My view of the world:
After completing my first degree, a BFA in lithography from SUNY Albany, I read something that changed the direction of my life:
"And for the gift of self expression, society granted them the right to starve."
Unable to find a paying job, I decided to embark upon another path. I became a registered nurse. And I liked it. So I spent 38 years doing that, mainly working in emergency rooms and ICU's. Along the way, I discovered the Course (1988), and completed an MA in transpersonal psychology, heavy on phenomenology. I discovered Edith Stein, or St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as she is better known, the Jewish philosophy genius who became a Carmelite nun and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. R D Laing was another important find:
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values it's normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years." (Written in 1967, The Politics of Experience)
I am probably not the most light-hearted person you would ever meet. I have seen terrible things in my life. Our present world circumstances haven't helped lighten my mood. Beaurocrats falsifying death statistics to make themselves look better politically. Massive giveaways of taxpayer funds to multinational mega-corporations. Two thousand unemployed Americans in a drive-through food line.
That said, the fundamental core of my being rests in.my relationship with Jesus, a relationship that began for me when I bought a copy of the Course 32 years ago. The "world" remains as it's always been. I, however, have been lifted up, embraced, and redeemed.