When I was at the PDA North America annual conference in March, I drew a diagram in my notes:
I honestly wasn’t sure what prompted me to draw this, since it wasn’t related to the talk I was at … like at all. But I had been asking myself the question: What is autism anyway?
This is the answer that came to me in response to that question. The arrows indicate various levels of penetration of a person’s consciousness into their body. Dead is 0%, dreaming is 50% (or something), and autistic is somewhere between dreaming and fully animated. When the consciousness is only partially in the body, the remainder stays connected to source consciousness (where all consciousness originates, say).
Then, about a week or so later, I was listening to an audiobook called The Body Code, by Dr Bradley Nelson. And I listened in shock as he described this diagram!
The Body Code is a method for querying the subconscious mind, using muscle testing to receive feedback from the body (my chiropractor swore by muscle testing and used it regularly in his practice). And amongst the many kinds of questions you can pose to the subconscious, the one that stopped me in my tracks was this one:
What percent of my consciousness is connected to my body?
He goes on to describe the consciousness-body interface as one that can be partially interrupted. Death, he says, is the 0% case: your consciousness is fully out of your body, and therefore your consciousness cannot animate the body to any extent.
Being alive is when your consciousness is engaged within the body, but this level of engagement can be less than 100%.
But when your consciousness is not fully seated in the body, what actually happens?
In the case of autism, my diagram suggests the person’s consciousness remains partially connected to source consciousness, like an umbilical cord that was never completely cut. The consciousness animates as much of the body as it can, given the incomplete interface. But there is a persistent block to seating completely in the body, due to a regulatory system malfunction. If you lose a leg, that part of the body is no longer animated by your consciousness, because it’s just gone. But there are less extreme disconnections as well, preventing the full conscious animation of the body.
I’ve often felt a sense that ‘my spirit is too big for my body’. I’ve been constantly frustrated that what I can envision I cannot fully implement. I have an enormous internal world, and I want to realize it.
I once heard a kid describe the feeling of having PDA, as being in the control center of a robot, but not all the controls work. That hits it on the head for me. And it’s impossible to describe the frustration of that.
But the persistent connection to source consciousness would then allow the autistic person to mine insights from source consciousness. Like Ramanujan’s ability to compute infinite series in his head, or Einstein’s ability to ride on light beams in his mind and describe what he saw. Or Newton’s extreme powers of analysis, allowing him to solve the Brachistochrone problem in a day. Or Mozart’s innate gift for playing piano.
Is this what is going on in autism?
There’s another way I think about this that is more concrete. If the consciousness arises from the body, then a change to the body is a change to the consciousness. If the body’s ability to regulate itself can’t keep up with the changes coming from the environment, it’s busy trying to regulate. There are less resources available for embodying other ideas.
In my 2022 annual summary, I said articulating my experience on the spectrum could take me to the foundations of consciousness itself. At the time it seemed like a bit of a stretch, but here we are.
i was just discussing exactly that "Einstein’s ability to ride on light beams in his mind" with someone WE both know (the V-man) just last saturday, i kid you not.
i'm gladly surprised you're also familiar with all this. I originally heard it from Dr. Bruce Damer. He calls them "thought experiments" and "endogenous trips" meaning tripping w/o external substances
Incredibly I just saw a TikTok creator say exactly the same thing in her post about unique gifts of neurodivergent people: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZM2d8ugPo/?t=1