When I was told I had been diagnosed with Autism, when I was maybe 9, it meant absolutely nothing to me… and the subject never came up again for the next 50 years.
My parents, like many parents in the 60’s, really had no idea what this diagnosis meant other than their child was somehow ‘broken’. Their response was to, more or less, pretend it was not really that bad. They dealt with it the best way that first generation children of working class immigrants from Brooklyn the Bronx could, and to their credit, they actually made some changes that had a positive effect on me, especially in the area of diet. Moving from a diet of canned, preserved, instant, sugar filled food to healthy food at least made me a lot less ‘crazy’.
Given that we lived in a small town of farmers in rural New Hampshire with an education system that had not changed much from what the Pilgrims put in place, there were not a lot of resources or opportunity for my parents to get educated about the subject. In addition, in the scale of ‘problem children’ I was far from the worst, given the unusually high number of children who suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and inbreeding. So I was simply classified as ‘brain damaged’ and dealt with accordingly as per the public health policy at the time in this town, which was basically to ignore me, and put me in the class with the other ‘tards’.
Without getting into the details of my life in that town, suffice it to say I knew I had to get out as soon a possible. At the age of 16 I did. I left New Hampshire and moved to California.. where things got a lot worse.. but that is not the point. The point it, I never gave my diagnosis any thought. I went about life as if I was ‘normal’, and it was just the rest of the world that was upside down!
I had completely forgotten that diagnosis until recently, at the age of 60, when I was looking back at my life, much the way one remember the roller coaster ride they just took, and thinking “Wow, that was seriously crazy! And how did I even manage to live this long !?”
It was fairly easy to identify where and how my Spectrum qualities got in the way of my ‘normal’ life, but I also saw something else, something really wonderful and exciting to me, something that had always been seen by others as a ‘problem’ in me, but which I actually saw as an asset in myself; a perspective of ‘reality’ that could actually change this world for the better.
It is safe to say that 99% of my problems were rooted in the fact that I was very different from ‘normal’ people, yet I was trying like hell to live and act like them, and this can never turn out good. It wasn’t until I lost everything that I was able to see ‘who’ I really was… and that is when I remembered.
It seems to me that one of the big issues with dealing with Spectrum People (SP) is that society is trying to get them to integrate into the existing social and cultural structures that we expect, demand, everybody live within. I was watching a clip from an ABS special on autism on youtube entitled “Autistic Girl Expresses Unimaginable Intelligence”. The title gave me high hopes. I could not have been more disappointed. I was even angry at their coverage. What they referred to as “Unimaginable intelligence” was simply her ability to communicate via a keyboard in a way one would expect to communicate with a ‘normal’ person. What I found so offensive about this piece, behind the insulting patronization, was unimaginable ignorance on the part of the producers.
I do not mean to take anything away from this young woman or her family who have discovered a way for them to reconnect, and these skills are very important to build, as how else could these children of ‘another world’ share with us their insight and wisdom? How else can they teach us? But the entire ‘position’ of this piece was about how well she had adapted to ‘their’ reality, with not a single inkling of whether there was anything in her ‘reality’ that we should listen to. As this young woman has been raised in an environment where only those well defined popular cultural ideas are given merit, and by parents and doctors who haven't the foggiest clue, or desire, to explore her world, to learn from her perspective, she has no idea she has talents and gifts that the world so desperately needs today.
What could she possibly have to teach us? well, let’s look at what we have learned already from some of the more high functioning autistics, such as ...
* Bill Gates
* Thomas Jefferson
* Albert Einstein
* Nikola Tesla
* James Joyce
* Stanley Kubrick
* Michelangelo
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
* Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
* Lewis Carroll
* Hans Christian Andersen
* Sir Isaac Newton
* Charles Darwin
* Andy Warholl
* Emily Dickinson
These people were not simply ‘really smart’... they changed the way we perceive reality! Each one of them has set the bar for their field. They had the ability to understand how to deal with this ‘reality’ enough to make their thoughts understood and manifest their visions. The not-so-high-functioning SP does not have that ability, so it is the challenge of society to do that for them; to listen to them and be their voice, write their words, express their ideas.
How many more brilliant minds would we have to learn from if only there were those who could listen and understand what they were saying, in their language, in their world? A better metaphor (for me) is to imagine SP’s as an advanced race of benevolent being who have come to this planet, but do not know how to operate the ‘space suit’ of the human body that well. Society must build the bridge to their world
But there is another element of their ‘reality’ that is so radical, so transformative, that to speak of it would be like telling Pope Paul V the the earth revolved around the sun (he was the pope that imprisoned Galileo), because society would have to admit that our current obsessively linear, hierarchical model of the world is not only unsustainable for humanity, but threatening to all life on the planet.
When I was very young I used to have these very intense experiences where all my senses would merge together and I could not distinguish one from another. During these states I was unable to interact with the external world, nor would I have wanted to. the external world was pitifully dull compared to these episodes of sensory fusion. However, during these episodes I felt more was fused together than simply my five senses… there was another sense, one I would call a spiritual sense, a divine sense. Unlike most autistic children who become overwhelmed by this input, I found it to be ecstatic, blissful, perfect. This experience also lead to what is called Out Of Body Experiences. This ability was drilled out of me eventually, especially when I had to sit on my ass all day listening to someone talk about something i had no interest in but which they demanded I learn. Fortunately, these abilities came back in my teens, with rather unforeseeable consequences.
I imagine what could have become of this skill if it was nurtured rather that suppressed. More so, I wonder if this is common among autistic children.
In this interview of that young autistic woman I mentioned before, the interviewer asked.
“why do autistic kids cover their ears and flap their hands”?
(using a computer to answer) “it’s a way for us to drown out all sensory input that overloads us all at once. we create output to block out the input”
“Carli’s brain, unlike most people's, is overwhelmed by the sense of sight and sound, taste and small.”
“Our brains are wired differently. we take in many sounds and conversations at once. I take over a thousand pictures of a persons face when I look at them. That’s why we have a hard time looking at people.”
Based on this I suspect that this is an ability that SP’s have.
But before this can be bee seen as an ability, parents, therapists, teacher would have to recognize that autism is a disability only within the context of the environment they are forced to deal with, but it could just as easily be a gift to humanity given a different environment and understanding.
In the past the autistic geniuses were called geniuses because they found a way to reshape their nonlinear reality into this linear one, but even here we miss the true gift that is being offered us: to evolve past this archaic linear consciousness and move into a world that is ‘multidimensional’ (metaphorically, for lack of a better word). When I say non-linear I am referring to things like art and music, creative expressions that does not have a ‘purpose’ other than to be what it is.
One of the major debilitating factors in autism in children is what is called the “autistic defense”, which are brought on by “...unbearable early life experiences that force the infant to use autistic defenses often constitute a significant factor leading to cognitive impairment. These autistic defenses are self-generated (sensory) soothing devices that shut out consciousness of the world…”[1]
Quite clearly what is being said here is that the child is being traumatized by having to deal to sensory overload that he experiences in his environment… and yet processions still, work on ways to integrate SP’s into society. They may need to think about how to integrate themselves into the SP ‘reality’.
I think it is very interesting that significant research (with very positive results) is going on with SP’s using the consciousness altering drugs of LSD-25 [2,3,4,5,6,10] and MDMA (‘ecstasy’) [7,8,9] [12]. What this implies (again, to me) is that understanding consciousness is the key to understanding SP’s. A good step would be for those with their hands on the wheel of autism research to look into their own consciousness, and that of the society they live in.
Research results (of one research project) made it clear that there is nothing to ‘fix’ in SP subjects (i.e. it is not a consequence of some biological or neurological dysfunction [11]), rather, they needed to be ‘freed’ from their imprisoning minds [10]. From personal experience I can certainly vouch for this, but I would go step further and say that their mind was simply a product of their culture, or at the least heavily influenced by it, and this would imply that raising an autistic child in a completely different manner than what we are doing now, a manner that is compatible with their world view (and very incompatible with the existing one), would hold great promise not only for the SP but for all humanity as we would be slowly freeing ourselves from the same oppressive ‘mind’ that all people must suffer with. This is autistic children can change, and save, the world.
[ I am not allowed to post links so the links to the video about MDMA research and footnotes referenced can not be poster. However thet can be seen at legallyblindthebook dot com/blog/perspective-needed ]
16 Aug 2015, 9:58 am
) I do strenuously object to diagnosing or just stating with no caveats that a person from long ago was autistic. Autism and other conditions share many traits. Autism is a lifelong condition. Most of the traits have to be there in some fashion for a persons whole life. That information is just not known or at best comes from sources also dead that were not familiar with autism because nobody was. I would reread those articles again but unless it was from a personal blog every news article I have read that mentions, Gates, Newton with Autism has had a caveat even if that caveat is along the lines "many people believe that Gates has Asperger's" . I have not seen a blanket deceleration in a mainstream news article stating Gates and these other people are/were autistic. Wrong Planet is not a reliable source and Wikipedia does not consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source.
