Second birth (ICA)

This is the awareness that one's own most personal life and self-understanding have undergone a metamorphosis. Such a transformation happens without one willing it; one knows that one is not what one was: it has been called a second birth. D H Lawrence writes about this experience in the poem " A New Heaven and New Earth"; and the popular song "Clouds" also refers to such an occasion.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. There is a deep fear that it won't last and that it is more than one can constantly live with; but in the midst of such fears there is a fascination with the possibility that is now open. There is a sense that there is "nothing I can't do", that one's responsibility is without limits. In this state an individual decides to play the part, to assume this transformed life as his own to live and create, and to find ways to symbolize it. After such occasions there is a new appreciation of the frailty of life's roles and a knowledge that it can never go back to the way it was, that this fragile new creation of a transformed life can be created or destroyed.

This state is number 11 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.