Purps:
I wanted to bring out how many years I lived in this constant state fearing Armeggedon was any day coming. Of all the things I regret the most of the JW experiance is this. Every single day I was so afraid of the future I missed out on my life and my kids.
This is perhaps the saddest tragedy of a JW type belief system, is that it has us always reaching fearfully past this moment of life to some make-believe future time and place. We become the walking-dead with our focus and significance placed in a dream as we allow reality to pass us by. Your right Purps, the best thing we can do for others is to be deliciously present ourselves.
As far as aloneness; there can come a moment within self investigation, that it is clearly realized that "I" am nothing that the mind and circumstance creates or presents, and instead have no recognizable or definable boundary. Here, as the walls dissolve, does "other" (and so there is a vast pristine aloneness). You are everything, but no specific thing. Here, love blooms as there is no other to despise (which doesn't mean you necessarily like everyone, separate forms still remain -- there is just a deeper realised consciousness of oneness).
Narkissos:
It gets harmful, imho, when the "craziness," instead of being embraced or rejected individually as such, turns into a fashionable "wisdom" and eventually a kind of religion; when it comes to be recommended or looked for as objectively "good," and good to all. At this point people who neither really need it nor can truly understand it will be inclined to pretend they do, and harm themselves and others.
For instance, I think much of the "cross" symbolism ("dying to oneself" etc.) has meant about the same "thing" to Christian mystics. Yet its wider religious and cultural "success" has cast a dark blanket over much of the natural freshness of life in Christian civilisation for many centuries, and thus it has poisoned many minds and lives.
In this case the "craziness" is not a teaching but rather a finger pointing to the fact that you are not the isolated and broken individual believed to be, but rather whole and pristine. It is not the message which is poison, rather it is the corrupt interpretation that the mind can add. This is probably why much of Eckhart Tolle's book: The Power of Now, deals with gently and nonjudgmentally watching the mind's antics and manipulations. In my opinion Eckhart's way of expressing is far more precise and clear, and so more difficult and less likely to be manipulated than the way Christianity expressed -- what we both agree is likely the very same foundational message.
The message is a universal one as the foundational reality to which it points incorporates all existence. No one, or no thing is left out. What the mind does with the information, who can say. You place the message out there, and the chips fall where they may.
j
