[Legally Blind: The Book] Part 1: Chapter 3 -- Spectrum Fusion

In closing the doors to the outside world, I connected with my inside world.

I was seven years old, standing in a field of grass sucking on a delicious California orange, staring directly into the hot summer sun. I often stared directly into the sun for reasons I couldn’t explain, other than I really enjoyed how I felt when I did. During this particular incident, I experienced all things merge together—the orange, the sun, and me—with no definition where one ended and the other began. We were all one. I was the burning sun tasting the orangey bliss of my creation through my own creation of myself. I was the projectionist, the movie screen, the audience and the actors. I was, in that moment, the center of the universe, and all that I was experiencing was a miraculous expression of an unknowable, infinite universe of Love. I was in a state of complete surrender and, at the same time, a divine selfishness that knew that all of creation existed for me, and that I was all of creation. I felt completely satisfied and perfect and filled with a Love that can only be described as divine. As a child, I had no idea how precious this experience was. It was a perfectly normal experience for me, and an experience I assumed all people had.

Of course, I had no idea that I was engaging in the esoteric practice of sun gazing, used by the high priests of the Ancient Egyptians, Mayans, and others to awaken, stimulate, and increase the size of the pineal gland, or third eye, and boost melatonin and serotonin, the “feel good” hormones. I was just doing it because I felt so blissful when I did. I also had no idea that the yogis in the Far East practiced sun gazing to awaken their kundalini,[1] which I learned about years later when it was suggested I’d experienced a kundalini awakening, with the added footnote that I was fortunate this happened to me when I was quite young, before I had become embedded with beliefs and ideas that the kundalini experience so dramatically destroys, often with great pain and suffering. It was thought that my youth and innocence allowed me to perceive this experience as more of a “this is the true nature of life” versus the more common experience in later years of “My god, what is happening to me! I’ve gone mad!” sort of thing.

I accepted this explanation when I heard it in my late twenties, but today I think there was another ingredient. Typically, spectrum kids are so overloaded with stimuli that they cannot process the input; this is directly related to their cognitive abilities. I believe in that moment of sun gazing, I was overloaded and flooded with stimuli, but rather than short-circuit my sensory network, it all got turned on at once. I’ve had similar experiences under the influence of signal-enhancing drugs, like LSD or psilocybin. If controlled overstimulation can enhance our cognitive potential, it opens the door to the idea that spectrum children are phenomenally gifted but in an ability that our culture has little interest in. It also suggests that spectrum kids are, in a way, “tripping all the time.” This would partly explain why, years later, the world made sense when I was tripping but seemed crazy and out of control when I was not.

We all know, if we think about it, that everything we see, feel, hear, and smell is our brain’s way of converting the outside stimuli, the energy of the outside world that we experience as sensation, into patterns of recognition that fall into a conceptual hierarchical map bound to reactionary triggers. We call this perception. This stimulus is happening trillions (1013) of times per second. The reason we’re not all permanently paralyzed in a sea of blistering white noise is because our brain has a built-in “firewall,” so to speak—a protective barrier that filters these inputs through a map of learned recognizable patterns that have associated significance. The raw data remains stored behind the firewall, which we call the subconscious, while the heavily filtered data gets sent to and processed by our conscious mind on the other side of the firewall.

When we say “the cup is red,” we are saying that an infinitesimally narrow band of electromagnetic energy has stimulated a receptor that is specifically designed to emit a unique neurochemical response, and that this particular pattern of incoming stimuli matches what we have, by experience, come to understand and label as a red cup. The significance associated with that label of “cup” tells us we can put things into it, hold it (after testing to make sure it’s not too hot), and drink from it (after testing to know that what it contains is drinkable). These are responses that have been learned from experience as well as context, as one would have very different reactions when looking at a red cup while in the laboratory of Dr. Jekyll versus the chef’s kitchen of Julia Childs. This process is performed at the core of our reptilian brain in an area called the amygdala. It is one of the most basic, unconscious, primitive parts of the animal brain, as it supplies one of the most basic, primitive prerequisites for survival.

By the time we recognize something most of the original data has been stripped and stays behind the firewall, and all we really pay attention to are the responses and beliefs associated with what we’re perceiving and not the thing itself, which, void of any meaning or beliefs, has no significance to us in our day-to-day existence.

Let’s use the concept of money as an example. When we see money, we’re really seeing what money represents: new clothes, rent, status, security. The money itself has no intrinsic value. Even gold has no intrinsic value outside of what a culture agrees to. History is full of examples of the arbitrary value of money. Salt was the primary currency of East Africa in the Middle Ages, thus the word salary. Parmigiano cheese was once accepted as bank collateral in Italy. Squirrel pelts were the main form of currency in Russia in the Middle Ages, and squirrel claws and snouts were used as small change (this odd form of currency also saved the Russians from the Black Plague). Knives, rings, odd-shaped stones, and even potato mashers have been forms of money.

Our unconscious mind works the same way in that none of the data it holds has any intrinsic value or meaning. It is just data, regardless of how significant it is to the conscious mind, and the value and meaning of that data vary from moment to moment depending on what values and beliefs we apply to it as it passes through our firewall. Change your beliefs and values, and heretofore meaningless data can become a newly discovered gold mine, or squirrel farm.

This type of filtering and processing happens for all input, including the more abstract inputs such as language.

Although most of us share the same sensors and filters, some of us, such as those who live in the spectrum, have different filters. These people process input others do not, while not processing input others do. In this way the autistic brain is in a permanently “altered state,” operating differently from the “normal” brain.

This is why spectrum kids can have meltdowns if touched, just like normal kids would if you put a tarantula on them. These filters and processes are both learned and inherited. The inherited processes are often associated with fear-based responses as they were, and are, important for survival and have been with us for millions of years, such as the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling, both of which most people are born with. There are also unique inherited sensory processing conditions such as synesthesia where the senses are switched up, so, for example, the number seven tastes like coffee. Interestingly, in cases of synesthesia where people “see” smells, they’re able to see how long it will be before certain foods will go bad, or how old butchered meat is by simply looking at it. This tells us that there is more information available in the original input that our olfactory processing system does not use but our visual processes do.

Ultimately all this processing is in place to allow us to survive, navigate, and understand the outside world. The most critical point to realize here is that even though the stimulus comes from the outside, understanding comes from the inside. This may sound trivial yet its implications are profound because perception, and one could therefore say reality as we know it, is defined as the application of understanding and beliefs toward external stimulus.

For most people overstimulation causes unhealthy reactions because the filtering center of the brain, the amygdala, gets overloaded and can no longer properly send “safe” data to the higher brain. This results in fear, stress, and anxiety. For autistics this threshold tends to be much lower as the autistic amygdala does not work so well. This is one theory as to the cause of autism in the first place. Not having a well-working amygdala is like having a broken filter: too much of the data gets through. This is why many autistic children are super-hypersensitive.

When I was in control of the stimulus, such as eating a delicious orange on a warm day in the field, staring into the sun, alone and safe, my broken amygdala filter let through a wave of intensely beautiful stimuli, with their associated intensely beautiful responses. Controlled overstimulation of healthy input could possibly be a therapy that could be of great benefit to all people.