Autism re-imagined

Savants carry a message for our time.

It’s a fact that in just one generation, autism in children has exploded from a curious rarity to a condition about as common as being left handed. Public health advocates warn that the burden on society of so many people who cannot work and who need care themselves is becoming unsupportable. Here’s a contrasting perspective.

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When autistic children fail to talk and to make eye contact, their parents and caregivers naturally assume that they are unable to communicate. Sometimes, they extrapolate to assume that autistic persons have nothing to communicate, and that they have no inner life.

The Telepathy Tapes is a recent, unfolding podcast series based on the experience of families with autistic children who learn to communicate with spelling devices. It was natural to assume that children who cannot speak would be unlikely to learn to read and write. But some parents have discovered that, with patience, they can teach their autistic children to communicate with tablet apps. Some of these use pictograms and emotion-signaling icons.

Others just use point-and-spell alphabets, like the ouija boards of old.

Try to imagine a parent’s surprise when her 7-year-old son, who has never spoken a word and shows every sign of living in his own inscrutable world, types his first sentence, and it is about trusting in God’s beneficence. A mother discovers by accident that her autistic son knows her private thoughts, and she tests his telepathic powers with hidden 6-digit numbers. He points to the correct numbers consistently, effortlessly.

It turns out that this is just the beginning. There is a global community of autistic savants who have never met one another either in person or on line, but they gather at The Hill and communicate effortlessly their transcendent intuitions. Though many autistic persons confirm that they have frequented The Hill, it is not a physical place in our world. And our world, our entire world is just a small part of a reality familiar to the silent ones, a reality that we neuro-normies may sense hazily, once or twice in a lifetime, in a mystical vision.

One theory is that we all come into this world with wide intuitive powers. We sense a noosphere of thought and an akashic record of everywhere and all time. Then we are socialized, trained with selective affirmation from the Adults to attend to what is in our eyes and ears and to filter out the rest. By the time we speak our first words, our extrasensory senses are already encumbered, and by the time we reach kindergarten they have left us.

They may come back in rare out-of-body experiences, NDEs or kundalini excursions. Once or twice in a lifetime.

Our autistic sons and daughters carry a message for us that there is a larger world, a world in which we once dwelt with intimate awareness, now accessible only in fleeting visions.

It is not only human individuals who have amnesia; it is the whole human race. Before the ice age ended so abruptly, there were ancient civilizations. We know of their technologic prowess because they left us megalithic monuments and precision-carved artifacts. We don’t know whether their technology incorporated an element that we would call “paranormal”.

A new story of autism

Some of us are worrying that machinery and AI applications will eliminate most human employment, leaving a planet of useless eaters. Others worry that the autistic children will need so much care that there won’t be enough caregivers. Can two intractable problems cancel each other out?

We sense that our world is at a turning point, that we can’t go on like this, that there is an impending apocalypse or a beckoning More Beautiful World, or perhaps both. Surely a core issue is that our Western culture has turned toward logic and algorithms and an exclusively material reality. We have abandoned our Living Mother, our animal origins, our connection to nature. We are living in our left brains. The faithful servant of the soul has deposed his master.

The autistic savants carry just the message that we, the Western Intelligentsia, need for our leap into a New and Ancient Story. The unemployed will find employment as care-givers. The care-givers will transmogrify as messengers of the ineffable.