Primal sympathy (ICA)

This is an awareness of caring about what's going on around one; not that one should care, one just does. It is what happens to someone who comes across a dead dog that has just been hit by a car. A sense of compassion wells up inside him, without even willing it. You don't set out to be your brother's keeper, you just wake up discovering yourself being it. It is like Walter Matthau in the movie "A New Leaf" when, after trying all his life to not do anything but spend his inherited fortune, he suddenly finds himself impelled to take charge of his newly acquired mansion and put it back into order.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. The realization of caring often comes as a surprise, like a package with one's name on it. One asks "Is this really me or have I mistaken myself for someone else ?". One finds one's self attracted to this capacity to care but knows that it always costs something; in fact, it can cost one's life. There is no end to it, it just keeps going on.

Experiencing himself as a compassionate human being, an individual finds he is responding to the needs of others, not out of any emotional sentimentality but out of a deeper sense of being bound one to another. He sees that all of life is accountable to all the rest of life, and knows he will never again ignore the demands of life. He resolves not to forget what he has experienced – it's like wearing a new set of glasses through which he can interpret and respond to what is going on around him.

This state is number 37 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.