. I’d just like to make clear the difference between an idea and a concept. A concept is an interpretation of an idea, whereas an idea is complete unto itself. An example is love. People make so many concepts of love that the idea of the impersonal nature of real love seems alien to the sentimental love of the human race.
I, the individual man or woman must be willing to be disabused of my former ignorance and to live as consciously as I can in the here and now. This is a total living practice and not a partial therapy. This is the basis of my spiritual teaching for anyone who can hear.
But thank you for your comments, Donald, and I know you are sincere.