Seeker: Hello, James.
I trust you’re well and thriving. I know you are, as I’ve seen Adri’s photographs from Suryalila, and you look radiant. I’m sure the ageing process has its challenges, but you’re clearly not held back by that. I would have dearly loved to have come to the retreat, but the timing wasn’t right.
I have a lot going on my side. In a way it’s not Vedanta-related so I feel that I don’t want to take up your time telling you too much, but on the other hand, I do feel that it’s appropriate to fill you in a bit, if only because I don’t want to lose the contact with you, as I will hopefully be able to resume things with you more specifically around Vedanta, some time in the future.
About two weeks I discovered or realised or recognised that I have high-functioning autism, or Aspergers. It’s something that has come up on the radar a few times in the past, but I’d dismissed it – mostly due to not understanding what the “condition” meant. It’s not really a condition even. It’s just a wiring that is atypical so you’re not the same as most people (although they’re discovering there’s a huge number of people who are made this way, but don’t realise it) and this atypical wiring is mostly only problematic because “we” live in a world that’s ruled and driven by an almost opposite wiring. I saw that subjectively, because I’m high-functioning in it. So I have a brain and a capacity that can assimilate and process at a far higher rate and complexity than perhaps other people with it can. So how that I understand it, it’s as if my mind is simply downloading all the information and insight about how this body mind is wired, reorganising where everything has been a tangled mess, and just tidying things up. It’s overwhelming and sometimes distressing when I realise how much I’ve had to struggle to survive all these years because of this mismatch, but I know I’ll get to a point where I understand and come into alignment with how I am in relation to the rest of society, and I will thrive. It is absolutely a gift, and Isvara has been very good to me (I know the language of that is wonky, but I don’t know how else to say it) in equipping me for this journey. What I mean is, there are aspects to it that will make the assimilation of the teachings much easier, once I get on top of my life situation and the impact of having not understood the way things work for someone with Aspergers. I need certain things that I haven’t focused on getting or giving myself. (When I speak of myself I just mean the jiva. I know that is just what it is. But it’s the interface that I travel with or by or in, so I have to refer to that as myself. As we know of course, it’s not who I am. It’s more like what I am for now, kind of. ☺
I wish I could explain all the aspects to it that I’m referring to, but it’s too vast to do so. One aspect that’s vital in it all, is that I’m finally able to come to terms with my upbringing. My parents were just ill-equipped to care for and deal with a child who they didn’t understand. Aspergers mainly means one has terrible difficulty fitting into society, because we don’t understand how it works. We’re kind of naive about the social cues and the contracts and hidden exchanges that other people know by instinct. It’s very bewildering and distressing at times, when we do things that are natural for us, but foreign to everyone else. So we get “into trouble” but we don’t know why or what we did “wrong.” So as a child I was in this bubble of my own way of being, and my parents had no clue as to how to deal with that, and kept trying to make me conform – I assume. That sounds a bit off, as I don’t think they had an agenda. Maybe it’s better to say – the difficulties I was having to cope, for instance, with the sensory overload of the world, led to massive emotional outbursts of anger and frustration. They handled that badly and it just led to a lot of conflict and drama. All I needed was soothing and calm, but instead there was just an escalation of intensity and isolation. I think one or both of my parents have the condition too, although possibly only my mother. So my life-long quest to understand why she was so distant and absent whilst pretending to be a normal mother, and whilst insisting that our lives were normal when I knew they weren’t, has been a major challenge for me in terms of making peace with my parents. And I know that it’s important to do so, but I just couldn’t. I now have absolute compassion for them. I won’t say more on that, but it’s in process as I have to try and get them to understand all of this so that they too can be more at peace.
A lot of the self-image issues I’ve had have simply been a result of a lifetime of messages that I’m not okay and I need to be different to be acceptable to others. Part of my mind has always been perfectly okay with how I’m worried, but the sense that I don’t fit in has been the difficulty. Take, for example, the retreat last year. That week was actually hellish for me because of people. I just felt SO conspicuous, and the volume of how I couldn’t fit in at mealtimes and around the people was painful. It’s not that I needed to fit in, but there is always around people, a need to blend in – and I find that challenging. Small talk drives me insane, unless there’s something worthwhile to talk about. I feel confronted if anyone interrogates me, but I can’t tell whether whatever I say will be received with total acceptance. I don’t mean that I need people to love me so much, as I couldn’t up till now handle being told that I “should” do things that I hadn’t realised that I “should” do. That doesn’t sound very clear. I can’t think of an example either.
Anyway, the bottom line is – I totally love and accept this jiva now that I understand her world. It’ll all clicked into place. Part of the condition includes something called “pathological demand avoidance” (PDA), which means an extreme avoidance of doing what you have to do. I don’t understand it yet, but it’s a textbook issue, so I feel relieved to finally know that it truly isn’t that I don’t want to do what I have to do. But something prevents me from doing so. That’s the main issue that has created a lot of hassle and chaos for me in practical living. And it’s the thing I have to overcome in order to bring order into my day-to-day life, and then eventually I’ll be able to apply myself to the teachings, hopefully with a different approach that better suits my wiring, which resists doing what I have to and want to do, but I just haven’t been able to.
I need to go to work now, so will end there. I have the most incredible and deep sense of gratitude and love for you that I cannot begin to express or explain. You have been the mirror of the Self that I have absolutely needed, and I thank you for that, with all that I am.
Blessing and love to you and to Sundari too.
James: I really love your emails. They are so truthful. I found this one very interesting. It’s definitely Vedanta-related. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the clarity of your insight into the nature of your mind is due to your dedication to Self-inquiry. This objectivity shows that you have assimilated Self-knowledge to a considerable degree. From the beginning I felt that you processed information differently from most people. I saw it as a kind of “blind spot,” and took it as a classic case of denial. But your wiring – your svabhava, in Sanskrit – is just different. Now that you have this kind of clarity it will be much easier to negotiate your interactions with others.
It’s also Vedanta-related because developing compassion for your parents develops compassion. It’s a karma yoga issue, i.e. turning the emotion related to yourself and others over to Isvara because Isvara, not you, wired you that way. Sundari and I were discussing your letter, and she mentioned a book called The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. which discusses the relationship between the individual and society. She sent you a few pages that encapsulate the idea, which I will briefly summarize in Vedantaspeak.
The words “individual” and “society” are purely concepts. When you drill down into them they basically have no intrinsic meaning, like all dualistic concepts. They are not real, because speaking of an individual without the idea of its context, society, is meaningless, and vice versa. But insofar as individuals take themselves to be individuals, which admittedly implies another option, it is useful to understand a few so-called facts.
The problem of fitting in is due to a very pervasive ever-present thought: my self-worth is defined completely by how close my behavior conforms with what is considered “normal.” In terms of the social construct, behavior can be symbolized by a bell-shaped curve. Most behavior falls in the middle, which is defined as normal, whereas the behavior on either end is considered abnormal. But the problem lies in the simple fact that one’s behavior (svadharma) is a result of one’s nature (svabhava), which we call one’s wiring, or programming. It is a problem because we don’t wire ourselves, we are wired by “God,” i.e. whatever wrote the program. Understanding this means that whatever guilt you feel for not conforming to the norm is completely gratuitous, which means that you should be comfortable as a misfit.
Owing to the internet, the world is in the process of atomization, so society is starting to recognize that people have their own “truth.” So the pressure to conform is much reduced. In any case, you are free to let go of the belief that people who are wired differently are qualified to evaluate you. Whether you have a name for it like Aspergers or not, a fraction of every society is always wired differently. The good news is that they don’t burn us at the state or crucify us as they did in the good old days.
~ Much love, James
