An Introduction to A Portrait of The Autist as a Young Man

To think at the deepest level is to stop thinking and to experience thought at a spiritual level. I look to my genes and see that I share 50% of my DNA with that of a banana, truly I have a vegetable being before my animal body. In this universe all things share the basic building blocks – A C G T – of genes and; at an esoteric level; positive and negative (good and evil) spirituality and animal, vegetable and mineral (rock) states. These are the four chemical building blocks for most life on this planet and probably this universe.

Some argue that there are 33 portals within the vegetable and animal states that allow access to the spiritual state; for me they are as one and are sensed as one. This is a major difference between neurotypicals and myself; it is only an eye-blink from place to place or state to state; it is a burden that weighs both heavily and nothing.

My letters, cartoons, photographs and poetry show that it is the community or society, as a whole, that concerns me and if a public letter does not work then a private letter to a pivotal person usually does the trick. It is better to use nothing from outside of oneself because there are compensations that must be allowed for – negativity must balance positivity.

I am whole and I experience universes as they are, as a passive witness; I dream both awake and asleep and use them to solve questions; I have an intuitive framework and balance one against another and test their validity in relation to my goal.

Insanity is the inability of the self to cope with what it is experiencing, there is evidence (Maudsley Hospital, 1995, General Statistics & Schizophrenia) to suggest that schizophrenics experience the spiritual world as a waking reality. I stepped from the void of insanity into the real world and have made friends with the voices and given them names: Monument, Figment, Fragment, Pigment, Oddment, Oddenstein, Moment, etc.

Over time I became aware that my names were simply that and were allowable for use with the soft toys and puppets; thus it was via anthropomorphism that I found that the spirit world is there, everywhere, and can be called, but usually I just relax and slide into it, like a crocodile returning to its waters. It is my home, my birth, my catharsis, my world and, in time, I shall return to it when my physical self dies.

As to Heaven and Hell, these are aspects of positivity and negativity and are what we take with us into the spiritual world forms our own ‘Hell’ because it is the inability of the ‘self’ (Animal State) to cast-off the burdens of physicality in order to push into ‘Heaven’. I am using ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ but I could use any name, even ‘A’ and ‘B’. The reality of living in a physical body encumbers us with all that is of the physical; to pass on we must embrace the spiritual side completely, as in rebirth, and we must take nothing with us.

Neither ‘Heaven’ nor ‘Hell’ has reality beyond being metaphorical illustrations given to us by millennia of priests and religions – ‘dogma, smogma’. Believers expect to see what they are told exists, but we have to see beyond the metaphors and see what is real. Unfortunately, the majority of the population do not think beyond what they are told; in ages past they saw angels, demons and gods; nowadays they see aliens, spaceships and UFOs. Show twenty people the same set of circumstances, e.g. a car crash, and you will get twenty different witness statements based on what they thought they saw, mixed with what they were told, talked about before, during and after; often they will report completely on something that bares no resemblance to what actually happened.

Perhaps, for the majority of the population it is ‘normal’ and ‘human’ to be unaware of reality and it is only real to the minority; I prefer reality and thought, the thinking spirit in the physical body.

My father was a realist, in some senses, though he carried a lot of self and ego, he came to realise that I am not ‘normal’ and that my awareness of reality is outside of neurotypicals boundaries. Autism at the High Function and Asperger’s Syndrome end of the spectrum of ASDs (Autistic Spectrum Disorders) removes most of the emotions, social trappings and snares of human interactions and leaves one with pure mind and thought.

However, it does not make the person any more aware of the spiritual dimension of reality, but it does provide a vessel that is ready and waiting for association with the spirit. In my case that was having a very slow nervous breakdown and I misread the advent of the spiritual as being part of the process of being initiated into the Church of The Latter Day Saints, which I soon found to be the wrong course of action.

I have no training and have no expectations as to how the spiritual world should appear, save that I view it as being a multi-dimensional space that I am trying to describe in the limits of three dimensions, which is how must people view the world – though mathematicians have infinity.

There is a form of interface or door or portal between our world and the spiritual, despite all of our training and philosophies we are still trapped in the vegetable and animal states of existence; indeed, it is logical to assume that there are other states within the spiritual state that we must pass through in order to progress.

I have a few soft toys who represent the spirits (or voices) when I am in the animal state and by assigning an easy form I find that I can take my own version of reality into the dreamland (and into meditation), the spirit worlds of the shamans and the greater unattached spiritual sphere.

I am reminded of Odo, in Deep Space Nine, who returns to the great lake; what words we have are inadequate to describe what is happening, so we return to metaphors because they are easiest for us to understand what we are seeing and trying to describe.

We are part of a living universe and our bodies are vessels, which have their own universes within the tissues and sub-atomic particles. I am assembled from the universe via birth, for a while I have an independent life, then I die and my component parts rot and return to the universe; I am both the universe and of the universe and I achieve some form of everlasting life through this.