Autism, Myth and Mysticism

            I love my autistic brain.  The way I experience sensory, emotional, and imaginative data is extremely dense, rich, and satisfying.  When I listen to music, or play cards with my kids, or read an ancient Daoist text, it is as if there is an entire cosmos of structured experience whose axis is that moment.  Certain pleasurable moments are not just enjoyable for me, but an influx of celestial order and meaning.  My perceptual sensitivity is not across-the-board: while there are some kinds of data that I am deeply and continually affected by, there are other kinds that I am sort of blind and deaf to.  For example, I can’t really comprehend why people talk so much about sports.  The visual arts are also largely lost on me; and I have never been able to learn to speak a second language, despite several sincere attempts.  But the realms of perceptual experience that I am attuned to, I am very deeply sensitive to. 

            The main disadvantage of all this is that I can’t ever turn the volume down.  The flood of data that I am exposed to when I am in a public place such as a mall or restaurant is deafening and disorienting.  If someone honks their horn at me in traffic, it pretty much ruins my entire day.  The prospect of having to call customer service is terrifying. (Maybe lots of people feel this way?)  The suffering that neurotypical people seem to be able to endure without much thought can, in some cases, add up to nothing less than a realm of Hell as pictured in Dante’s Inferno or in a Buddhist sermon on karmic consequences.   My brain is on fire, my family become my enemies, my physical body fails me.  Worst of all, the experience condemns me to suffer in silent isolation – until I find the time and space to rest, and crawl back out. 

            What this means, all things taken together, is that my emotional and cognitive life has this huge internal range which is wildly at odds with my worldly appearance.  I appear (I imagine) quiet, thoughtful, boring, and forgettable.  Under the surface I feel like traveler in a strange and mythical land, whose extreme beauty is matched by its inherent danger.  I have not yet ascertained if I am a hero, an enemy, or just another helper who dies along the way.  Or all of the above.  In distinction, the neurotypical experience of life seems quite shallow.  Other people seem to operate in a social and metaphysical Flatland, following pleasure and avoiding pain, making judgments about what is right and what is real on the basis of hearsay and authority.  Myth is mere entertainment, injustice is simply a fact of life, dishonesty is both polite and profitable, and narcissism is a virtue.  This is just what it looks like, to me, at this point in time. 

Many (if not most) autistic people are permanent resident aliens in Flatland, unconsciously masking in order to pass as native to whatever extent they are able.  And most (if not all) neurotypical spend at least part of their time in the abyssal depths of the soul, a world that is both fascinating and repellent.  I do not want to draw the lines between neurodiverse and neurotypical worlds too starkly: we all live in two cognitive realms, whether we like it or not.  It’s really just a matter of passport and citizenship.  Being human, as I understand it, just is living simultaneously in these two distinctive worlds.   

            What does this mean for religion?  To begin with, it looks as though myth, religion, and spirituality constitute a kind of special language in which to communicate the depth dimension of human experience.  Myths (one might say) are simply metaphors and models of how we experience the world, when that experience becomes too complex and weird to express in plain language.  But it is not just a set a metaphors.  There are reasons why the world becomes as strange as it does, when people are sensitive to its weirdness.  The world is a very weird place.  And mythic language appears to be the right way to express its inherent wierdness.  For those of us who are to some degree sensitive to its mysterious depths, there really is something there that seems to demand the use of this kind of language.  Remember: a metaphor is by definition an artful way of expressing something that could also be expressed literally.  If mythic language is the best and only language available to describe certain kinds or aspects of human experience, then that language can’t be described as ‘metaphorical.’  Something else is going on.  The fact that such experience exists, and that it is remarkably consistent across cultures and time periods (up to and including our own) is simply a matter of following the data.  Interpreting the data is the tricky part. 

            The materials included here do not constitute or provide a theory of religion, or a specific religious doctrine, except in the barest possible outline.  I do not want to tell you how to interpret the data.  The idea here is simply to organize the data, in the form of a catalogue or lexicon of ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ elements.  The elements are the standard and familiar mythic symbols, and a system has been superimposed upon them in such a way as to highlight certain recurrent relations between them.  Again, the method is to show, rather than tell, something about how these symbols work, how they interrelate, and what they really refer to.  The only thing I can say in plain language is what I have already said: it has to do with the nature of consciousness.  What is mind? How does it work?  How does it relate to the physical body, and the material universe?  If I could say it more plainly, I would.  I don’t really understand it myself.  I can only attempt to let the data, as I have encountered it, speak for itself.