Relational situation (ICA)

This is the realization that no one else is responsible for one's situation. Placing no blame, making no excuse, offering no defence, seeking no counsel, one embraces one's fate with all its haphazardness and precariousness. One ceases to blame one's parents, or one's self, or one's social- economic situation, or anything else, for the way one turned out. It is reflected in Wellington's comment "In for a penny, in for a pound", when he ordered the general advance at Waterloo. The poet Stephen Crane captured it when he wrote about the creature squatting upon the ground eating his own heart in his hands: "It is bitter-bitter," he said, "But I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart".

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. One is aware of being completely vulnerable to the whims of life – like the parents of a seriously ill child who are gripped by the dreadful knowledge that the child may die and at the same time are lured by the possibility that it might live. There is no one to whom they can turn who can take away the agony of waiting upon life to determine which way it will go. Confronted with this shattering clarity, the decision is that no-one and no-thing can tell one that things are any different from the way one perceives them. It is as though one has had life handed back to one in a brand new way and no more does one seek a scapegoat for one's actions.

This state is number 22 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.