”Greta” wrote:I remember how relatively desensitized - "work toughened" - I was by the time I retired. Retirement for me has been a process of re-sensitization, where "trivial" details of life become interesting and the practicalities of human society, for decades the be-all-and-end-all for me, seem ever more like mere froth and bubble.
A renewal in one’s latter years is certainly a blessing offering confirmation to some after long experience of what is most valuable compared to what was most necessary.
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Ha! I was desensitized by a debilitating mental disease, starting at around age 13. Or diseases. Now in my sixties, for the first time in 50 years, I am re-living impressions of my childhood moods, harkening back to my pre-diseased state... they are not as vivid, not as long-lasting, but just as pleasant and wonderful.
Unfortunately this revival of occasional experiences of joyous and rapturous childhood moods lasted no more than about a few months. There may be a diagnosis, pending still a few invasive tests, but I may have developed a serious physical illness. Until I know for sure, I don't think I'm going to have any more of these flashes of the past. For a fact, I feel really sick from time to time, almost inexplicably... for instance, when I cough, or when I exert pressure on my bowels in the washroom, I feel dizzy and sickened.
At the most acute phase of my mental debilitation, still in my teens, I listened to a Deep Purple song from Machine Head, and balled my eyes out every time when I heard it.
The song was called "Pictures of Home", together with another song, almost a continuation, "Super Trouper", from the band's immediately next album released (in chronological order), "Who Do We Think We Are". "Super Trouper" was a more positive song, in lyrics, it pointed at a brighter future. In my life it actually actualized; but like I hadn't expected, only many, many, many years later.
One of the many reasons I don't believe in the supernatural and to a degree in spirituality, is the fact that life is much too random. There is no just or justifiable reward-punishment system on Earth; it is explicable only by science, and without a moral overtone. The faiths and spirituality all imply a moral world order, which simply does not exist.
In the Bible, the Book of Job is about exactly that. It teaches the readers of the Bible that no matter what, God after all does not stand up to His promise; that life is random, and you may argue about it with your God, that won't change the situation.
"When I was back there, in seminary school... there was a person there who put forth the proposition, that you can petition the Lord with prayer.
Petition the Lord with prayer.
PeTItion the Lord... with prayer??
YOU ... CAN
NOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!!!" -- Jim Morrison, of the Doors.
Many of us suspect that this is so because the Lord does not exist, and the entire Bible is nothing but a set of propagandist, or else merely well-intended, but basically dimwitted instruction books. The forerunner to the "For Dummies" series, in a way, with today's knowledge less all kinds of knowledge humanity accumulated, resulting with the dim grasp of reality that was prevalent in the minds of all people back 1985 years ago.
And folks take it as gospel, and search for meaning and lessons in it... and they have to apply more and more explanations, because the stories in the Bible make less and less immediate sense... except these people are committed to a belief, which is unbelievable beyond belief.