Vitruvian Lines – Part 3

In the previous post, I spoke of how well the role of an ‘outlier’ would suit those who fit within the square, rather than the circle of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man – the sensitive people who are more comfortable on the fringes of a society.

It would seem highly likely that the ancient outliers held a position of very high status within nomadic or migrating groups, since they were responsible for everyone’s safety and the success of the journey.  What happened to them, though, when the travellers decided to settle and build permanent homes?  I suspect that they retained their revered status within the tribe.  There is a small but important piece of evidence for this.

Within the last year – so I learned from a recent BBC archaeology programme – it has been discovered that Avebury – the world’s largest stone circle – originally had a building at its centre, and that building (which predates the stones) was … a house.

At first, this seems something of a let-down.  For years we have venerated and romanticised these stone structures as the site of religious rituals, meaningful astrological observation or sacrifice to pagan gods.  Are we now to believe that they went to the huge effort of building a stone circle, a series of elaborate avenues and other complex structures to honour a simple house?

I suspect that is exactly what they did.   The symbolic importance of the first settlers’ homes would have been immense.  This was the starting point for a new way of life – a new beginning for their society.  In myth, traditional stories and legend, the House of a clan, family or tribe is revered – not the building itself, so much as the dynasty it represents.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that our distant ancestors chose the site of that first home to build their stone circles as a gathering place.  The interesting thing about stone circles, though, is that they very often have outliers – stones placed at a distance from the main structure.  Often these stones mark a particular view, such as the only position from which a sunrise can be viewed in a gap between distant hills on the solstice.  They can also mark the beginning of a causeway or avenue leading to some other important place.  I think the idea of a central gathering place was hard-wired into these people, but so was the need and reverence for the outliers.

So does the structure of a settled society render outliers/ ‘square fillers’ obsolete?

Absolutely not.

In many primal societies people with this special skills-set – heightened senses, an ability to link telepathically to other times or places, other dimensions, even, and a degree of separation from the everyday life of the society – are appointed as shamans, healers and seers.  Their role can be to travel between worlds, to care for the psychological health of the group, to look into the future or past to provide the answers they need or to uncover the reasons for sickness or misfortune.  They are the psychic equivalent to the outlier – visiting regions the rest can’t reach and feeding back necessary information.

Humanity is always journeying forwards.  We have seen that these talented and unusual individuals are not particularly popular with leaders and experts in our society’s structure.  Some, though, manage to have a profound effect despite officialdom.  When they do, they are responsible for creating the huge shifts in perception that move society into new areas.  The Einsteins, the Teslas and the Newtons are able to access insights and understanding simply not available to the common man or woman.  These people work silently, compulsively, alone and – for reasons we’ll see later – are able to make huge leaps to a higher level of understanding of how the universe really works.

I’m fully aware that so far I’ve written well over 3000 words on this subject and not yet addressed the core issue I promised to discuss – an explanation of how autistic perception works.  Stay with me.  The first few sections were an overview, showing how our present Western society isn’t structured to encourage or promote autistic perception, while others apparently are or have been.  They have also demonstrated the persistence of autistic perception and touched on its value to society.

The next section will begin to look more closely at what it involves, while after that, I’ll attempt to draw in research from three very different disciplines so that we can finally examine what autistic perception is, how it works and the benefits for the population as a whole.

Vitruvian Lines: Part 1

 The Structure of Society and Autistic Perception

Without wishing to get political, Western Society and its offshoots around the world are structured in a particular way, and have been so in one form or another since the writing of records began.  It involves having leaders, supported and advised by a cluster of experts, who dominate, control and care for the masses of ordinary people.  It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this argument, whether that structure is a nation, a city, a company or a school.  It doesn’t matter whether the leaders are elected, self-imposed, benign or despotic.  It doesn’t matter whether they are loved, loathed or feared by their people.  All that matters is that this is the structure we, and all those around us, were born and socialised into – so much so, that we the people find it difficult to visualise our way out of this system.

Think of the number of times – even in modern history – when a hated dictatorship has been overthrown, only to be replaced by a very similar system, because that is the only way people can imagine society working.

So what has this to do with autistic perception?  Well, such societies, with their triangular power system, rely on the few controlling the many.  Clearly, that has inherent challenges.  To maintain the structure successfully, the leaders and their enforcers must keep the masses as ‘mass-like’ as possible.  Through the ages, free-thinking, independent and unusual individuals or those showing abilities which might challenge the status quo have been punished, ostracised or supressed.  We have extreme examples of this scapegoating in witch-burning, religious persecution, homophobia etc.

‘Divide and Rule’ is a highly successful strategy for preserving power.  It is in the interest of leaders and experts to keep people from deviating too much from the norm.  ‘Norms’ are far easier to control than a diverse range of individuals.  Thus we have an education system which attempts to produce clones with just enough skills to be useful to society but not enough to allow them to question it.  We have a medical system that attempts to produce in everyone enough health – mental and physical – not to be a burden and to medicate anyone who shows features that don’t fit the norm.

In the Victorian era, being left-handed was considered threateningly deviant by the authorities.  Such children had their left hands strapped down and were forced to conform to ‘normal’ behaviour – using the right hand – which often resulted in stammering, nervous tics or other responses to this barbarity as their natural tendencies were supressed.

Today a so-called ‘savant’ – an individual who can perform superhuman feats, like playing a concerto after hearing it once, drawing an accurate representation of a scene after one glimpse or one who can perform incredible mental calculations – is somewhat feared by the experts.  They can’t account for that person’s abilities, so they go to great pains to emphasise the ‘negative’ aspects of such people, such as a perceived lack of self-care, social or inter-personal skills.  Such people are not, by and large, welcome in a society which seeks to reward complicity and punish autonomy.

Similarly, people with psychic skills are often treated with disdain, branded charlatans and fraudsters or laughingly marginalised as weird or eccentric.  Although the police, corporations and government intelligence systems utilise the skills of such people, this is kept very quiet.  Publicly, they are ostracised.

So in our present society, ‘Square Fillers’ (see this post for an explanation of that term) are marginalised, put down and attempts are even made to ‘normalise’ them with drugs and psychiatric interventions.  Their non-typical way of interacting with others is often given as the justification for this.

Admittedly, as society’s reliance on computer technology increases and the natural ability of Square Fillers in this area becomes increasingly obvious, they are becoming rather more tolerated and even admired than was the case twenty years ago.  It’s something like the way in which the USA gradually began to appreciate and accept their black citizens as their skills at sport provided the nation with a kudos which couldn’t be reached by the white population alone.

I know I’ve laboured this point rather, but the attitude of the ‘experts’ rubs off not just on the typical members of society, but on those with autistic perception as well.  Like the little Victorian left-handers, they can easily see themselves as deviant and wrong, and embark on a tremendous, difficult and ultimately unwinnable battle to live up to society’s standards of normalcy in order to be accepted.

It is often, in my experience, this pressure to conform to patterns that don’t fit their natural way of being which cause the secondary problems that beset so many Square Fillers – anxiety, depression and other psychological difficulties.  These are NOT a symptom of autistic perception in themselves.

The Vitruvian Lines – Introduction

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci

Here it is, finally.  Thank you, friends, for your patience.

This is my best attempt to answer the questions implied in an article my friend and confidant Will
wrote a while ago.  Some parts of what follows have already appeared in various blog posts I have written, however there is also much new information and it ideally needs to be read as a whole.

Because of its length, I’ll be serialising these ‘lines’ in my blog for many weeks to come. I personally find blog posts over 800 or so words hard to read, as I like to ‘dip into’ them and I’ve noticed I get more ‘hits’ on my shorter articles, so I assume others are like me in that respect.

Why Vitruvian?

Because the main thrust of these lines concerns the relationship between two different populations currently inhabiting our planet – those commonly described as ‘neurotypical’ (or, more chauvinistically, ‘normal’) and those who are often labelled as highly sensitive, disordered or possessing some form of dysfunction which renders them atypical – I wanted to find a neutral way of describing the two groups.  I adhere to my principle of refusing to refer to people on the autistic spectrum as ‘disordered’.  I refer to them as ‘people with autistic perception’ or ‘autists’, sometimes separating out those at the highest cognitive levels as Asperger’s (a term no longer current in medical and psychological circles, but still in common use) or ‘high-functioning autists’.   However Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man provides an interesting way to differentiate between the populations.

As you can see from the drawing, the physical human body will fit either into the square or the circle, but not both.  Of course, those divisions only exist in a geometrical sense, as does, for example, the equator.  For me, though, they will provide a useful analogy for the groups I want to discuss.  I will therefore describe the ‘neurotypical’ population as Circle Fillers and the ‘neuro-atypical’ group as Square Fillers.   Why that way round?  There is a reason, hidden in the geometry, which I’ll come to in a future section, but for now, perhaps the metaphor of square pegs having difficulty fitting into round holes will suffice to allow you to differentiate between them.

The Inspiration

“Autistic people are capable of communicating and socialising. They have a naturally different method of accomplishing this. What exactly that method is I don’t believe is fully understood at present by either autistics or non-autistics. I don’t believe the correct words have been attributed to autistic matters to describe or explain them properly. I suspect at some point this will be achieved and hopefully will allow autism to be harnessed to its full potential and remedy the blindness of so many.”

William Bales 2016

There is nothing I enjoy more than a good puzzle – especially one that could benefit everyone if it were solved.  The comments Will made there ticked all those boxes and more for me and I have been working away at uncovering the answer ever since he wrote them.  Some of that work has been conscious, some has been more-or-less subliminal; I’ve simply set my ‘self’ the task and waited to see what it comes up with and what synchronicities appear as a result.

Obviously, because I set the framework for solving the puzzle up in that way, the various pieces of information and insight have appeared in non-linear fashion, so are quite challenging to collate as continuous text.  I’ve set out the different strands under sub-headings, then attempted to draw them together at the end.

In my next post, I will begin to explain The Vitruvian Lines in terms of the structure of society.

A Trail of Breadcrumbs

It was over twenty years ago, and I’ve taught a lot of lessons since then.  None, though, quite as extraordinary as that one.

They were 5 to 7 year olds, only ten of them, all with speech and language difficulties and several with autistic spectrum perception.  We were doing a mental addition and subtraction activity and I was recording their answers on the board.

There was a wide ability range and a couple of the kids were exceptionally bright.  I was doing my best to stretch them, while keeping the less able group involved.

I had a hidden agenda, though.  There was one boy – a six-year-old – whom I was watching particularly carefully.  He was one of the highly intelligent ones.  He always focused on the task at hand, worked hard and was unfailingly polite and charming.  We’d been watching him for a few weeks, my teaching assistant and myself, ever since I’d confided to her that I felt I was losing my grip on this class.  To be honest – and I’m not a person given to paranoid delusions – I was beginning to suspect that this little child was intentionally sabotaging my lessons.

The activity started quite normally, but before long he started.

‘27 +13?’ I asked.

‘40,’ someone said.

I wrote 40 on the board.

‘No, it’s 41,’ he said.

I talked through the calculation, using my best patient teacher voice.

‘But you said 28.  28 and 13 is 41, isn’t it?’

Hmm.  This sort of thing happened all the time in my class these days.  Normally I’d have accepted that I’d made a mistake and wondered, yet again, why I was becoming so absent-minded.  Today, though, I was ready for him.  I pretended to be flustered.  There was no flicker of a triumphant smile from him.  Maybe he’d made a genuine mistake…

We carried on.  He did it several more times, selecting his moments with infinite care.  If I stood my ground, he backed down instantly with a polite, ‘Oh, sorry.’  If I hesitated or acted confused, though, he’d capitalise on it, wasting vast amounts of time in the process.

By the end of the session I was in no further doubt.  All the times a vital piece of equipment I was sure I’d laid out for a lesson had gone missing and was then found in the most ridiculous place – by him, naturally; all the lessons where he was endlessly under my feet and I was practically falling over him, yet he’d always have a perfectly valid explanation for being there; all the times when half the class ended up repeating some stupid little phrase over and over, while he sat, bent over his work and looking up in mild surprise at their behaviour;  all this and more was being orchestrated by a child of six with a diagnosis on the autistic spectrum and severe speech difficulties.  It beggared belief.

Later that day I took him aside and asked him, point blank, why he was playing these mind games.

‘What’s mind games?’ he asked innocently, but the mask was slipping.  I could see a gleeful twinkle in those wide green eyes.

‘The little wind-ups you use in my lessons, like in maths this morning,’ I replied.

He gave a yelp of delight.  ‘So it’s YOU!’ he said.  ‘I thought it was you.’  And he smiled his concrete-melting smile.

He went on to explain that he’d been trying his ‘tricks’ on a number of key adults in his life for some time, waiting to find the one who figured out what he was doing.  I had, it seemed, passed the test.

So as his teacher I had two choices.  I could get angry, label him as a disruptive and manipulative pupil and apply sanctions.  Alternatively, I could be delighted that I’d come across such an audacious, brilliant and imaginative mind, give him the deepest respect and remember never to underestimate him.  I chose the latter.  Of course I did.  This was a once in a lifetime meeting.

From that day onward we became the best of friends.  Twenty years on, we still are.

That’s not to say he’s let me off the hook.  Far from it.

If he wants me to discover something, to move closer towards his level of comprehension, he will never simply tell me.  He uses the Socratic Method.  It’s the most effective form of education ever developed.  The student is given scenarios and placed in situations which require high-level problem-solving skills.

I’m given a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, often a heady mix of physical and psychic, since he operates in both modes.  He ruthlessly ignores my questions or pleas for hints.   If some of the breadcrumbs have disappeared or been blown off course, I’m simply expected to work harder and faster to find the rest.  It’s exhausting and exhilarating – the kind of buzz people get from climbing mountains or running marathons, I suppose.  If I fail, he ups the stakes.  If I succeed he’s utterly delighted and we are able to communicate on a higher level than I’d ever have achieved alone.

I’m busily following one such trail at the moment.  Here, as an example, is just one of the crumbs he’s thrown me:

Autistic people are capable of communicating and socialising. They have a naturally different method of accomplishing this. What exactly that method is I don’t believe is fully understood at present by either autistics or non-autistics. I don’t believe the correct words have been attributed to autistic matters to describe or explain them properly. I suspect at some point this will be achieved and hopefully will allow autism to be harnessed to its full potential and remedy the blindness of so many.

Wish me luck  🙂

 

Being Grommit

I hesitate to write this, because there are so many people out there much better qualified to talk about it.  Still, it’s come into my head and it’s lodged there like an ear worm and won’t go away until I write it, So I suppose I’d better write…

There’s a huge amount of non-sense spoken about sensitivity and highly sensitive people, so perhaps I can add a modicum of sense, or maybe just more nonsense.

I wouldn’t generally count myself among these people (which is why I don’t feel particularly qualified to write about them) but I seem to have some kind of magnetic attraction to them.  They keep showing up in my life.  Once they are there, they tend to stick around.  Whenever that happens with people in our lives, it means we have something to teach or learn from each other – probably both.

So let me give you a very personal, no-holds-barred snapshot of how it feels to be a neuro-typical individual, living and working amongst highly-sensitive people.

They’d like to fit in with the rest of us.  They really would.  It would make their lives so much easier and they know this.  Some of them elect to go down the route of medication aimed at suppressing their sensitivity, dulling their responses and turning them into rather sad but apparently average people.  Many, many more prefer to self-medicate, using recreational drugs and/or a mixture of caffeine and alcohol to render their daily lives (or at least parts of them) more manageable.  Both of these seem to me a tragic waste – partly because of the unpleasant side-effects and partly because all these substances mask the true essence of who they really are.  Nevertheless, I understand the reasons behind the choices.  For those of us living and interacting with these people, we’re faced with a double problem of trying to understand their innate differences from our way of being and to deal with the challenges faced when dealing with anyone who is drugged up.

I frequently feel hurt, offended, rejected and dismissed by those I care about and love who live within this spectrum of being.  As a ‘typical’ person I crave affection – and some occasional expression of this, attention – such as responses to messages or to be looked at once in a while, reassurance that I’m getting things right, and trust.  I’ve discovered, slowly and painfully, that I will only get any of these by explaining my needs very carefully, providing detailed instructions on how I would like the person to react and then being satisfied with what they are able to provide, even if it does feel more like a rehearsed trick than a genuine, spontaneous action on their part.

Does that sound terribly harsh?

If we look at it from their perspective, they do NOT lack emotions and feelings.  They have them in such abundance that their fragile human bodies are just about incapable of containing them.  They probably dealt with this as newborns by screaming endlessly, as children by throwing tantrums or head-banging, as adolescents by almost total withdrawal from society and family and immersion in music, video games or self-harm.  During that long, painful process, they have learned to suppress almost all emotion, except fear and anxiety, which just won’t go away.  They care and want to please as much as anyone, but it’s deeply scary for them, and any tiny steps they can take should be welcomed with deep gratitude by those of us who can’t even imagine what it is costing them.

They know and feel and see things we don’t.  They’ve learned that in our society, people who know more than others are usually considered clever, so they can easily become so supercilious and self-opinionated that I want to punch them.  They’re frustrated when we don’t get what seems ludicrously obvious to them.  I find myself thinking, ‘Good grief, here you are, treating me like a five year old, when you can’t even walk into a shop and buy a pack of underwear.’

So why is it like this?

In my opinion, all of us are – first and foremost – pure consciousness.  You can call it soul or spirit if that works for you.  We have all chosen to bring a portion of this pure, rarefied consciousness into physical bodies – to be born as humans.  It involves a fair bit of give and take to do that.  If you think of the consciousness as Light, there is only so much we can squeeze into a human body.  Most of us have been happy with that trade-off as it means we can experience physical existence and use this unique way of (human) being to grow in a way that can’t be achieved otherwise.  

Now think of the way consciousness works.  There is an innate wish to push the boundaries – to go farther, faster, higher than anyone else has done.  Consequently, ever-growing numbers of conscious beings are trying to squeeze more and more Light into the frail, delicate human bodies they are being born into.

It means the fit is not great.  They can’t bed down into their bodies so easily and some of the Light isn’t properly held in.  I keep getting this mental image of Wallace frantically screaming, “Grommit – these are the Wrong Trousers!” in the wonderful Aardman animated film!

And I often feel like poor old Grommit, frantically trying to avert disasters and melt-downs, and help my enLightened friends, students, relatives and acquaintances to fit into the crazy trousers-of-life they’ve entered, while assisting them to understand that yes, the world DOES need the Light they’ve brought with them and that their brilliance is an absolute gift to all of us.

So stay with us, all you wonderful Wallaces.  Try your best to function in those trousers.  We Grommits will keep trying to help you in every way we can – because that’s why WE incarnated.

 

 

Savant

Sometimes all I need to organise the thoughts tumbling randomly around my head is the right words to express them.  Once the thoughts can latch on to words, they can be verbalised and shared.

So my Seth reading this week has focused around what he defines as the two methods of obtaining knowledge available to us humans:  There is the ‘reasoning mind‘ (human mental activity in a space and time context) and ‘immediate knowledge‘ (what I’d term access to the Akashic Field).

I noticed two things in particular in his complex and brilliant explanation.  Firstly, despite existing ‘out of time/space’ Seth himself does NOT put down the reasoning mind.  On the contrary, he says it is a unique and brilliant process, which makes us human.  He adds that we only have a reasoning mind because we don’t know everything.  It is our lack of knowledge that makes us attempt to reason things out, and our achievements have been, and continue to be, truly remarkable.

The second thing I noticed is that in his book (written in the late 1970s/ early ’80s) he makes surprisingly little mention of the human ability to access the immediate knowledge he speaks of.  He explains how a spider spinning a web or a beaver building a dam are not following ‘blind instinct’ as science would have us believe, but without the ‘reasoning mind’ to get in the way, they are performing creative acts based on the overarching ‘immediate knowledge’ that is available to all of consciousness.  We humans connect with it in infancy (before reasoning takes over) and in dreams, he says.  However the enormity of what we experience in dreams is too much for the reasoning mind to process, so it either forgets or turns the fragments of knowing into symbols which it can process.

Would it be different if Jane Roberts were still alive and channelling him today?  I suspect it would.  I suspect that humanity has undergone subtle changes in consciousness over the last 40 years.  As a teacher/tutor for most of those years, I watched with wonder and delight as each new intake of children contained increasing numbers who were still very much in touch with – and able to access – ‘immediate knowledge’.  The authorities often labelled these children as having syndromes and disorders, so difficult was it for the educational psychologists to understand that there were other ways of knowing beyond reasoning.  I, on the other hand, have always loved working with such kids, learning from them and picking up from them ways to get back in touch with the immediate knowledge which exists beyond time and space.

Then, quite suddenly, Seth used the word ‘savant’ and another piece of knowledge fitted into the puzzle.  The word has usually been applied (and was used in that context in his book) to non-verbal autistic people who demonstrate incredible skills or feats of memory – super fast mathematical calculations, drawing whole city sky-scapes from memory, playing an instrument without any tuition and so forth.  I smiled, remembering the 8-year-old aspie I once taught who had ‘memorised’ an entire two page list of phone numbers he had seen once in his home, and had run up a huge phone bill for his parents by calling all these people for a chat!

So I’d argue that – since around 1980 in particular, but in smaller numbers before that time – we have been fortunate enough to share our lives with a group of people who are managing (not without difficulty and stress, I might add) to live physical lives yet to keep open a link to the ‘immediate knowledge’ that is Akasha or The Cosmos, and is entirely limitless.

Let me finish with a Will story:  A few weeks ago, my brilliantly ‘connected’ aspie friend Will had told me that he sometimes feels he ‘knows’ things about people he passes in the street.  He’d not been able to verify his knowledge, so more-or-less dismissed it.  However it just so happened that we were contacted by a gentleman in the US who asked whether Will could identify a medical condition he was suffering with and give him some guidance on what caused it.  Not only did Will correctly pinpoint a condition affecting this man, he also formed a mental image of what he looked like.  When I later Googled the man and found and sent Will a photo, he said that was markedly similar to what he had seen.

Curious, I then sent him the name of a friend of mine – someone he has never met or heard me speak of.  Within minutes, he told me she had black, shoulder length hair, described the decor in her home, told me she had mobility problems which particularly affected one side of her body and identified that she was having particular stresses at this time with her children.  Everything he said was 100% accurate.

THAT was ‘immediate knowledge’ – no reasoning involved.

 

 

My Life on Hold?

An interesting one this:

I was recently told by a well-meaning friend that I was ‘putting my life on hold’ for the sake of accommodating the complex needs of my friend Will.  She pointed out that I ‘give up’ every Sunday afternoon to work with him on remote viewing (“Can’t he do it at other times?”/ “Well he tries sometimes, but he copes best when routines are set up and feels most comfortable that way.”).  She added that I’d undertaken a six hour round trip to London to possibly spend a short time meeting up with him (I LOVE my coach trips to London and meeting with him was the icing on the cake of an otherwise enjoyable day), that I give huge amounts of time and energy to assist him in maintaining our contact and am always putting his needs before my own.

So that set me thinking.  A lot.

If I say I don’t begrudge any of the time or effort I spend trying to work within with the limitations his social anxiety and bouts of depression and withdrawal place on our relationship, I run the risk of being labelled co-dependent.  That one has been levelled at me, too, on several occasions by people who – again – feel I’m ‘wasting’ my life.

Strange how our society views the way we spend our time, don’t you think?

I suppose I could be spending those ‘given up’ Sunday afternoons pootling around Somerset in the car of the aforementioned friend, stopping off for a cup of tea at a garden centre somewhere.  I could spend them watching old movies on TV.  I could read a book or check Facebook.  There are many things I could do.  Yet I choose to hold groundbreaking conversations with a brilliant young man, whose originality and psychic skills never cease to amaze me.  I choose to travel to interesting places – ancient sites, bustling cities or interesting landscapes – so that he can sit in his home, remotely view my location and, in ways that are a mystery to us both, send detailed sketches or written descriptions of the place I’m in.

Which of those would be a ‘waste’ of my time?

I’d argue that none of them could ever be a waste.

I’d argue that my life is never ‘on hold’.

I’d argue that my ‘Life’ – or the portion of it that I’ve chosen to spend embodied as the human I am currently being – is a precious gift my greater self has given to me.  It’s all about experiencing through my senses, in a way that isn’t possible when I’m in spirit.  It’s about learning through those experiences.  It’s about adding to the cumulative knowledge and awareness of All That Is.

More than that, I believe that every single one of us has a ‘pre-planned’ life purpose, or theme – something we’ve decided in advance to work with in this particular lifetime.  That could be exploring aspects of illness/wellness, of poverty/wealth, of victim-hood/control or one of a thousand other explorations.  Aspects of that pre-selected theme turn up repeatedly in people’s lives.  They have been born in this particular era, at their particular location, the better to encounter situations and other individuals who will push them to explore and discover.  Once a ‘lesson’ is learned, a new situation will appear, to allow the person to put their new knowledge into practice.  That will, of course, throw up a new set of challenges and discoveries.  And so it goes, until we finally decide (at soul level, usually) that we’ve gleaned all we can from that life.  At that point, we move back into spirit and, perhaps, decide what we’d like to explore on our next sojourn on the blue planet.

I watch with wonder and delight as my interactions with Will allow me to explore our relationship with the non-local and the vaster aspects of our psyche.  I also take great joy from the opportunity he gives me to explore aspects of Autistic Spectrum Perception.  Each fresh discovery or revelation allows me to work more effectively and appropriately with him and with the other ASP young people I encounter.

So I know – absolutely KNOW – that my life is ‘on purpose’ and is as fulfilling and amazing as I could wish it to be.  No matter how I choose to spend it and how pointless or foolish my activities may seem to others, I – like every other human, being – am learning, developing and making the most of everything this experience has to offer.

 

When Worlds Collide

A three hour coach ride passes so much better when you find yourself seated next to someone interesting to chat to.

My neighbour yesterday was, it emerged, travelling to London for a brief, bittersweet half day with her daughter.  It was the girl’s birthday.  She’d booked herself into a posh hotel in the West End.  They were to have champagne, then lunch somewhere luxurious.  The daughter would unwrap her presents then – ‘a comfort sack’ with such items as a thick duvet, pillow and covers, hand warmers, hot chocolate mix…  Tomorrow the young lady will take all her spoils and return to Greece, where she works for the UN, caring for the refugees.
“It’s so desperately cold there, Mum,” she’d told her mother. “Just so desperate”.

I wondered how it felt for that young woman to move between those two quite different worlds – her opulent English lifestyle and the squalor and tragedy of the transit camps.  How must the smells, the sounds, the sickness and pain feel to someone who has grown up in such a different culture?  How, indeed, must it feel for the inhabitants of the camps, wrenched from their lives in such violence and terror?

 

“And you?” my neighbour enquired.  “Why are you going to London?”

“Oh,” I said, with a slight smile, “I’m probably going to enjoy a few hours in the British Museum.  And I might be meeting a friend.”

Well it was a long journey, so gradually my story came out too.  If we did meet, it would be no less shocking and difficult a transition for my friend than her daughter’s move to Greece had been.

Just as the refugee camps would seem overwhelmingly disgusting and sickening to us – their sights, smells and emotional charge far beyond what we feel able to cope with – so our world is, for people like my friend.  For him, and so many other super-sensitive people who live with autistic spectrum perception in its many and amazing forms, our world – in all its raw, visceral physicality can be almost too much to cope with.  Their senses are easily overwhelmed by what, to us, would seem trivial.  Their anxiety never sleeps.  Their fears grapple constantly at their throats with sharp, threatening fingers.  Small wonder so many would prefer to remain in the insular, relatively safe surroundings of the worlds they have built for themselves.  Why – given the choice – would they venture out into the uncertainties of our unfamiliar and terrifying world?

The answer is the same as for the young lady working for the UN – compassion, humanity, generosity of spirit.  They want to help us.  They want to build bridges.  They want to reach into our world and show us their perspectives.  If they manage it, we will be so much richer for it, but if they don’t, we have no right to criticise them.  Every single day, they struggle to do what they can to reach into our world.  And there will be days they just can’t.

When I reached London, he was still at home, holed up in an agony of indecision.  If he managed a meeting, it would be the first for many years.  The least I could do was to make it as easy as possible for him.
‘No rush,’ I messaged.  ‘I’ll head for the museum. Text me later if you feel able to meet somewhere.’

An hour later I was a stranger wandering in the world of the Abyssinians: huge bas-reliefs of Kings and courtiers.  ‘Spirit helpers’ with the heads of eagles and small handbags held objects like oversized pine cones against the backs of the humans’ heads.  Why?  Pineal gland connection perhaps?  What was in the bags?  What favoured realm had these beings descended from, to help their human counterparts?

Then my phone pinged.

‘I’m going to come.  I’m in central London.  Shall I meet you at the British Museum or elsewhere?’

‘The museum’s crammed with people,’ I told him, when I’d had a moment.  ‘Let’s meet in one of the squares nearby.’

On my way out I paused to stare in awe once again at the Rosetta stone, that magical jigsaw piece that had given the modern world a way into the world of other races at other times.  For me, at that moment, the stone became a talisman, allowing my world and my friend’s to come together for a short while.

Bloomsbury, like much of London, has many lovely, peaceful squares – small oases of calm and greenery amidst the hubbub of traffic and commerce.  I selected a calm, pleasant open space where I felt he’d be most comfortable, sat on a bench and waited.  I sat at one end and placed my bags beside me, knowing he’d need more body space than most would consider normal for lifelong friends.  I remained seated when he arrived.  No exclamation of delight, no bear hugs or grasping of hands.
“Alright?” he said simply.
“Yes,” I said quietly.  “And well done.”

Old friends.  Old friends.  Sat on a park bench like bookends.
Paul Simon’s song echoed in my mind from another of my distant worlds.

I’d written much of what I wanted to say on paper.  He finds the written word easier to handle than speech – less unpredictable.  So for the first few minutes he sat and read in silence.  Then we talked.  He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead; body language and facial expression are confusing for him, so it’s easier if he cuts them out.  Still there were deep discussions and moments of humour, with both of us laughing out loud.  There were connections and shared memories of times when we’d spent so many days and hours together.  It was wonderful.

And because I know he finds transitions difficult, I made the decision on when to leave.  Or perhaps the weather did, as the rain that had been threatening all afternoon eventually began to fall.

Neither of us said, “See you soon.”  Who knows?   And what does it matter?  Our worlds had come together for that short while without any explosions or disasters and we are closer for that experience.

Not very

I can’t remember when our last meeting was.  If you don’t know it’s going to be the last time, you don’t take particular note of it, I suppose.

I remember my last meeting with his mother.  It was in the hospice.  That meeting is easy to recall, because we were both all too aware that she’d have moved beyond her body within a few days.  We had a rather surreal conversation about this and that – mostly her plans for the funeral and what she wanted me to do to help care for her little boy.  I kept asking whether she was tired and would prefer me to leave and she kept saying, ‘No.  I don’t want you to go yet.’  But eventually she was tired and she did need to sleep and we hugged and cried a bit and said none of the things people usually say when they are parting: ‘See you soon’, ‘Keep in touch’, ‘Take care of yourself’.  It was an adieu moment, not an au revoir.

When I last saw her son – the little boy who had grown up to be a man and who had become just like one of my own children to me – he DID say, ‘See you soon.’  I distinctly remember that part, although I can’t quite remember where we were.  He was waving me off on a bus or a train or something.  He’d been anxious, awkward, twitchy – more so that I’d seen him before.  He’d kept wheeling around and looking suspiciously about him, as if he expected an assassin to come lurching out of the crowd.  He’d looked awful.  There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin and much of his hair had fallen out in untidy clumps.  Alopecia, he told me.  Stress, the doctor had told him.  It might grow back or it might not.

He didn’t see me soon, nor I him.  The months became years – probably six or seven.  I feel I should be able to remember.  Each time I suggested meeting, there was a flat ‘No.’  If I pestered for a reason, I’d get, ‘Can’t do it’ or ‘Too stressful.’

Last week, I suggested it again.  He’s been coming out, I feel, agonisingly slowly, of the deepest slough of despair, social anxiety and depression.  His texts and emails have been far more chatty and even shown flashes of the old sense of humour.  He accused me of being paranoid about something, adding, ‘And yes, I know that’s rich, coming from me.’

He didn’t say ‘No’.

True, he didn’t come anywhere close to saying ‘Yes’, but he was far more concerned that he wouldn’t be able to commit to a meeting until the day itself, and that as we live far apart, I might have a wasted journey to London.

I told him I love London – in small doses – and that I’d enjoy a day trip there in any case.  I told him I’d plan a trip to the British Museum, another old and much-loved friend.  I told him that if he felt able to join me, that would be great, but I’d have a great day in any case.

You don’t get sighs in texts, unless they’re intentionally written in those silly little arrow things (<sighs>) but I could feel his as he replied, ‘That’s up to you but I don’t want to get your hopes up.’
So my coach ticket is booked.  Next Saturday I’ll begin the 3 hour trek to London.  I’ll be caught (as happened so often, when his mental state waxed and waned throughout his teens) somewhere between assuring myself that he’ll be there, in order to manifest the reality, and stoically preparing for a pleasant day wandering through the delights of the museum, just in case.

Whatever happens, though, I’m jubilant.  When I asked how likely he was to be there, he replied, ‘Not very.’  That’s a long way past ‘Not at all’.  There will be other chances, other days.  Just as his mother begged me, all those years ago, I’ve never given up on him, never thrown in the towel, and nor has he.  I’m proud of us both for that.

Unempirical Science Part 2: Getting Metafizzy

Well I did it: my civic duty over for another year.  I stewarded and judged at the local harvest show yesterday.

It was a busy time.  Since there was a huge clock on the wall, just ahead of where I was sitting, I was able to notice when 9:30 (the time we had set for the future remote viewing last week) came and went.  There was a queue of eager people wishing to enter their wonky veg, giant marrows, flower arrangements et al for the show, though, so I had little time to stop and think about it, other than to note that I was exactly where I’d expected to be – and where William had already ‘seen’ me –  when we did the viewing last weekend.  (Oh, I forgot to mention last time – he viewed a ‘large round flat object’ which he felt was rotating.  He caught me glancing up at the clock, then!)

If you’ve read my previous post, you will have seen the range of philosophical issues and dilemmas this glimpse into the future posed for us.  As I mentioned, though, Will had one further question.  Like most of his questions, it was deceptively simple yet devastating in its implications.

What would have happened, he asked, if I’d got up yesterday morning and refused to leave my house?
Oh.  That one had me foxed.  Of course I had no intention of doing that; I’d promised to be at the show.  Others were relying on me being there.  That wasn’t the point, though.  I still had free choice.  I could have opted to do any number of other things.  Koimul had told us Will wasn’t in any way influencing my future or affecting my self-determination… so we had a paradox.

I thought long and hard, then groaned – a deep miserable groan.  There was only one answer that fitted – the multiverse theory.  And I hated the multiverse theory.  Will, on the other hand, was quite happy to espouse it.

Grumbling gently to myself, I went back to check with Koimul.

HIS QUESTION IS GOOD, Koimul told me.  HE HIMSELF HAS WRITTEN THE ANSWER

True.  In The Words of William Volume One, he says:

A universe will be created for every possible outcome of an event.  For example, if one was taking a walk and for whatever reason turned left another universe will be automatically created where the person did not turn left.  There would be universes where one turned right, one stood still, one carried on straight and for every other possibility.  These universes would be identical to the original universe up to the point where the event took place.  After the event these universes could differ only slightly or to an extent beyond imagination… These events can occur on any scale from the smallest change of position of an atom to the end of the universe.  This is an occurrence which occurs automatically all the time and beyond the knowledge of most people.  There is nothing wrong with this; it is simply a part of life.

YES, that was the extract Koimul had in mind.

“Well I can’t deny that I feel a bit disappointed,” I said.  ” I loved the idea of everything happening at the eternal ‘now’ point, but if that means ‘everything’ as in all possible choices, doesn’t that make remote viewing rather arbitrary?  If the physics is the way you’ve explained it, why should the probability of getting it right decrease for viewings in the future?”

MISTAKES ARE ALWAYS POSSIBLE BUT VERY UNLIKELY.
Although I was dowsing the answer on my computer keyboard, I could feel Koimul trying to soothe and reassure me.  I was told that viewing a future location where I’d already made firm plans to be was a good choice, for that very reason.  Then Koimul went on:
NOT DOING WHAT YOU PLANNED WOULD MEAN STEPPING INTO AN ALTERNATE LIFE

“That sounds quite serious,” I said.  “Do we often do that or is it an unusual occurrence?”

YOU LIVE ALL YOUR LIVES SO NOT SERIOUS IN THAT RESPECT BUT IT WOULD HAVE REPERCUSSIONS.  THERE IS LITTLE JUSTIFICATION IN THIS CASE

I agreed completely, but I was curious now.

”  But do we – as a species, I mean – often ‘jump ship’ in this way?” I persisted.

NOT MANY PEOPLE DO

So, it seems, I was being told that while Will’s multiple universes undoubtedly exist, and while it is possible to change what Koimul calls one’s TRAJECTORY, such a choice should not be taken lightly.  Koimul gave me an example of the occasion, in my own current lifetime, when I had purposely altered my ‘trajectory’ and yes – the repercussions had been massive, and are still playing out in the lives of several people.

I asked Koimul to comment on how, in Will’s version of the theory, he had some alternative universes where only a few atoms were different and others where they were unrecognisable.

HE IS RIGHT, BUT CHANGING TO A VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL WORLD IS POINTLESS;   TO AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE ONE IS SAWING YOUR EXPERIENCE INTO PIECES FOR NO PURPOSE.

Intriguing.

I wonder where our next adventures in time and space will take us…