Cryptic disclosure (ICA)

This occurs when the mystery is experienced as always absent; no matter how hard he tries to seek the final reality of life, the individual can never approach it. He feels he has been left out, cut off and denied a clear perception of the final revelation of the meaning of life, as if he were being called but not allowed to approach. The life he has created – all he loves and cares about – is saying "no" to him, rejecting him, and denying his presence. It may compared to the experience of the mother of the family in the film "Ordinary People" when all she loved, trusted and counted upon in her life are turning their backs on her; or to what Yeats wrote in his poem "The Second Coming" in the lines "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold".

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe that is fear and fascination. The fear is that one's whole life is meaningless and one will never understand what is happening. Yet there is a deep fascination in that one goes on showing up with a life to live; the state is unwanted and resented, yet desired. One cannot live with it, one cannot live without it. The decision is to be who one is. There is knowledge that the absence of the mystery is in fact the current manifestation of the mystery, and this experience is part of what one decides to be. One is left with the sense that nothing worse could happen.

This state is number 14 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.