Universal fate (ICA)

This state occurs when an individual encounters the sheer arbitrariness of his existence. Call it fortune or fate, the fact that each of us showed up at all was a one-in-a-million chance. What is more, everyone has his own particular set of unique characteristics that defines who he is. I can go on asking "why me ?" but the fact is this is just the way I arrived; like Luke in the movie "The Empire Strikes Back" when, having fought and defeated the figure of Darth Vadar, he pulls off the mask to find his own face there. It may be compared to coming to terms with being a homosexual, despite all attempts to hide it or run away from it; or what happens when a mother discovers she has given birth to a brain-damaged child.

A dimension of this experience is a sense of awe, that is fear and fascination. The acknowledgement of my fatedness is accompanied by the realization that no-one will ever understand the peculiarity that I am; and a sense of being trapped by existing. At the same time there is an awareness that if I don't embody this particular perspective that is me, nobody else will. I don't have to keep trying to become something else; just being who I am is the greatest chance I have had or ever will have to live an authentic and fulfilling life.

The decision is to take hold of the life one has been given and to live it. This is the one big chance and there is the gnawing knowledge that one could easily fail. The sense of mundaneness of one's life is matched by an equal sense of awe at the profundity of it. One is reminded of the songs of the African slaves working on the plantations of North America as they celebrated the pain and glory of their existence in the "New World."

This state is number 21 in the ICA Other World in the midst of this World.