Book: Autism and the God Connection

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Have you read this book? It's interesting...the premise is that some people on the spectrum seem to have a closer connection to the spiritual world. It includes a lot of anecdotes about autistic kids predicting future events, animals (even wild ones) being attracted to autistic people, being able to see or communicate with spiritual presences, etc.

My 6yo son (AS) has had things like this. In our old house, he would clearly "play" with someone who we couldn't see in his room. We moved out when he was just about 2. When he was three and his speech finally came in, he told me "in the old house there were monsters in my room--but they weren't mean". Interestingly enough we later found out two children had died in that house. There have also been a handful of times that my son seemed to know what I was thinking...as in I was thinking about something unrelated to anything around us and he answered my question out loud.

Have any of you had experiences like this? Just curious. It's an interesting book if you're interested in that type of thing.

yeah, I can still 'sense' energy that was 'caught' in a specific place when the physical being has ceased to exist, but their emotional and intellectual energy is still present. It is usually something psychically disturbing, and that is why the 'reception' is so strong in some places and not in others. It's like being a radio receiver and picking up radio stations, they just 'play' in my mind.
"They" are mostly not conscious that I am there, though. They are usually repeating and repeating some scenario that they must be still working out on what ever plane they are conscious on. One time, in San Francisco, I was living in a huge old townhouse with grand stair cases, dining rooms and a ballroom on the second floor. I was cognizant of a energy matrix (I don't know, a ghost or something? what do you call them?)slowly trudging up or down the stairs with a tray in his hands. I would amuse myself by walking through him just for the goosebumps it would raise on my arms and the back of my neck. Once, he actually turned and looked at me while I did it!! The expression on his face was one of shock . . like HE had seen a ghost!

I just think we are sensitive to more than this earthly plane of existence. Like I can 'remember' living in other bodies. Stuff like that. When I was a kid I was really affected by it, but I was pretty affected by EVERYTHING , and didn't know others didn't see reality that way.

Merle

Well, of course "God" is autistic, as we're all made in his image.

Why do you think he can't talk? He's totally nonverbal.

My sister, my father, and myself, we all have this in spades. It is a big part of why we are so uncomfortable around institutional religion. Dogma is not spiritual it is a coercive power structure, spirituality is the asa of creation as revealed by the prophets. Guess who the prophets are?

Spirituality is the understanding of the systems of reality on a higher level. The ability to hyper-systematize that which you perceive, the ability to have sensory acuity two to three times greater than the norm for human beings, lends itself to being able to logically reason out Source is real. It is a physical, palpable, touchable thing. I have touched the face of God, and the All touched my face back, for Thou art God. Invert your senses and stop looking outward, instead look inward and you will see the power that is within all of us that comes about by being self aware creation.

The prophet Einstein teaches us that the only universal constant is the speed of light. His disciples brought us greater understanding of the metaphysical and demonstrated what Einstein meant when he said time is not linear. Everything that ever was and everything that ever will be, is right now. You can not change the past because it is happening right now. You can not change the future because it is happening right now. You have to change the now.

Ghosting is the awareness of the results of actions that imply to you the actions that MUST have occurred. I think therefore I am, but that is about all >I< have the ability to do, think that I am. I have one other trick I can do. I can take credit for that which the great integrity tells me is true. I didn't figure it out, I just opened my senses and let myself be the channel through which the Voice spoke. The apparition you hallucinate to yourself is a method of opening these senses to let the Voice speak with clarity, the Source acted like it saw a ghost as a way of communicating to you that it WAS seeing a ghost, it was seeing you, because you WERE the ghost, you were manifestating it in order to try and process the information your senses were giving you.

There are clues so subtle all around us that most of humanity simply does not have the sensory ability to perceive it. Instead they have hands. The prophet is the eyes of humanity. The hands of humanity want to cover them up so they can play with their toys, but the arms of humanity say no, let us see the asa and let the truths of creation be revealed unto us. The heart of humanity says We trust the eyes, the eyes speak with sincerity. The mind of humanity says If the eyes are Sincere we must Believe what they See, actions of humanity must change. The legs of humanity say Then let it be so, Change shall come to our lands for humanity walks a new path this day.

Interesting, Merle. When I was little I have a very clear memory of waking up one morning and there was a man I had never seen standing next my bed. I remember *knowing* he wasn't really physically there. I told him I was afraid of him and to go away, put my head under the pillow and fell back asleep. I've never had anything like that again, so it doesn't seem to be some "ability" that stuck with me or anything.

As for God being autistic---lol! That's a fun way to think about it. It brings several ideas to mind but I don't want to make this thread a huge debate about whether or not there is a God, what s/he is like, etc. so I won't go there...

Crassus: It seems that you are implying that when one sees what many people call a "ghost" the "ghost" is oneself? Hmmmm....I'm not sure I buy it. Also, trying to label the viewpoint you are expressing might irritate you, but it sounds like a garden variety New Age belief system to me. There is no God because we are God or all part of one great energy source...is that what you're saying?

The joke of labeling it New Age is not that I mind being labeled, it is that calling the oldest belief upon which the others were derived according to historical data New Age is a great trick. Here's the thing, I pretend to myself that I'm talking to you right now, and you are pretending you are talking to me, but we are talking to ourselves. We are using our limited perceptions to "see" each other to craft the version of each other we are talking to in our heads, but we are not perfect creatures, we have imperfect perceptions and understandings. Everything we do, say, are, is us. Everything everyone else does, says, are, is us. Our perception and understanding of what we believe they did, said, were, is ours.

You are what you See. You are what you Do. You are not the Mask you Wear. You are not what you see. You are what you See. You are not what you eat. You are what you Eat. See with the inner gut, not with the eyes. I am an adamant skeptic and rational thinker. I know based on factual understanding of concrete genetics and concrete evolutionary biology and concrete physics and math, there there is a connective element to all creation. Systems are inherently connected, our universe of reality is by definition a system, ipso facto there is an inherent connection between all reality. In common parlance, this is God.

Everything that happens, does so because it was required to happen by the rules of the system of reality we exist within, therefore everything happened by the will of God, for the purposes of God. If you want to assign sentience to this connection, that is a whole 'nother debate and becomes about belief systems. I just stated there is something you could choose to call God, or The Source, Gaea, Cronus, Allah, That Which Is and Will Always Be, The Great Spirit, Father of the Sky, Sky-Daddy, Big Momma of The High Mountain, I can go on like this for days before I even had to resort to making up my own names rather than using names that have been used by historical societies. This is an empirical statement deductively stated. It is supported by the evidence. Refusal to accept this is the refusal of asa. You can just call it reality. Names are for philosophy.

Names are for philosophy because Plato teaches us that which you name you have power over. The prophet Plato, who through his devotion to the Goddess of Wisdom Athena, made the ultimate sacrifice of self as a symbol of this devotion and told his Goddess the truth. That she was a fabrication of his mind. For his service to her, Athena rewarded him for carrying out that which she asked by revealing that he was correct. Asa was attained.

Crassus:

Paragraphs one, two, and three...OK. There really isn't a great deal there I can't agree with except that I choose to believe God is other than myself. It seems that as humans we are born with the intense desire to worship something. Even those who don't believe in any higher power, collective or otherwise, worship something. Many people spend their lives worshiping other people.

I haven't studied philosphy, but I imagine if there is an intense desire to do something, the thing that fufills that desire also exists or the desire wouldn't exist. We hunger, therefore there is food. We thirst, there must be water. Does that make sense?

We long to worship something that is better than ourselves...so there must be something better than ourselves to worship. And I don't think the answer is celebrities or saints or whatever. In my reality, that is God.

Anyway, we have gone WAY off topic. I don't mind maintaining two topics in one thread. I don't have a diagnosis, but if I had a special interest it would be people in general and how they think...I love hearing about what people believe and why they believe it, etc. I will probably walk around and think about the things I have read here all day, with periodic interruptions by the outside world.

The original question was whether or not you seem to have spiritual capacities that most people around you seem to not have? It sounds like you believe we all have them. So I guess your answer would be "no".

I believe many autistic people do have this ability and it is due to greater intelligence/perceiving of reality, different mental archetypical structures, and different biology that perhaps has greater ties to spirituality or more advanced reality.

http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm

The original question was whether or not I had read a book. No, I have not read that book, I do have an extensive knowledge of the topic of the book and am likely to seek that book out, because this is a Special Interest for me. I believe that people who are more in touch with that which they sense and how it differs from what those around them sense are encouraged to explore why those differences exist. When you are experiencing stimuli of a sense at two to three times the acuity of the vast majority of people around you, you are aware of a lot of things they are not. Things they call you crazy for being aware of.

20/20 is the normal human visual acuity of somebody born without physical defects of the eye, autistic individuals with no physical defects of the eye have an acuity of 20/7. From 20 feet away from the autistic individual, they see with the clarity that the normal human sees something that is 7 feet away. Where does that increased acuity come from? The normal human has a portion of the brain responsible for carrying out intuitive Theory of Mind visual cue processing, this same portion of the brain in an autistic individual is instead being used to process vision in another way.

Most humans are born with a portion of their brain responsible for the display of and perception of relational communications. Autistics instead have have that area of the brain modified in a way that leads to it being utilized by the brain in a different manner. Most humans intuitively "just get it" when it comes to group participation methods of the herd. Autistics have to explicitly learn the rules and communications that are happening rapid fire and intuitively for everyone else. Asperger's Syndrome is essentially the diagnosis of any autistic that still has intuitive verbal ability ToM or who is able to overcome the lack thereof.

That which is better than you that deserves your worship is the better you that you will be tomorrow. Learn the lessons that better you is trying to teach your self. That person you think is your mentor, is just the you of tomorrow speaking to you through your interpretations of your mentor. Worship the Buddha. The Buddha is not Siddhartha Guatama, Siddartha Guatama Buddha is the individual receiving the title that denotes having transcended beyond the ills of society, The Buddha is the version of you that has also transcended. Worship that.

Do I have capacities that those around me don't seem to have? No I do not. Do I make more active use of the same spiritual capacities that those around me seem to ignore or claim not to have? Yes I do. I have been called wise for my ability to foresee my entire life. I have been able to approach animals of all kind with greater ease than most my entire life. I have been able to sense that which is important to people when they thought they had made no revelations of it my entire life. I have been able to answer questions that people thought were unrelated to anything around us that they were considering because I was more aware of why we were both considering it. I can sense impending violence because I can smell and taste and hear and see signs of the change in an animal that precede lashing out. I have found myself walking down hallways and being compelled to stop, go back and enter a door just in time to stop somebody from striking somebody else. It was not some mystic occurance, it was my inability not to act when my senses inform me something is occurring I have undertaken the precept to prevent.

I remember my past lives in the sense that I can feel the chain of historical reality that led to my genetics. The genetic pressures necessary for my current biological form tell a narrative of my ancestry, the forms my genetics walked before.

I see the ghost of the murdered wife because I see the subtle evidence imprinted into every particle of the environment it happened in. I know what kinds of things corrupt a human relationship to the degree that a man takes a knife to his wife, I know what kinds of things happen to the floor and chairs and curtains when the act is undertaken. I know how to interpret the lingering amounts of chemical odor they both left in the room. I identify with the victim and feel sorrow that I was not in this place in time to act on the compulsion I feel. I undertook a precept to protect her and was not in time. I reach out to her with my mind and generate a manifestation of her, because I am sorry. I feel her pain. I want her to know she was not alone. I am here with her now, I reach out through nonlinear time and am with her as it happens. She tells me I know, I know you tried, It is okay. God Speaks To Us. It is not Supernatural, it is the natural way of things. We are One Tribe.

People think I'm just insane for having broke down in tears from the experience, they just don't know. Later somebody finds out that there was a woman murdered in that kitchen by her husband, it was done with a knife, and suddenly they think I actually did see a ghost. They are afraid to go back to that place for fear that this ghost is somehow going to affect them, and the truth is the ghost will affect them. They will be aware of the act having happened and it will make them uncomfortable, they will dwell on it, it will not be healthy. So we avoid that abandoned house.

Instead we go hang out at Jimmy's house, where I can smell the argument his dad had with his mother before he went to work. I can see in his mother's behavior that she is afraid. I can hear it in her voice. I can watch her take it out on Jimmy because she sees Jimmy as the manifestation of his father, and she has the authority over this one. I am paralyzed by my inability to find any course of action which I can undertake myself to change this situation. All I have power to do is offer my support to Jimmy and try to help him understand that he is a loved being, that he is worthy of life, that there is reason to go on.

In the World of the Blind, They call me Schizophrenic. I weep my sorrow for them, I just wanted to help them See. They confine me and tranq me and tell me I'm wrong for wanting them not to abuse people. Maybe if I let them abuse me they won't feel the need to abuse others? No, letting them abuse me just teaches them how to better abuse others.

It is a very interesting book that I've read.
It explores autism in a different perspective;
the kind that would almost seem hallucinatory.

I haven't read the book. I do agree that I am more "spiritual" than most people...but spiritual really isn't the right word for me. I am an atheist and I also don't believe in ghosts, spirits, psychics, things like that. I don't think people who have experienced these are nuts or lying, however. If science can prove these things, I would be open to exploring the possibility, it's just that I've never experienced anything even remotely supernatural. Sometimes I wish I would so that I can have my own opinion! I just can't believe in things that have no proof. It's not that I refuse, I just can't. It's not in my nature.

Anyway, I DO feel much more "at one" with nature and animals than most people. I am actually much more sympathetic to animals than people...and animals do seem to always like me, even if it's an animal most other people are afraid of. I like to sit around alone in nature and contemplate how I am connected to and part of it all...the earth and the universe. In that way I'm kind of "spiritual", but not in the sense that I believe in spirits. Actually it seems to me that my Asperger's lead me to be an atheist, because I see everything so logically. I guess it's different for everyone.

I've had many experiences that convince me all of accumulated human knowledge so far is a mere shadow of the truth. And yes, I think I have always been more attuned to the edges of physical phenomena more than the NT brethren around me. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that autism is the heart of the Shaman-nature. The people in tribal societies singled out to be healers and spiritual conduits are always those perceived as 'apart' from the group - special in their uniqueness. Sounds like us.

That makes sense. As far as I can recollect:

1) Our brains are wired in the way that makes our conscious mind be connected more closely to our subconscious mind.

2) We have fluent relationships with animals.

3) Some of us treat even plants and other objects as persons.

So, instead of autistic, let's call it the divine mind.

I also think that people with any form of autism are out of the mainstream of normal thought processes.

Much of a relationship with God is rejecting what Man holds true and grasping onto the deeper mysteries of the universe. People too locked into the standard program have a very hard time reaching beyond it. Their NT minds have constructs that stand in the way while non-NTs don't have that issue.

What a great way of thinking of it! The funny thing is that there are tons of NT's who go to church just because they were raised doing it and it's "the Sunday thing to do" (in Christian circles) but really have no true sense of spirituality or the reality of anything they go there to learn about. I would see doing something purely out of routine and habit to be more of an autistic trait. But maybe I am just being ignorant.