Ultimate reality (ICA)

This state occurs when an individual experiences all he knew or counted upon in life as somehow taken away from him, as if he no longer had a place to stand, and a thick fog had descended around his world; all he had depended upon to inform and shape his anticipations of life are not there. For many people the assassination of President Kennedy was such a moment; other examples occur in Camus' work "The Stranger" and the movie "On the Beach", which aptly shows a situation where all the ground rules of life have been changed. It is like waking from a deep sleep in a strange room and not remembering where one is.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. A characteristic of such a time is profound fear that perhaps reality is not the way one had always thought it to be. A feeling that everything one does is wrong and one will never belong again is held in tension with a sense of being really alive, a sense of newness – "I've never been here before" – that seems to remove the old limits. One feels beckoned to create the new in the midst of this unknown world.

In this state one decides to trust what one knows about life and to keep moving, to live in the midst of this strange event rather than seek to escape. After such a time one thinks twice before acting and feels one's way. Being lost is not a problem and one develops a style for all situations.

This state is number 3 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.