Autism and the Paranormal

[aihfl]

I got an official diagnosis of mild autism yesterday. What would have been called Asperger's in the recent past. It certainly would have made the last forty years or so a hell of a lot easier to have known that about myself, but teachers, school administrators and school psychologists in East Buttfuck, Tennessee in the late 1970s didn't have time for diagnoses. I was just a bad kid, end of story.

Now with that diagnosis, things from my past started making some more sense. I don't hear or see dead people, sometimes I just notice things that go unnoticed by most people. It was particularly troublesome when I was a kid. I hated being home alone after dark, and sometimes, I would have to leave the house and go outside. Ironically, the atmosphere outside in the actual dark, was much less cloying than inside the house. The only way I can describe it was a thousand people all trying to talk to you at the same time - again, not that I heard voices, but it was that same kind of sensory overload. If I did receive any "communication" from "the other side" it was never spoken to me inside or outside my mind, it took the form of a thought that seemingly came out of nowhere. That doesn't happen anymore as an adult, but I still know when someone who isn't there is there. When I still owned my house in Southern Vermont, I had an in-law apartment on the back of my garage. I spent many a late night in there bringing it up to code and getting it renovated so I could get a renter in there and there were some nights that no matter how many lights I left on or how loud I had NPR or talk radio on, it would get so uncomfortable in there I'd just have to call it quits for the evening. I guess the mother-in-law (she really did actually live there years in the past) wasn't taking kindly to me taking down the old lady wallpaper and painting over that awful 1970s sea blue-green paint.

I've had New Age-y people try and tell me about "my gift," but I don't think it's a "gift" per se. Like I said before, I think I just notice things other people don't, and the autism diagnosis goes a long way toward explaining that. And it's not something I care to try and "cultivate" either. We have zilch when it comes to a discrete base of knowledge regarding what we call the "paranormal." But just because we can't prove anything about it doesn't mean it can't be dangerous or that it's not real. Just like Marie Curie who didn't know zilch about the hazards of radiation. But her experiments ended up killing her.

Posting this just to see if anyone else has had a similar experience or thoughts to share.

 

[FLA]

I got an official diagnosis of mild autism yesterday. What would have been called Asperger's in the recent past. It certainly would have made the last forty years or so a hell of a lot easier to have known that about myself, but teachers, school administrators and school psychologists in East Buttfuck, Tennessee in the late 1970s didn't have time for diagnoses. I was just a bad kid, end of story.

Now with that diagnosis, things from my past started making some more sense. I don't hear or see dead people, sometimes I just notice things that go unnoticed by most people. It was particularly troublesome when I was a kid. I hated being home alone after dark, and sometimes, I would have to leave the house and go outside. Ironically, the atmosphere outside in the actual dark, was much less cloying than inside the house. The only way I can describe it was a thousand people all trying to talk to you at the same time - again, not that I heard voices, but it was that same kind of sensory overload. If I did receive any "communication" from "the other side" it was never spoken to me inside or outside my mind, it took the form of a thought that seemingly came out of nowhere. That doesn't happen anymore as an adult, but I still know when someone who isn't there is there. When I still owned my house in Southern Vermont, I had an in-law apartment on the back of my garage. I spent many a late night in there bringing it up to code and getting it renovated so I could get a renter in there and there were some nights that no matter how many lights I left on or how loud I had NPR or talk radio on, it would get so uncomfortable in there I'd just have to call it quits for the evening. I guess the mother-in-law (she really did actually live there years in the past) wasn't taking kindly to me taking down the old lady wallpaper and painting over that awful 1970s sea blue-green paint.

I've had New Age-y people try and tell me about "my gift," but I don't think it's a "gift" per se. Like I said before, I think I just notice things other people don't, and the autism diagnosis goes a long way toward explaining that. And it's not something I care to try and "cultivate" either. We have zilch when it comes to a discrete base of knowledge regarding what we call the "paranormal." But just because we can't prove anything about it doesn't mean it can't be dangerous or that it's not real. Just like Marie Curie who didn't know zilch about the hazards of radiation. But her experiments ended up killing her.

Posting this just to see if anyone else has had a similar experience or thoughts to share.

Wow I forgot that's how she died. And I'm sure you know shoe stores used to let you x-ray your feet in the 20's or 30's giving them who knows how many REMS?

I always liked that Zeppelin song The Battle of Evermore where he sings The Sky is Filled with Good and Bad, Mortals Never Know. I don't know anything but my intuition tells me to not mess around with dark magic. Buddhists believe there are invisible spirits around us like demons and Dakinis.

So are you saying that these voices you heard was not your own conditioned inner dialogue? I have a friend John that has these paranormal experiences. He had an experience of talking to this guy that was doing some work on his condo and John said he saw a very discontent young girl behind him, maybe showing signs of being battered bad. When John noticed her and made reference to her this guy became agitated and said there's obviously nobody there you nutcase or words to that effect. I forget the details but this worker ended up saying and "I can make you disappear too". So not that long after he saw in the paper that this guy had been arrested for murder. John's sisters husband just died and he was up there trying to offer some support and his sister said she saw a doppelganger of John. I could go on.

I don't know what to make of it. And I don't want him to think I'm skeptical. Because my degree is in engineering, I was conditioned to think only in evidence based terms.

I don't have your gift. I've had experiences of being completely removed from as an observer and duality ceased to exist. There was just no me but it wasn't scary because I was still fully aware of everything. It's such a blessing to be rid of your conditioned self.

My brother developed schizophrenia from doing too much acid. He's 9 years older than me. He was starting to show signs when I was around 15. I thought I was doing him a favor by getting acid for him. My mother never let me forget that I was partially responsible for what happened. I'm keeping her dying wish that I take care of him for the rest of my life. Anyway he hears voices but I just think it's an inability to disidentify with his inner dialogue. The only real difference between so-called normal people and schizophrenics is "normal people" don't verbalize all this mindless chatter going on in their heads.

 

[Jabberwocky]

According to a spiritual practitioner I consulted a little over a year ago I have the same soul contract that people with autism generally have. When I started to look into it it actually made a lot of sense to me. This information came to me after years of spiritual searching so I was open to it even though I don't claim to understand it. I grew up with a younger brother who was the opposite of autistic. Socially very gifted and one of the most expressive people I've ever met. An odd duo but it worked. We were playmates for most of my childhood and buddies in our teenage years though we gradually moved on into our own lives. When he learned to play drums I decided to learn to play bass and we improvised music together. He generally included me in his social circle even though I was often painfully shy. If what I was told is true, it offered a surprising explanation for my particular temperament; quiet, contemplative and happy being alone and doing my own thing most of the time. While I don't consider myself particularly good at tuning into the social cues of others I definitely pay attention to them and adjust my behavior accordingly.

My point is, when I tried to see myself in this light -- as someone with autistic tendencies -- I didn't end up seeing it as a disorder really, just a different way of being with its strengths and weakness. The weakness can be corrected through learned behaviors and the strengths, well, I enjoy those and I hope you do too. So as tempting as it can be to pathologies your diagnosis, I hope it will help you focus on the right things more to make your life fuller and richer than it otherwise would be. The paranormal or spiritual aspects of this may or may not be useful to you at this time. Without an acceptable framework for contextualizing it it can sound like a whole lotta mumbo jumbo.

 

[Foreigner]

This idea that people are all perceiving the same things in more or less the same way due to our static model of human physiology is problematic. We all need a shared common reality otherwise humans wouldn't be able to relate to one another, but the way the standard model of normal vs. deviance is used to dismiss people's experiences has always been hard for me.

When I was a kid and I would get freaked out because of visitations at night when I was in bed, or when I kept trying to warn someone not to do something because I accurately felt that it could be very bad for them, almost no one listened to me. My own mother told me to stop being ridiculous. The only people who ended up believing me were the small circle of friends I had who got to have repeat experiences of my abilities while they were around me, but it's only because they saw the proof. Our society is currently mentally trained to not believe it at all, even when faced with proof. The most common thing people do when faced with proof is make up an alternative story about what the proof means, rather than let their mind make the difficult but expansive leap to "maybe there is a perceptual reality other than mine".

This is why children with abilities learn to block them, usually by adolescence, unless they have a source of acknowledgment and encouragement around them to validate their reality. For everyone else, the ongoing dismissal and omission turns to self-dismissal. Even the word paranormal is othering.

Whether you want to call it, psychic, autistic, or whatever... I think humans in general are born with a lot of amazing sensing ability that ends up atrophying. If you look at the animal kingdom, there are creatures with senses and abilities that are our beyond our comprehension, yet we can't deny it because we are witnessing them doing it. When it comes to humans, I think we are all born with more or less the same openness.

Nine times out of ten, "cultivation" mainly means learning to undo the blocks that are preventing your clear insight. A psychic with clear insight is a good thing.

 

[FuckinAcidMan]

I feel like I had to deal with something buggin me when I was up at night as kid. I was fond of distractions like television and avoiding sleep in general due to consistent night terrors and horrific anxiety ridden hypothetical scenarios involving potential harm coming to me and others I cared about. Home alone at night I regularly heard footsteps and vague chatter downstairs below my room in the kitchen, I'd go to investigate it and of course nothing was down there. I wrote it off as an overactive imagination and later as too much weed, but lately I'm wondering if maybe time doesn't exist and some people can see "through the folds" that aren't supposed to be able to be peered over, into the "past" and "future" of a space. I mean it's all the same space, the events that happen in a house in 1989 still leave ripples in 2006 and my ripples from 2006 are probably there in 2018. IDK. I think it's arrogant to think we have completely figured out how all of this shit, human perception, life and death, the passage of time works.

 

[aihfl]

^ Yeah I avoided sleep as a kid myself. Or if I did fall asleep I'd leave lights on and then my dad would yell at me in the middle of the night about how I was "running up the light bill." Every time something unsettling happened that I would bring to my mother's attention (like pointing out that the grandfather clock kept stopping at the time of a favorite aunt's death), I'd get yelled at again, and now that I've had years to think about it, I think it because it freaked her out, too. I've been plagued by sleep problems for as long as I can remember and after drying out from drugs and alcohol, I practice good sleep hygiene (no lights, fan running for white noise etc. - easy to do now because the energy is good in my present home) but I used to have a house in southern Vermont, and that house was most definitely haunted and I did leave lights on while sleeping there. The only time I had an experience like you described was there, when someone was going up and down the stairs all night and when I went out to take a look and flipped the light on in the stairwell, the noise ceased. As soon as I was back in bed it started right back up. I already described my experience in the garage apartment attached to that house.

 

[ChristConsciousnes]

I had a best friend named Todd when I was a boy, and his younger brother had autism, and, quite paranormally, was psychic and demonstrated astonishing abilities when it came to things such as clairvoyancy, predictions of future events.

He also had eyes on the back of his head. Dozens of times, as Todd had inadvertantly discovered, if an item was thrown towards him while he was facing the other way, somehow, he knew to move at the precise moment to evade it, or better yet, occasionally, caught it without even looking.

I think the relationship between our brains in all their organic and biohologram, sentience receptacles and the kind of thing we describe as "paranormal"is one not of fluke, but conditioned limit setting and a paradigm of inertia

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

I KNEW my spazzy sense was tingling! damn, I had a feeling about you Aifhl, Come join the rest of us at intensitysquared dot com. (if you want to know, I go by my actual name there, Lestat), if you want to come over and wonder who it is that invited you. Although it doesn'ae take a genius to figure out who it is over there.

Good place to kick off your shoes and cut loose with whatever the hell you feel like. You more or less CAN'T be banned there, near enough anyone goes. We had a potential school shooter there that took MONTHS of shit and pressure before we got rid of the bastard and were back to as normal as anyone there is.

Aihfl, don't be alarmed by what seems to be paranormal. Our senses are heightened, Easily overloaded to a point of shutting down depending on the individual, but we tend to notice things fast and in great detail. It CAN be a gift, if you aim towards developing it that way, you might get help from some at intensitysquared (good pointers, ask pyraxis or couldbecousin, QV, they are all reliable and not full of shit, especially 'raxy. Odeon is a cunt, but at least he knows a thing or two about being autie. As for me, card carrying spazz, so to speak (I.e classic autism and then some. If you want to PM, go right ahead. I had a hunch you were a spazz right from the start (please, don't take that as an insult, it isn't meant to be, I use the term to describe myself,the lass I almost married and should have, and the person who I admire the most, a girl with Rett's. atypical chimaeric exp ression and funny as all fuck. Somehow I KNEW you were one of us, Don't ask me how or why, but I have a spazzy sense, when it comes to our kind, I can smell a spazz a mile off. And it looks like its worked again.

I just knew it.. So far, 100% succes rate. Once I took a spazz for an NT, but not for more than a few minutes. Never the other way round. IMO cultivate your inner spazz and let it loose, its great once you get used to how to cope with or get rid of the disadvantages.

I know what you mean about a sort of nigh-paranormal sense Christconsciousness, I used to throw knives to sharpen my senses, and if you'd have thrown a knife thrown at me from the back, I'd have probably turned right round and caught it by the handle, at least when I was well in practise, its been years since I have as target practise, but my reactions, they pick up anything and everything, Aihfl, It's normal to have a squirrely reactions, its a matter of learning, if you can, to block out what isn't needed as opposed to a flood of potentially useful data that an NT would never pick up.

Its saved me from being literally burnt to the bare bones from the waist down at least at once (I kind of followed in Curie's footsteps. Brings tears to my eyes thinking how Marie and Pierre Curie went, before their times. I'm more of a chemist than a radiologist, although admittedly I've been more than tempted to build either a cyclosynchrotron or an isochronous cyclotron, or after some recent reading a plasma wake-field accelerator. Just not read enough about the last of these to determine if an antiproton accelerator is practical with a surfatron design (essentially reliant on the weight difference of a heavy ion vs an electron in a plasma to accelerate the lighter particle preferentially, using a plasma as the perfect electrical conductor) neat as hell, can condense what would take meters of diameter for a cyclotron into centimeters. I SO need to figure out if heavy ion acceleration or even proton/antiproton acceleration is possible using the wake-field technology...

Anyhow, if you want a fellow spazz to connect with, go for it and PM me.

 

[aihfl]

LC, I'll definitely check out that site. And I've definitely been a spazz for as long as I can remember so no offense taken.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

None meant either. One warning about I2...ANYTHING goes more or less. Don't post child porn, don't stalk anyone (we've had a few weirdos over the years but they get shitcanned), and your more or less alright. Not to say you won't get a fuckton of stings if you stir up a hornets nest, but thats how it goes, unmoderated or almost so, thats about all the mods are needed for, is things like merging threads at request, and dealing with the occasional fuckwit just out to cause trouble for the sake of it. We more or less run ourselves. PM if you want to know my username over there.

And terms like spazz, etc, sorry, I didn't even think, I'm so used to it over there and to applying it to myself, I didn't think. No offense intended at all. I am, and I'm fucking proud of it

 

[iridescentblack]

I admit I used to be a bit jealous of reports I had read or heard about supernatural that other people experienced. My only encounter with supernatural was in my brother's old apartment. I was spending the night on the couch downstairs one night. Meditating, I opened my eyes and saw two head-shaped shadows appearing between three of the wooden supports that held up the guard rail or hand rail from the second floor hallway. I tried to convince myself that these were just shadows of something still on the second floor but they proceeded to move every so often. What was weirder was the shadows seemed to have eye holes. In other words, the shadows were of the shape of two persons heads and upper torso but there was light coming through where the eyes would be.

I continued meditating because it appeared as no direct threat to me but every once in a while I would look up and see them and occasionally the 'eyes' would move. They moved in sync, as to say the two holes of light would move in accordance with one another.

It was in this apartment that I first learned to circular breath. I assumed that maybe because there was supernatural energy in the apartment I was able to do things I normally couldn't do. Never had another experience like that in the number of times I spent the night in my brother's apartment. He had two other roommates and neither of them ever reported anything strange.

I am not autistic to my knowledge. Have been diagnosed as schizoaffective but I'm not entirely sure about that diagnosis. My ADHD test, afterall, was basically to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was graded on my ability to make it efficiently. I do not hold much respect for the way that they classify the 'mentally ill'. In my opinion Trump is far more mentally ill than most of the people I've ever known.

I have always had a sort of extrasensory perception, though. As a kid I was shy but very high functioning. I was often able to predict what a person was going to say and had senses of things that were about to occur. I developed senses over the years and am no longer fascinated as much by these petty things since my abilities have grown far beyond precognizance and whatnot. Though I don't boast a great sense like clairvoyance, I have other abilities that seem to suit my needs well. Needless to say I have never been particularly hindered by my senses. They often seem to aid me rather than cause me distress.

 

[Emrysi]

I was diagnosed with aspergers at 16 and I’ve had incredibly similar experiences, even still today I have thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and men no sense. Case in point, I was in a local high school recently and looked at a large dent in the wall, only to coherently and with no prompting think “of course they haven’t fixed it” despite never having seen it before and having no reason to care. It was really jarring because it pretty much cut off my internal monologue out of nowhere. You’re not alone man.

 

[ovenbakedskittles]

I can kinda relate in a way... I don't think I have autism but my psychiatrist is suspecting I might have psychosis based on the information I gave her... All my life I have felt like my perception of everything was slightly more exaggerated than the average person and I feel like I am intimidated by most things.

Lately those parts of me have been getting worse and consequently find myself being more open and sensitive to the spirit realm and the paranormal. Not to the extent that I see and hear things that aren't there but I feel like sometimes theres information being downloaded into my brain by angels trying to teach me about different aspects of life and reality and I feel like I am becoming more aware of the immense polarity of nature and of these benevolent spirits navigating me and guiding me towards my life purpose.

I have voices come to me in thoughts like you do. I feel like the thought would just pop into my mental awareness and I would visualize the word/s that are being said. It feels just like my normal internal dialogue but its more defined and intense than how it used to be and sometimes I feel like its my subconscious speaking to me or something I heard before that is just revisiting me.

I think a diagnosis is just a humans way of trying to grasp certain mental conditions that we can't quite understand. People look at it as a sure thing but we should be looking at it as half the picture; one side to the coin. The other side being the spiritual benefit. We can choose to look at it from either side but ultimately both the physical and the spiritual interpretation coexist and they both have reasons for existing.

Its interesting that you say that you rather not cultivate your abilities and how embarking on this journey towards the paranormal can lead to dangerous outcomes. I was watching a couple of scenes from the Truman show which I feel has a lot of parallels to a spiritual awakening. Anyway, theres that one scene where he finds out its all fake and then the creator of the show tells him you will find that the outside world has lies and deceit just as well and it made me realize that the dark side of the universe that is responsible for creating the physical world that we live in is trying to keep us hostage in this world and tries to convince that the spirit world is full of ugly stuff that we are better off without but I feel like eventually we should embrace that aspect of reality because there's also a lot of amazing things on the other side that we can utilize to make our lives more fulfilling and to see the bigger picture as well but the bad side is always gonna try to get you to focus on the negative when it comes to progressing spiritually just like on the Truman show.

And meanwhile the good guys are on the outside hoping that you will figure it out just like in the movie when they are phoning the show yelling at the creator.

Very interesting stuff that I think is subliminally portrayed and has a lot of validity to it.