LOOKING INTO THE DARK PLACES
Given that my life has always been a sequence of bizarre adventure supervised by Overseeing synchronicity, it was only a matter of our concept of time before a presenting and concluding picture would form. In the late seventies my first contact with organized Tibetan Buddhism was a stay at the Karma-Kagyu Samye-Ling Tibetan Centre and monastery in Dumfriesshire, Scotland; the first Tibetan centre in Britain and named after the first monastery in Tibet.
Dan Green:
The Coming Race
- From Buddha to Asperger
© Dan Green 2009
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Some twenty-one years later having renounced my Buddhism, I spent two and a half years working with persons with autism and Asperger Syndrome at Heath Farm, the first residential centre for adults with autism in Lincolnshire, England. A ‘heath’ is any of various low-growing shrubs of the genus Erica - many species also called ‘heather’. Heather is also called ‘ling’! That the language of the Mother Tongue I have so frequently written about should find its timely
way into my life at a point on my DNA blueprint is no mystery - the word ‘language’ tracing back to Middle English ‘langage’ from Old French from Gallo-Roman ‘linguaticum', from the Latin ‘lingua’, meaning tongue, language. Language, Buddhism, autism - something had just connected all three.
By 1999 I had consolidated a friendship with Robert Fantasia, President of the international Boston Higashi School in Massachusetts, a program serving children and
Samye-Ling Tibetan Centre, Dumfries, Scotland
Boston Higashi School, Randolph, USA
adults with autism from all over the world with systematic education through group dynamics. During one of my visits on a late summer Sports Day, I experienced one of the most calming and harmonic days of my life parallel to another in May 1994 at Samye-Ling when HH the Dalai Lama was paying a special visit before 20,000 attendees to consecrate the completed Temple that had been in construction since 1970. Being amidst Tibetan Buddhists and persons with autism, I found
myself recognising a ‘sameness’ and similar deep vibe, and wondered why this could be so. It seemed to me that an onus was about to be placed on my shoulders to investigate a brave hypothesis and a consequent conclusion and when in 2002 my initial attempt, a limited edition book “Buddha and The Autist,’ was well received by British autism expert Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen at his Research Centre within Cambridge University, this confidence assisted me to delve deeper.
Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen comments:
' Very interesting and thought provoking.'
Key to Buddhist doctrine is the concept of impermanence, the continual changing nature of all beings and objects. Given this, we can ask a question - if Buddhism, instigated by the presence and investigations of one Gautama Buddha, - like all else must change, then into what? In September 2009, the National Health Service in England made a startling announcement, that one in every hundred adults in the country has autism, the neurological condition described as a complex developmental disability. No-one really knows why people have autism, or why there is an alarming worldwide increase in its appearance. Millions of people across the world also have a deep rooted belief in the phenomenon of ‘UFOs' and would like to attribute them to being extra-terrestrial spacecraft piloted by ‘aliens’. Scientists who have little patience with what they consider as an outlandish expectation, cut to the quick
and say provide the evidence. Extra-terrestrial DNA would be the clincher, but I think the real proof concerns an alternative neurological wiring. My inquiry will set about to inter-related what will happen to Buddhism, why the inexplicable global rise in autism, and are there aliens, by trying to explain a new type of Buddhism that has entered our world, a new species in fact, and by comparison with our held concepts of ‘normal’ quite legitimately alien. Where to start to explain the full tapestry? Firstly, for convenience, allow me to refer in this essay to persons or a person with autism as a PWA. Two and one half thousand years ago in the Far East a seed was planted from which would germinate and grow a great movement involving the practices of meditation, relaxation, mind control, philosophical respect and admiration. Approximately 2,440 years later, in the West, a medical profession diagnosed and classified what they decide to term a brain condition and its ‘sufferer’, causing a misery to those closest to it, and yet both factions seeming to be in pursuit of a common goal - a cosmic glimpse of reality. Is this the worst possible dichotomy of thought, the concrete Western mind versus the enlightenment of the East? It is almost as if we are discussing the two individually functioning lobes of the brain. The first thing we learn in Buddhism is that all life is suffering - the same suffering experienced by those who witness what they see as the plight of the classic mute and near immobile PWA? Why is the PWA condemned for not leaving the sanctuary of their own safe, private inner world to venture out into our more dangerous version, a less safer society with enforced mores, and yet the whole notion of a spiritual search for Buddhist Schools and sects the world over is to turn within and to renounce this outside material plane? Both Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner and Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger, joint claimant founders of modern day autism, emphasized the word ‘aloneness’, more correctly, a mental aloneness, as the predominant and most obvious feature of autism. To quote Kanner regarding this definite choice of the term, we read, ‘It whenever possible disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from outside.’ Kanner went on to stress that the lack of contact he was describing was only in dealing with people whereas on the other hand objects might be acceptable. He chose his other defining feature as obsessive insistence on sameness, ’Most simply in the form of repetitive stereotyped movements and noises, additionally in the adoption of elaborate rituals and routines and lastly, the surfacing of strange, narrow preoccupations better expressed as highly focused intense fascinations and fixations.’
Leo Kanner
Let us backtrack for a moment as we come away from this clinical diagnosis and view it through the eyes of a nirvana seeking bhikkhu Buddhist monk. Does Buddhism not teach that it is necessary to attain the state of enlightenment - a view of reality - by shutting out anything that comes from the outside (i.e. the deception of the material world, all not as it seems, as new models and paradigms in quantum theory attest) and to concentrate on the within? That Kanner found no problem with response to objects is equally acceptable to the Buddhist thinker, the emphasis on the focus for meditational purposes, the very intention of meditation to raise consciousness from the bland, everyday mundane.
Hans Asperger
These states in the Buddhist can be expressed by a whole emotional gamut, all rapidly changing seasons of the autistic mind. Some PWA have their own body postures, to some degree so do schizophrenics - these are natural to the autistic condition, directives from a department functioning in the brain that most of us have ‘switched off’. It is a yoga they did not have to learn, a method of freeing their nervous system from conditioned perception. Naturally conducive to the autistic state of a heightened and alternative awareness, their rocking to and fro, if not to pulse beats, is an externalization of the balance of the mind. To an outside viewer of the classic autistic condition, one might say here was a creature in sufferance - it would certainly look so from a non-PWA point of view. A visible detachment, a specific concentration of mind, an individual lost, with nothing to gain and nowhere to go. It simply ‘is’. It has let go in this world. It simply watches. It has no desire. It is a figure representative of a termination of personal existence. In our non-autistic world it must be suffering, but in its own autistic world it is blissful - it is a glimpse of that cosmic reality that can be only ever continually be pursued, far divorced from our daily, shackled and dense bare level. PWA are the best quantum physicists I know of. In philosophical terms it has been held that ‘reality is simply the collective vast experience shared by the majority of the world population on a daily basis. It is self-programmed by each and every individual’s brain. It is done at such a great speed that we are generally unaware that we are like an editor in his suite, editing cinematic film in our constant video. Non-PWA, using the vastly common open departments of the brain, edit out a vast number of things that are going on about us in this world; vibrations, frequencies and rays, referred to as generally unseen and unheard - that in ‘reality’ are there and do exist, putting us at odds with the vastly more sensitive PWA with their strangely opened extra channels. Confusion as to our finalized everyday product and perspective with what is actual external reality is the Maya of normal consciousness, as spoken of by Buddha. The PWA is unbridled from conditional perception, they are more a totality, a whole at one with the All, and yet we wish to pity them and drag them into our world of multiple foibles and desires, the illusionary realm of individualness. PWA are seen to have a problem identifying themselves in a mirror or in a photograph. In Zen Buddhist terms they are viewing the ‘empty mirror, or reality’. For a Buddhist not to see nor understand his/her reflection in the mirror would be for them to have discovered and seen their ‘Original Face’ - a Zen term for enlightenment. People will always make mistakes looking for answers to autism; they look for it outside of itself, looking at it from outside of itself. You can’t look into something that’s inside out! The DNA blueprint for Man is altering, mutating, and evolving the human race. Whether great numbers of population can take or are ready for this strain does not alter the fact that the process has begun, since autistic births were first recognized. Brains capable of it, are now functioning in a manner hitherto unknown - more young prodigies are being born. It is an evolutionary march leading to a great Something. It is reminiscent of the motion movie ‘2010’ - sequel to the seminal ‘2001; A Space Odyssey’ - wherein a disembodied astronaut, who had left earth, could only reappear for moments on his wife’s TV screen to declare, ’Something wonderful is going to happen’. The space traveller's name in this epic work of fiction from Arthur C. Clarke’s brain was Bowman. I suspect his Collective Unconscious was at work concealing in basic anagram both ‘womb’ and ‘woman’. Something wonderful IS going to happen! Hans Asperger, co-founder of the autistic condition, described autistic intelligence as untouched by tradition and culture, calling
it unconventional, unorthodox, strangely ‘pure’ and original, comparable to the intelligence of true creativity. The work of British neurologist and New York based Oliver Sacks, popularizing the field of neuropsychology, has shown how neurological dysfunctions within autism can set free hidden, natural abilities. One of the numerous remarkable cases Sacks has collected is of two seriously handicapped twins who could neither add nor subtract basic sums but managed to entertain themselves by reeling off 12-digit prime numbers. How they could do this most remarkable feat was outside the area of maths in general, of which they knew hardly a thing - it arose from an aptitude to be able to reflect a private understanding of the harmonies between numbers. Speculation arising from Sacks’ work ponders over whether mathematics aesthetics and music can be
perceived as ‘landscapes’ - as opposed to logical systems understood through rational deduction - in which the mind surveys in an instant. The PWA as a species is still evolving, the prototype with us now is the latest presentation in the mutation of the truly most complex mystery known to the inhabitants of earth - no, not UFOs and aliens, these concepts we misunderstand or interpret to our own satisfaction, predilection and vanities - but the human brain. No-one is left out, we all possess one. The only mystery that should concern us as a race is nearer than we ever thought, an organ far greater than any computer could ever be, as no brain depends on linear-sequential programs. When asked how autistic prodigies perform their amazing feats, whatever they may be, these newly births answer the same and in simply the best way they can, ‘It is in my head’, they will say. How can a savant, for example, and it has been recorded, be able to figure out the cube root of a six-figure digit in six seconds without a knowledge of mathematics? The answer is in their head! Rather, a specifically designed brain. But of which department? The autistic department. But the PWA is a species, a new order with access to their own departments, dipping in in a flash. How the fanatical geneticist would like to locate and isolate the autistic intelligence gene and try to draw on that unfathomable well. The intelligence is the Great Wisdom, the Nirvana chased by the Vajrayana Buddhist ideal, direct experience with cosmic reality. The purest state of becoming a true astronaut. Autism is leading bamboozled neurologists on a migratory course. Some feats accomplished by prodigies and savants would have some regard the PWA’s ability as ‘paranormal’, and here again it meets head on with the mysticism experienced by the Tibetan school of Vajrayana, or Lamaism. But not so. This is the dawning of the science of a new millennium. The successor to the Buddhist is an inherent intelligence within evolution, a further advanced and more natural component part of an impending cosmic childbirth - a race that would learn and recognize both sounds and rhythms in preparation for delivery of the birth.
© Dan Green 2009
Related article: The Mother of All Codes... and the role of the Tibetan Buddhist
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This ‘obsessive’ insistence on sameness echoes Buddhist thought that the phenomenal world that we entertain in our ordinary consciousness is an illusion and that ultimate reality is impartial and lacking differentiation? It will be the same, if everything is the same i.e. One. The PWA sees this wholeness. They are one another, eluding this human delusion of separateness. Their sameness is represented in the form of repetitive stereotypical movements and noises, additionally on the adoption of elaborate rituals and routines. This strikes a chord with the schooling of Vajrayana Buddhism, the Diamond Vehicle that extends to Tibet, China and Japan, with its own distinctive features of various contrived ceremonies or rituals whereupon trance-like states can be achieved; stress laid on the use of an endless number of mantras - sounds repeated over and over, and mudras, vocalization of strange sounds with physical gestures that accompany worship. The intense rocking backward and forward as a symptom displayed by many a classic PWA is replicated by the rows upon rows of Tibetan monks at the height of a ritual Puja ceremony as they sit cross-legged on the floor rocking in tandem to strategic and unattractive murmuring sounds and chants. Another symptom catalogued and classified in autism is the obsession with spinning objects and things that spin, this too can be observed by turning our attention to study mechanisms/objects that direct focus in prayer and worship - Kanner’s strange (to the Western mind) narrow pre-occupation expressed best as highly focused, intense fascinations and fixations - in Tibetan Schools’ prayer beads. 108 of them are used as rosaries to assist in the remembrance of the number of prostrations that novice monks undergo on a certain number of particular mantras to be chanted. Tibetan prayer wheels are sets of prayers, the wheels cylindrical in shape containing prints from sacred scriptures, spun by the hand clockwise as the devotees move themselves along the side of temple walls in which the wheels have been installed. The same brain department seeking a state of achievement seems to be operational here in both PWA and Buddhist alike, only in the PWA more naturally than the prescribed contrived method of the monk. It is a shame that the appearance of such fascinations as just described and the adoption of such rituals, often before the age of five, were not to be seen, both Kanner and Asperger thought, in any other condition. Is then, Buddhism a ‘condition?’ In Chinese Chan, popularized as Zen Buddhism, truth is transmitted from mind to mind, bypassing the normal language. Is this why classic PWA are mute? Again the correlation between Buddhist and PWA becomes noticeable regarding focus on strategic or specific objects, and in Buddhist terms this method of meditation is called Samantha or Samadhi, whereby the mind focuses in a prolonged setting of quietude on a chosen subject/s. The reward for successful meditation will be a development of relatively unrecognized insights that cannot be attained or reached by our everyday practical mind, nor again, in normal terms can be explained - simply experienced. The struggle to achieve a correct body posture through yogic training is an attempt to discover an alternate heightened awareness from everyday experience, a mental/physical stimuli, ‘feeling’ the stillness in the air like a radar or antennae, to concentrate on things we usually dismiss or bypass; colour, texture, the feeling of objects. Such things are often watched when we study the PWA’s fascination for feeling and sniffing textures. Such scenes are visibly evidence of a heightened awareness at work, inward states of mind changing the quality of usually accepted thought processes.
Mike Oram
Mary Rodwell
Karen Sawyer
Paola Harris
Ann Andrews
Neil Hague
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