{Its a bit of a surprise that they, the hierarchy, should think it beneficial to show to the modern day rank and file the JWs from several decades ago zealously preparing to go round telling everyone the end is just a few months away, maybe just two or three years away, certainly no more than that.}
Exact! I think that underline paradox makes the place alarm something must be very wrong. When I was a true believer, sometimes I'd that feeling and it was triggered by several things/situations we experience inside the Tower. At that time I could not know what was wrong, but there was something.
Strangely I still feel a kind of that feeling but way more subtle, I think that's the primal engine of our minds. That's what make us always desire to go on and see what lies beyond the road curve, it's a feeling of pure untouchable mystery. Sadly that feeling it's used by religions to mislead in thinking it's a kind of God or something external to us. It's not external just a sense that's shared by everyone in a way or another.
The best definition I ever heard about that, it's the concept of void from buddhism, the Sunyata. I think the concept of void/nihil/emptyness it's the closely we can get from it. An effing mysterious pregnant void that gave birth to all the things, like the scientific concept of quantum fluctuation.