The Autism Spectrum According to Autistic People

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The Autism Spectrum
According to Autistic People

NeuroClastic

Change | Divergently

Health

Mental Health | Self-Help

Gaia loves making senses

Jorn Bettin December 19, 2024

Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.

Gaia loves making senses

Jorn Bettin December 19, 2024

Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.

Gaia loves making senses

Jorn Bettin December 19, 2024

Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.

bell curve

Life defies the dehumanising cut-off points of the bell curve

Jorn Bettin February 20, 2024

The global mono-cult pretends that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality – by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality, it is chaotic, it is beautifully and awesomely diverse.

web of life

Life is relational and beyond human comprehension

Jorn Bettin February 13, 2024

Life is a highly dynamic system. Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with human emotional limits. Powered-up relationships are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human. Along the way we also begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making.

mutual aid

From artificial scarcity to ecologies of abundant care

Jorn Bettin February 7, 2024

Autists learn and play differently, because our senses work differently, and because we make sense of the world in different ways. Our sensory profiles don’t allow us to push cognitive dissonance out of conscious awareness. We feel and know that a way of life that traumatises large segments of the population and the non-human world does not make any sense. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life.

Life in the compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult

Jorn Bettin January 16, 2024

It is impossible to recover from Autistic burnout within the established institutional landscape. The emergence of ecologies of care is the emergence of a beautiful diversity of human scale cultural species and organisms in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult.

The ecological niche of A♾tistic peoples

Jorn Bettin December 16, 2023

Surviving on the edges of modern society is an Art. The Arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Within the context of the polycrisis that shapes the modern human predicament, the urgency of cultural evolution can not be addressed from within the paradigm of a hypernormative education system. Healthy Artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from “normality”.

Intersectional solidarity and ecological wisdom

Jorn Bettin December 11, 2023

The objectives of the Autistic and neurodiversity civil rights movements overlap significantly with the struggles of indigenous peoples. All people are fully human. Especially those who are systematically marginalised have developed distinct cultures and ecologies of care beyond the human. Much of the deep collective ecological wisdom and the sacred relationships that we can develop at human scale transcend the explanatory powers of the narrow silos of modern scientific disciplines.

The ability to relate deeply is the inability to conduct transactional busyness

Jorn Bettin November 22, 2024

Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, no one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. Continuous dialogues about commitments make life sacred. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.

The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally

Jorn Bettin November 17, 2024

Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.

Healing – Resisting internalised ableism

Jorn Bettin November 10, 2024

In the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world we live in what philosopher Guy Debord described as The Society of the Spectacle. The reality presented to us via the media and public social media has been engineered to fit the exacting standards of Homo Economicus®. All the people alive today in Westernised countries, i.e. all the people in WEIRD countries and in the countries aspiring to WEIRD standards, have been born into The WEIRD Spectacle of internalised ableism. 

Being part of the Earth in good company – our shared humanity

Jorn Bettin August 24, 2024

The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other. A frame of collaborative niche construction allows us to contribute to rather than extract from the living planet. Healing starts with rediscovering our faith in humanity.

The massive cognitive and emotional blind spot at the core of modernity

Jorn Bettin August 20, 2024

In our modern world the notion of tribalism is associated with many negative connotations, and especially with tribal bias, which is assumed to be an undesirable trait. A closer analysis reveals that the modern bias against tribalism is the result of conveniently sloppy research and a collective cognitive and emotional blind spot related to the collaborative potential of networked egalitarian human scale cultural organisms.

Sowing the seeds for ecological and intersectional communal wellbeing

Jorn Bettin August 16, 2024

Many scientists don’t acknowledge the extent to which their disciplinary paradigms are influenced by the cultural frames of the colonial era. The so-called mental health crisis is a symptom of a terminally diseased institutional landscape. Neurodiversity and disability activists have been collaborating on coherent theories of human ways of being. Collaborative niche construction is the evolutionary process of reducing cognitive dissonance.

Neurodivergent nervous systems and sensitivity profiles

Jorn Bettin August 3, 2024

Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not).

Ecocide® – Clearance sale! Buy now. Pay later.

Jorn Bettin July 27, 2024

Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions that are exclusively concerned with perception management. As life on this planet is being liquidated, more and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction, retreating into human scale cracks within the dying mono-cult.

Falling in love with human limitations – healing from anthropocentrism

Jorn Bettin July 7, 2024

Humans are not going to find solutions for the polycrisis, conquer new planets, the galaxy, and the universe, fully understand the human condition, or develop technologies that replace anthropocentrism with technocentrism. Minimising suffering beyond the human translates to nurturing ecologies of care beyond the human, and to falling in love with human limitations.

How much cognitive dissonance is in your life?

Jorn Bettin July 2, 2024

The Autistic Collaboration Trust has been active in researching cultural and psychological safety from an intersectional perspective. We now explore the level of cognitive dissonance that is generated by the societies that people are embedded in. You are invited to contribute! The results of this research will inform the education services we provide to healthcare professionals and education providers.

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