Dieric Bouts, 1455; | Piero della Francesca, 1463; | Fra Angelico, “Noli me tangere” 1440
Alone To Become Inward
There are and have been a few autistic people around from whom we can learn a lot about the value of meditations on the Holy Week. If autos means self and autism is to be locked up within the self, we soon find the core of loneliness is Autistic (or Autism in the making). Being lonely and being alone are two different things. Autism however, is where the two inextricably overlap to form a deadly trap. More later.
Having nobody around to celebrate Easter (or Christmas, New Year's, birthdays etc) may be a drag but what can you do? If you don't like superfical small talk or generic white noise? You don't have to feel lonely (miserable) all by yourself. Even if you were to take my distractions away from me (books, music, plant-friends, good food, hot showers) I'd like to think I would survive my single and friendless state. I don't see my son much anymore, these days, but we do sit down for dinner every evening. When that falls away (as it did yesterday) then the silence does suddenly increase. I realise I am very young to be as lonely as an elderly person; what's more, I have already had 13 years of this. The prospect of more of the same (and increasingly more so) does make me weary.
I think of war-widows. But they had eachother. I liken myself to inmates on death row, or hostages tied to radiators, but they too have a shared fate. My situation is really quite weird. It begs to be set straight - by either moving to a very solitary place, or joining a cult (I'd stop going to any other friendly group, bored to tears in no time, or causing a row over a non-issue).
I have learned it is not safe for me to go out and "try" to fit in. I don't, I won't and I can't . It remains curious though, to me, why on earth this is so. Maybe, just maybe, it has everything to do with Autism. But it's not so straightforward as sticking a label on myself (trust me, I would love to grab for a solution that simple for a change! I'd finally be eligible for some disability allowance to boot!)
In The Quiet Lonesomeness
As I sat down to report on Easter Sunday, early this morning, I was struck by a suffocating sense of loneliness. I wanted to analyse this in greater depth and went through it methodically for a couple of hours. I shall spare you the details but will pick out a few core thoughts.
There is no sun today where I live. It is grey and foggy and miserable. I am alone and the street is quiet. My son has gone off to explore bunkers. Not a bird to be heard. A few meagre, brave pink blossoms of an obscure (and very minimalist) cherry variety do their best to cheer up the murky air, in my (tidy) neighbour’s garden. My medlar, Ariel, is still lifeless. The heather perseveres, the snowdrops have finished dangling their bells. There has to be the stirring of Spring low above the ground with weeds beginning to poke through, but I haven’t got up close and personal to my dreary garden yet.
Here and there, the sun back-lights the blanket of cloud staining it a pale sheep’s wool gambooge. This is what summer must have looked like during the Great Fog. This is what summer may look like in every big city in a century from now. How fast does climate change happen when it is caused by cellular technology? Who needs the cell of the sun with the shine from a screen? Who believes in the rebirth of the sun in our heartspace?
Loneliness=meaninglessness
We are alone for different reasons. We more or less expect the elderly to feel lonely as their partners and friends die away. We do our best to bring them an Easter egg or a mince pie and treat them to an ice-cream on the beach once in a while, but heaven forbid if any carer ever would condescend to me in such a way. I realise that I would find no small comfort in such little panderings - mistrusting the intent or remaining undercooled by its dutifulness - and this always makes me appreciate how I would truly feel lonely if I lost my mobility. They say if you lose your mind you won’t know: so going batty is the least of my cares, I suppose. But imagine ending up in a wheelchair? No, better not imagine that, today…
Applied Wisdom
I recall to mind, from a documentary I saw 30 years ago, this little old lady all by herself in the Alps, in her nineties still gathering herbs, milking a goat, feeding chickens, and chopping wood. One day she didn’t get up anymore and that was that. The only dignified way to go when you are alone.
There are several Tibetan nuns who spend years on end by themselves, too. These women have no time to feel lonely. Furthermore, they are fully connected. I think Esther Ekhart (Ekhartyoga.com) who has just come back from a silent retreat (of a month) would second, how being alone and silent (no longer in debates or conflicts or plain opposite anyone, including conversation) leaves you connected; i.e. your natural state is to feel the WE that all of US are. It is the nattering of the mind which severs you from true being that is Oneness; and original meaning that is a childlike knowing and belief which must be nurtured into an applied wisdom.
Above Ground Zero
Veronese, 1570; | Juan de Flandes, 1500; | Rembrandt, 1636.
If we consider the essence of the disorder that is Autism (which I tend to capitalise when speaking of this in terms of spiritual science), I, too, have been born Autistic as a state of soul. For me too, there is an innate obsession with the truth that is an internal coherence which ties up to a larger human ethic. Little else about the world made sense to me as a young naïve and hyper-sensitive adult. But I have managed - by some kind of grace - to live with my disposition for autism (largely genetically determined) without a diagnosable handicap specific to the Autism Spectrum.
I believe autistics are born in clusters, or constellations, therefore in families and therefore effecting genepools. Also slotting into World-ether climates. (Forming "generations" or a "miasm".)
Hyper Consciousness
There was an autistic man, who did not survive the harrassments of the every-day for much more than forty years, who believed the most fundamental philosophical error made is to presume we are an atomical construct built up out of molecules and the rest is consequential. He was a very cerebreal and academic individual. He believes, like I do, that the physical body is an end product, not a starting point. From within an autistic mind this becomes plain as day. Extremely handicapped people with autism (often with a low IQ) reveal similar ideas through facilitated writing. This insight came to him "in flashes" (if seldom) as if the constant hard-wire thinking that caused him no end of pain in the brain, also allowed for a hyper-marked (albeit rare) silence, which revealed this essence of reality.
Not Life But Thinking Plays Tricks
What makes the difference between one type of (psychiatric/pathological) autistic disorder or another and a more psychological dysfunctionality, which doesn’t belong on the spectrum, is the cognitive ability to cope with a predominant non-sense dependent awareness. We may know about the sensory impairments for Autism, but have we understood the far-reaching implications of how they come into being because of the state of Autism and that they are not the root abnormalities causing impaired cognitive functions? Sensory deprivations or excesses and nervous stressors (taxing intelligence) or emotional negligence (refrigerator mothers) have no bearing on the development of Autism whatsoever. Guaranteed.
Lost In The Details
When you consciously experience your consciousness as independent of the limits of the nervous and sensory system it is very disorienting. It feels like you are trapped inside an avatar (I don't know if Spielberg's latest makes for a good simulation). Your man-made surroundings are always equally chaotic. Man-made life, after all, is a set of random choices and flexible categories (subject to interpretation). Nothing is certain or secure: the world is a billion details: how to decide which matter most?
On the other hand, since you are constantly overwhelmed and everything around you is something within its own right, you find it difficult to experience privacy. Even your own self feels like another pair of spying eyes. (Paranoia and schizo-typical behaviour, as is Narcissim and Borderline are all co-morbidities to watch out for in Autism!)
Heart-felt Guidance
Only the heart can choose. This is where the defect of Autism truly and problematically lies. The cognitive impairment can be amended in some cases (applied behaviours may compensate or retrain the brain) but the essence of the dysfunction lies at the heart of the soul which no longer trusts itself to incarnate in the name of love.
We come full circle to the Holy Week; and the seven Stages of the Cross and the Christ Within Me. This lack of trust is becoming wide-spread, but is “set” in autism.
Perhaps, the Autistic mind can feel the absence of the heart all the better. The rare glimpses of all its glory - inaccessible, unattainable, always behind thick glass for the Autistic stuck in his skull - tend to make their lives intolerable, thereafter. They may fall into chronic depression - lifted only by recurring moments of "mania" (or joyous insight).
Be Warned By Autism
Before you know it, a life lived from the head (ignoring the heart) leads to a maze of torture and meaninglessness. Anger becomes a primary emotion, which is actually not the worst news in this context. It serves as a spiritual self-healing mechanism trying to reactivate the heart. We have seen how the Christ allowed himself to become angry at the Temple on Monday.
However, anger is very exhausting and improductive. You can't build a life on anger. In the meantime the tracks of a specific way of coping with life have been laid by the autistic mind and one can only trundle along these in the end.
The Nonsense Of Our Journey
For an autistic mind a non-expressive person is a nightmare and gives much insecurity. What on earth could they be saying? The words alone tend not to “say” anything. They are generally hot air, steam, as everybody's train chugs along from station to station - going somewhere, nowhere, back and forth. In their own speech they hear all that is getting lost. They are not perfectionists as such, really, only trying to catch up with themselves all the time. The steam blows away into the wind as the train of thought moves on, unstoppable, trying to mean something that it cannot as representation of something already gone. That is the problem of the head. In the heart we don’t have this issue. But how do we arrive there?
The End Station
We seem to find ourselves there, at the Heart - or not.
Transported by the fragrance of a flower.
In a moment of awe.
Endeared by a kitten, charmed by a blue bird, enrapured by a cake flavoured with rose water and vanilla pod.
But such a climactic moment doesn’t do more than suck us in and pump us back out again.
The longer meditation must not fall into the revery of summer, either. We cannot be a God in France, a King of Siam. Our life has to be lived for the sake of becoming a resurrected soul on Judgment Day (i.e. the now as an objective observational moment, with that clarity of thinking that sees the heart).
Literally, the lid has to come off the tomb of death (our body) before we breathe free at last. This is to live at the heart.
The autistic mind has mistaken the realm of justice for the realm of feeling. It has come with the aim of building a city (a New Jerusalem: a system that works for the eternal soul) founded on a fully Humanist Ethics. This is good (and special). But what is an error is to by-pass the heart. One can then never access the art of attention that constructs the New Temple.
One needs Faith, for there the foundation stone lies. One needs to fall in with life and accept the illusion (Maya). You need a dance floor to dance upon but only dancing will lay down its boards. If you trust your nerve-sensory system to work for you rather than over exert yourself to see "arightly" you will come to a quiet place of knowing - which is awe-inspiringly (and a little terrifyingly) lonely. This is to arrive at the heart of Sophia. A fathomless fount of Love.
)Ninetta Sombart: Easter Morning