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.

De-powered dialogue

Jorn Bettin November 27, 2023

The smallest unit of learning is a feedback loop. Power is the privilege of not needing to learn. The dynamic process of life is best understood in relational terms. At human scale, all healthy relationships, independently of the level of intimacy, are characterised by the maintenance of de-powered dialogue – by a mutual deep desire to understand a precious living being.

Nurturing ecologies of care, healing, and wellbeing

Jorn Bettin November 21, 2023

Social power is best understood as a highly addictive and socially corrosive drug. Meaningful education in the era of the sixth mass extinction event has to focus on the majority of the human population that is not power drunk, and on the humane treatment of those who are ready to confront their addiction to power head-on. Conceptualising social power as an addiction provides the majority of the human population with a highly effective bullshit detection tool.

unWEIRDing Autistic ways of being

Jorn Bettin November 8, 2023

The mental health crisis, which is best understood as a crisis of pervasive cognitive dissonance, and which affects large parts of the population, creates plenty of profitable opportunities for ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approaches. Neurological and cultural diversity is the reservoir of imagination of the human species. In a time of existential crises the collective creative potential of neurodivergent people and marginalised cultures has become more important than ever.

Surviving + De-powering + Thriving

Jorn Bettin October 30, 2023

Ingredients for slowing down to the relational speed of life and cooking up de-powered social operating models. Many Autists realise that the best we can ever hope for in this hypernormative civilisation is acceptance of our existence in bare survival mode, performing the function of a mindless busy cog and consumer in the sensory hell of the industrial machine.

Bringing our gifts to life

Jorn Bettin October 26, 2023

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.

Life is not a performance

Jorn Bettin October 13, 2023

In a performance-oriented culture getting ahead is what matters most. Finding ways of meeting the numbers is what matters, being perceived in the right way is what counts. Our society has increasingly cult-ivated performance,technological progress, and the “art” of perception management.

Understanding power and de-powering

Jorn Bettin April 7, 2024

The normalisation of social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding.

Co-Creating NeurodiVentures and A♾tistic Whānau

Jorn Bettin April 3, 2024

There is an urgent need to catalyse Autistic collaboration and co-create healthy Autistic, Artistic, and otherwise neurodivergent whānau all over the world. Autists depend on assistance from others in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. However, the many ways in which non-autistic people depend on others is considered “normal”. The endless chains of trauma must be broken. 

Bringing human imagination down to Earth

Jorn Bettin March 31, 2024

Over the last 5,000 years the ambiguities of linear written narratives and convenient interpretations have played a big role in amplifying social power gradients. The story of infinite economic growth and technological progress portrays a completely delusional and scientifically impossible world, which not only ignores biophysical limits, but also human cognitive and emotional limits. Nurturing the human capacity to extend trust to each other, and engaging in the big cycle of life as part of an ecology of care beyond the human is the biggest challenge of our times.

Celebrate the diversity of humankind – Embrace your weirdness

Jorn Bettin March 2, 2024

4th of March is Weird Pride Day. This is a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated with being weird. To publicly express pride in the things that make us weird, and to celebrate the diversity of humankind.

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.

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.

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