Definitive predestination (ICA)

This is the realization that this is the only world one has. The cartoonist George Schultz portrays this very succinctly in his Peanuts comic strip when Lucy confronts Charlie Brown with the fact that this is the only world there is and then admonishes him to live in it; and the poet E.E. Cummins says it too, with tongue in cheek: "Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go". It is like having been shot from a timeless cannon to a fixed target on the temporal plane. The singer Bruce Springsteen conveys the same experience in his song "Dancing in the Dark" when he sings: "There's something happening somewhere, Baby I just know that there is".

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. While acknowledging the gift of the situation, one resents the limitations it imposes, and appears boxed in or imprisoned by limits of time, space and physiological constraints. Yet there is also a certain sense of victory at making it through this moment, somewhat akin to solving a very difficult problem or riddle. Realizing what one has on one's hands, one stops looking for an alternative to run to and decides to live the life one has, even if it is not what one ordered; one acknowledges that everyone else shares the same limitations. There is an inner sense of gratitude for the limits that life has imposed.

This state is number 34 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.