https://civitavecchia.portmobility.it/en/tarot-garden-masterpiece-niki-de-saint-phalle
. . . continued . . .
Dear Sister,
Self-Consciousness is dependent on neurological resonance. Alan Watts speaks of this very clearly and most inspiringly in “Out of Your Mind”. Now, out of your mind is where you would love to set yourself, for in autism the resonance is way too high. This problem gives that echo (clear in echolalia and compulsions, tics) which scrambles your reception, gives you this internal interference and confuses, which leads to anxiety - naturally.
High-functioning autism may too easily be confused with the disorder of Hyper-Sensitivity (leading to the preferred “diagnosis” of Star-child or Indigo-child). It may well be a comorbidity in some cases of Autism, where a filter is lacking and all sensory data arrives unequalised, leaving you with tonnes of bits you need to select from and assemble into a meaningful whole. But this “everything interests me” and lavish lashings of empathy and vicarious suffering is generally not found in autism.
You are, however, overwhelmed and even attacked by sensory data. You are constantly disorientated and remain “behind”, ill-informed, which delays (retards) spiritual development. This development is quintessential to becoming a sound human being, integrating body-mind-soul. Behavioural abnormalites result from a deficiency of spiritual Self. The self-awareness then turns in upon itself and deforms the reflection of self.
This in turn is ruinous to your discipline of Kama, or sensuality, or as Thomas Traherne might have put it, sensibleness, or basically the use of your senses as spiritually elevating tools. I have met people with autism who seem to have far less need for the tools of civilisation. They may even wonder why we don't all just revert to the primitive hunter, all for the mammoth and the mammoth against all. In certain aspects this smacks of devolutions, when you are uncommunicative, self-centred, ill-mannered, coarse, unartful (overly pragmatic), insensitive to others. You will remain beyond the pale. The right path is not for you. It's all hand to foot, surviving on an emotional front and hamstering for all eventualities on a material front.
If I suggested yoga and an assistant to you, it was because of my own spiritual training. I thought to save your soul, but nobody saved mine but me and mine. Why would it be different for you!
Those on the path of self-anihilation as opposed to re-unification may meet in nihilism for a stint, but soon the paths fork and the self-destructive types drop off the cliff face like lemmings into the void.
I am familiar with pretty much all the autism-management programmes out there, but I can’t see any working for you. You’re not the only one they fail. But it means I have nothing more to offer you but my love, something you are not able to receive. But I trust love can bathe your soul in the realm of the Inbetween, we both visit nightly.
I do not believe in the way modern psychiatrics views autism as a mental disorder. The cause may be neurological and found in the functionings of the brain, but one mind will be a rubber dinghy on the stormy sea of Gallilea (a picture for the etheric pools of thinking and remembering) while the other an ocean liner. So some people will be more affected by the autism than others, and more mentally handicapped by it. The autism stays the same as the barrier to finding the Self.
From Patanjali (and the practice of yoga) we learn to be spontaneous inspite of being self aware. It was deemed one only came to the study of yoga with a degree in politics, sensuality and justice. One understood the world as a chess board and was ready to sit down an play at it. Time to become childlike!
You are sternly serious if not aggressively insistent life is no laughing matter. You spend a lot of energy fuming at society as an inefficient, unfair, unintelligent system - which fails to meet your expectations. Come to think of it, a lot of addicts do not come from abused homes, but from overly-protective ones. You have spoken of how I curbed your imagination by being the pro-active one for us two, and how our mother did not push you out into the world with more animation and self-confidence. This sounds like you woke up one morning to the cold, sharp shock of the “real world out there”, which wasn’t going to let you be half asleep, uncomplicated and brilliant without proving yourself. You stepped into a Willow state and never stepped back out. On the back of your stubborn nature this slid into a Gentian state besides.
If we had known about autism and got the help to assist you, back then, that transition could have been better prepared. It is why I advocate diagnosis/acknowledgment of the existence of autism. How and when it will inconvenience you or handicap you is going to have to become secondary. Like for a common cold, some of us work on with one, others take to bed. Or again, my favorite comparison, pregnancy. If you are in the first timester of the spectrum of pregnancy, you may still be able to run for a bus, by nine months the condition rules pretty much your entire life, but from the moment of conception (preferably before) one should be careful about the amount of toxins/foreign astrality one consumes (alcohol, nicotine, coffee, blue cheese, raw meat etc).
This is why a more standard, predictable or traditional household would have served you better with its clearer codes of conduct and moral expectations. We were still fairly organised, regular and punctual (our father naturally dictated a need for this). But our mother and I together could also be quite improvised and in for spontaneous action. For the rest we were an island always, expats in childhood, returning rootless without extended family to our parent’s motherland, my mother and I always freedom-seeking in the cracks of society. It was guessing games for you all the time.
My loss is two-fold. My sister and my mother - not entirely together, but there comes a day when something finally snaps and you did cause the bond with Mother to fray more quickly.
The mother I knew suddenly vanished with the arrival of my son. She suddenly had no idea how to be, since her mother had never shown the example (neither in bonding as a mother, nor as showing interest as a grandmother). It became startlingly clear (commensurately to the increase of alcohol consumption) that our mother had been running on a prayer up till then, very much supported by minor rebel but Michaelic spirits. I suppose she and I were very close in our quest for independence as a self (step one in the Individualisation Process). But now also in search of the best way to care for my child, my inquiries into spiritual truths took on a more practical note, as I slowly gravitated towards Anthroposophy. I might as well have slept with the devil himself, if you ask our mother.
I went towards Anthroposophy for the “stuff” (not for the knowledge of the Higher Worlds, which I had already studied in Vedanta and Yoga). This intensified the nature-girl in me, and Waldorf appealed to the inner child; thus the gulf between her and I (originally both Montessori fans) gradually grew so wide that now there is no means (on earth) for crossing it.
Our mother is a classic case of being afraid of losing the self. This fear is normal and serves the knight to get back upon his horse; but it only digs dark pits for yourself if you are afraid of horses (the flight of imaginative thinking). You must embrace fear: saddle it and ride on out upon it into the dark night of your soul.
There is a point to looking for yourself, even if you cannot find her. There is a point to a teacher, a guru, a merlin,a Trevrizent, a guide, a mirror who will play the fool to his Lear. The king you think you are is only ego. The true Self/king has to travel through the storms, over the moors, in the dark, stumbling, whining, raproaching, howling, lost, renouncing everything, stripped naked like a saddhu, to find the self that is ready to step out of a social role (mortal coil) and into the Self. Here is Brahma. This is Samadhi. But first still the racing heart, the milling mind, and breathe.
5th Adventure, 4, Parzival sees many marvels at the Grail Castle, illustration: David Newbatt, from “Parzival, The Quest for the Holy Grail”, Wynstones Press
The Parzival story is a modern and western, narrative account of the yoga sutras. May it illustrate to you that you need not sit on a pole to achieve enlightenment. The Latin “spirare” ought to inform you that spirituality is merely breathing. Like Dante, keep on walking. Like the magpied Parzival, it takes a life-time of balancing yin and yang, polarity, till a state of Zen unifies the subject-object, in a Chemical Marriage. You can experience smaller moments like this in daily, normal life: you suddenly just “get it”, and do it; when your movements are full of grace and precision, your will acurate and powerful, your heart open and joyous, like the window of a Swiss chalet onto the glorious meadows in June.
I leave you with a quote from the brilliantly spiritual, if thoroughly scientific (mathematician) Maria Popova, my all time favorite blogger. She speaks in reference to (the thoroughly spiritual and completely grounded) Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Pi” which she reads in her talk “The Universe in Verse”, sharing,
“my lifelong love of pi as both an anchor of reality and a counterpoint to certainty. In pi resides a reminder that despite the rigor and devotion with which we may map reality, our maps are still maps — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.”
The collective modus for Autism is masochistic. A loss of sense of touch as spiritual bridge causes you push it to the limits by thrashing your own back in order to have wounds to curse. Will this bring God nearer? You are forever waiting to be comforted and caressed, but present yourself to the world as a roll of barbed wire. Unfurl and be a leaf in the wind. Polish stones and learn what mirrors you and what doesn't.
There is a great discontentment and even greater illusion causing autism, a snare of fear and devolution making us hide in certitudes. Because you are hyper sensitive, because you are my sister, I know that you don't believe in certainty, but how then to appease your autism?
. . . to be continued . . .