More and more people are discovering the timeless wisdom curated by Laozi for survival within the mono-cult of busyness. The Chinese concept of Pu is a Daoist metaphor that points us towards earlier times, to the qualities of small scale societies that have survived on the margins of empires, in some cases for many millennia.
We did not evolve for a transactional world. It is time to stop trying harder to fit in. We have already done so all our life. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life that is compatible with our evolutionary history. This is well understood by many indigenous cultures in different parts of the world, but this knowledge, this deep wisdom has been actively suppressed.
Just like a cell, a cultural organism has many critical interdependencies with the outside world; the state of environmental health is deeply entangled with the internal state of health of the cultural organism. Autistic life is incompatible within a society that lives within an Overton window. To understand why, look no further than the way in which Helen Mirra is conceptualizing autistic experience as holotropic. Holotropic people have naturally wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence.
In an effort to “be the change”, in the industrial era, many Autists end up being sand in the gears of busyness as usual. Luckily, thanks to the Internet, this is not the end of Autistic people. The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. Experiences may vary depending on the human scale cultures we co-create on the margins.
As events beyond human control force us to pay attention to the much richer metaphors of living systems, Autistic people are rediscovering the beauty of collaborating at human scale, and co-creating beautiful works of art as an antidote against the emergence of social power dynamics and the competitive logic of hate and violence.
I will speak in terms of beliefs, because at the core there is a point where the choice of our political system becomes a matter
Lining objects up is a common autistic stim. This piece is a look into an autistic adult’s machinations for lining up, arranging, and color coding items.
Perceptive Observational Analysis refers to the way autistic minds intake and process information.