Something like this can happen to anyone at anytime and they have no control over their attempt to save another creature from harm or suffering. The best explanation and description of this that I've heard is from Joseph Campbell in his "Power of Myth," which was discussed in his series with Bill Moyers about 30 years ago:
CAMPBELL: There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life for the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved?
In Hawaii some four or five years ago there was an extraordinary event that represents this problem. There is a place there called the Pali, where the trade winds from the north come rushing through a great ridge of mountains. People like to go up there to get their hair blown about or sometimes to commit suicide – you know, something like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
One day, two policemen were driving up the Pali road when they saw just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man but caught him just as he jumped, and he himself was being pulled over when the second cop arrived in time and pulled the two of them back.
Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off – his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life – all his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.
Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let go? You would have been killed.” And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.” How come?
Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances in time. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life.
The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of realization for that truth. The concept of love your neighbour is to put you in tune with this fact. But whether you love your neighbour or not, when the realization grabs you, you may risk your life. That Hawaiian policeman didn’t know who the young man was to whom he had given himself. Schopenhauer declares that in small ways you can see this happening every day, all the time, moving life in the world, people doing selfless things to and for each other.
MOYERS: So when Jesus says, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” he is saying in effect, “Love thy neighbour because he is yourself.”
CAMPBELL: There is a beautiful figure in the Oriental tradition, the bodhisattva, whose nature is boundless compassion, and from whose fingertips there is said to drip ambrosia down to the lowest depths of hell.
MOYERS: And what is the meaning of that?
CAMPBELL: At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image. The bodhisattva represents the principle of compassion, which is the healing principle that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva is one who has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That’s exactly the theme of Paul’s statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think godhood something to be held but took the form of a servant here on the earth, even to death on the cross.” That’s a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life.
MOYERS: So you would agree with Abelard in the twelfth century, who said that Jesus’ death on the cross was not as ransom paid, or as a penalty applied, but that it was an act of atonement, at-one-ment, with the race.
CAMPBELL: That’s the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified, or why he elected to be crucified.
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