What am I Doing Here?

Most people, at some point in their lives, experience a kind of existential roomnesia. You know, when you walk into a room, stop and look around, and realize that you have no idea what you went in there for. It’s just like that, only with your life. As if you had been recently placed in this body, on this planet, and you sort of look around and ask yourself: what I am doing here? How did I get here? This feeling seems to be both widespread, and ancient, since there are many stories and myths that give voice to it. For example, there is an idea that human DNA was ‘seeded’ on earth from some other civilization, on some other planet. Or the idea that individual souls (called “Star-seeds”) were placed on earth in human bodies for some cosmic purpose. Even ideas about reincarnation point to the sense that you were originally somewhere else, before being born into this worldly identity, and that there is some karmic reason for the specific location where you ended up, even if you don’t know what that reason is.

It is important to remember here that myths are not meant to explain anything. They are not early science, or primitive science, or bad science. They are internally coherent expressions of pervasive human experiences. They have a logic of their own. Generally, they are structured in such a way as to be maximally transparent to a certain dimension of human experience, which we may call spiritual, if we like. In this case, the myths all point to the experience of a disconnect or discontinuity between one’s internal sense of oneself, and one’s experience of being in the world. We sometimes talk about this in terms of the difference between mind and body, or self and other, or even truth and illusion, but all these dichotomies are attempts to understand the more primitive experience: the experience of ‘not fitting in’ in some deeply existential way.

As I say, everyone probably has this experience at some point in their lives, but there are certainly differences between people in terms of how often, and how painfully, this sensation appears. There are several reasons why ND persons may feel this tension more viscerally than NT persons. One reason has to do with embodiment. The sensory issues many of us experience make it seem as if we are in a recording studio, but the all the levels are out of whack. One drum is set too loud, while the others are set too low. The vocals overpower the other instruments, and the lead guitar can’t be heard at all. This can give rise to the sensation that your body is an instrument or vehicle that isn’t functioning well. But your subjective sense of yourself is separate from the sensations: instead of simply being aware of the world through your perceptions, you are also aware of the perceptions themselves. You are person in a body, rather than simply being a body. This problem is even more acute in the case of interoception, that is, our perception of internal body states like hunger, fear, sexual attraction, or anger. If your perception of your own body is in some respects exaggerated to the point of painfulness, or dampened to the point being imperceptible, you might well feel like your body is not only not you, but not even your ally.

There are also social reasons why we might feel detached from ourselves. One is the observation of feeling left out socially. Our environment is, among other things, intensely social. To be alienated from the social environment is also to be isolated from the world more generally. Similarly, our values are often quite at odds with the rest of the world. Although I feel sort of shy about saying this, many other autists have observed that from our perspective, mainstream culture seems amazingly shallow, materialistic, hypocritical, dishonest, and often quite brutal. And what’s worse, when we point this out, we are accused of being naïve, weak, overly sensitive, or just plain impolite. If it weren’t for my own knowledge that many other ND’s share this perspective, I would certainly feel like a crazy person, or least, like someone born on the wrong planet.

Finally, I should also just mention dissociation due to trauma, which ND people disproportionately suffer from. Because of our heightened nervous system, especially stress responses, we are more likely to experience adverse events or circumstances as traumatic in the clinical sense of the term. This may be experienced as the heightening of alertness in a ‘fight-or-flight’ response, or (as in my own case) it may take the form of a ‘freeze’ response, which just is a persistent mild dissociation.

But to be clear, the sense of being a spirit uncomfortably placed in a physical body, like a spacesuit or a rental car, is not simply a facet of neurodivergence. It is a real fact of human life, although how we understand and make sense of that fact is sort of an open question. What is most important is maybe not the specific mythological model we use, but that the model allows us to gain insight into how to live in such a way as to optimize the fit or mutual engagement between the internal and external worlds.

It should be clear at this point that my understanding of spirituality does not mean or imply transcending or escaping this world. Just the opposite. My understanding of spirituality is based on the starting point of feeling separate from the world, and attempting to approach a state of integration with/in the world. I agree with people like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell who think that in some sense, all myths are really telling the same story over and over again, in different ways, from different perspectives.  I would argue that story they are telling is the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, the love affair and ultimate union of Empirical existence and the Spirit.  Your soul is the universe, or the stage, on which that story unfolds.