Overcoming Autism
Autism is an incurable
pervasive developmental disorder that I cured with lots of help from other
places. Not much was to be found in
this dimension. Otherwise autism would
not be incurable.
I will share my life story
briefly. I trust that the patient and
understanding reader of this memoir will “get” the brevity of my weird
life. The details are really boring and
barely remembered. After all, autism,
among other things, is a disease of not remembering. Indulge me, as I will focus on my 15-year healing journey into
somewhat detailed descriptions of strange states. These were well remembered, as they should. They were the inner music of my genetic
healing and autism transformation.
Bottom line is I cured or
was cured by the process. Lots of
barely understandable things happened.
When the dust settled, I learned how to see truly. I learned to heal from within incurable
genetic disorders. I now know that truth alone heals. Regular therapy didn’t work for me because it wasn’t true. Truthful seeing was supported by my mad need
to survive.
The key to my journey is
that I pushed and pushed outward, inward and backward. I pushed until I fell over lots of cliffs of
some unknown experience. Only after
falling literally and physically was something incurable cured. Major parts of living would come to life
when nothing was there before. What had
been numb would work. First, thoughts
came clearly, then vision with colors, then sensations and feelings spun out,
surged and lunged out of me in no particular order. Then whole things came together, distances, body sense,
uncluttered thinking, and life.
I tell this tale because I
believe that my experience has a larger meaning. I hope you see what I see truthfully.
What Is It?
Lots of theories. That alone should be proof that bad genes
alone don't cause autism. Once it was
bad mothering. There have been other
theories. I believe that autism and
developmental disorders occur when human are invaded. Genes allow for the invasions.
Archetypal energies invade a genetically impaired human body. This invasion crowds out everything else.
I now believe that autism
is curable. My genetics were
transformed with a spiritual practice that removed the invaders. Slightly simplistic, but I put was lots of
experiments, lots of hard work and a positive resolution after 15 years.
I learned to speak in my
natural voice well over the age of 40.
Before I had memorized speech. I
learned to see depths and color over the age of 50. Before that I guessed at what it was I was seeing. I learned to
feel sensations, feelings and experience the outside world all at the same time
over the age of 55. Before that was
nothing. My entire life experience was
transformed with help from other places.
My journey has been a guided process.
I thank the Invisible Powers of the Universe for being a pain in the
ass. Sisyphus had more fun rolling a
rock up a hill, rest assured.
My Version
I’ll begin the
beguine. I had a miserable and unhappy
childhood in Brooklyn, NY. I was not
normal but I went to a normal school, did very well academically and miserably
socially. I fared even more miserably
at home where silence reigned. My
father worked at home as a children’s cartoonist. I never saw him in our small apartment because he walled himself
off in a private room, which was off-limits.
I believe I spoke to my father two or three times for the first 15 years
of my life.
I don’t remember too many
details. You will soon understand
why. No one ever spoke in my house
much. We had to remain silent to
respect my father’s self-styled genius.
I do remember "Shuddup!" as a surrogate for "How do you
feel today?" That’s all I
remember. My mother did not come home
till late in the day. She worked as a
secretary for a trucking company. She
and my father rarely talked in the presence of my brother or me. She claimed and believed that my father’s
very strange working and living style was evidence of his self-styled
genius. Certainly it was not a
pervasive developmental disorder.
My mother was an advanced
practitioner of a weird package of idealization of my father’s good looks
wedded to denial of the meaning of his lifestyle. She claimed that we were a happy family and later that I was loved
and reared properly alongside my slightly younger brother. I did not know that my father was an
Asperger until many years later. I did
not know that I could not hear, nor see, not think, nor process any information
in my brain properly, nor any other spontaneous act because there was no
feedback.
I survived by memory. I had memorized my limited speech because my
Mother put the fear of God in me. If I
could not respond fast enough I memorized my motor functions. I learned to walk and talk by memorization
separated from biology. I did not know
it. I just did it.
Living was a major league
effort. It was hard to have to remember
everything. I became a reclusive robot.
I had an intuitive grasp that I was in some hellhole. My hellhole at home was so intimidatingly
normal that I doubted my every perception.
On the rare events of going out, my parents used some kind of social
façade that made them kind of normal looking.
This further reinforced my discomfort.
It reinforced the feelings that my intuitions were wrong. I doubted everything. Each moment of decision generated in me a
flood of self-doubt that buried naturalness even further.
As
early as I could, I started trying to spend time away from home. I once got beat up and found a YMCA where I
could work out. I wanted to be tough or
at least look tough. I lifted lots of
weights, became a body builder and looked tough. I wasn't since I was still disembodied. I bulked up pretty quickly from the age of 15 to 18. The workout small workout room was in a kind
of basement. It required a train ride
to Queens. There were some really
built guys. Bodybuilding was a very
quirky subculture during the 50’s. It
was far before Arnold Schwartzenager became a national role model. This experience reinforced the notion that I
could live as a robot by appearances only.
Workout rituals were a childhood reaffirming way for me to be in the
world.
I left
home for good at 18 years old long before I was ready. I had earned $3000 during my summer after
graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School. I was ill prepared to leave home or do anything since I had
difficulty talking and being comfortable with people. Home was a hellhole and anything was better. I just had to get out of the house. I chose Paris, God knows why. I had studied high school French. My father occasionally impersonated a French
accent. That should have been reason
not to go.
I first
found a room rented to other students and I was unhappy and could not
communicate. I suffered heightened anxiety in Europe as I tried to master
foreign languages by memorizing them.
That was the only way I knew to do things. It was especially tough since I could not speak English too well. I did not know it then since my mother’s
stock in trade was denial and no one spoke to me. As I have come to learn I had aphasia either from my birth
delivery, my Asperger genes, or both.
Aphasia is and was considered incurable. I have cured it over a 15-year period working at it 24 hours a
day. I managed to get by through feats
of memory and not talking much.
I stayed a year in a small
hotel on the Left Bank, knocked up a French girl working at a bookstore and
sold my plane ticket to get an awkward abortion. I can still some primitive device like a corkscrew inside her and
the baby was flushed away. I returned
to NY and stayed briefly with my parents.
I worked at various jobs selling insurance, acting and hairdressing. While acting I got engaged to a nice looking
actress. We had an engagement party and
I was asked to give up acting and work in Wall Street. Fine for me. I had no idea what was going on.
Rote Capitalism
I learned capitalism just
how I learned everything. I memorized
it plus financial formulas and ratios.
I made some money, not much. When
the engagement was ended for reasons of my social awkwardness I left that
firm. I got another stock sales job and
learned how to sell businesses, which I did with a little success. I then married another actress with two
young children. It was a home. Her emotional demands were greater than my
capacity and that ended in about two years after we moved to Connecticut. A pyramid selling company recruited me and I
learned how to sell by memorizing salesmanship. I was one of the more successful people until the government for
selling too many franchises compared to retail sales closed them down. I traveled and got divorced in about two
years but stayed in touch with the children.
My career was
pointless. I thought I knew franchising
and I bought a tax consulting franchise and memorized accounting. My memorized salesmanship got lots of
customers but had not the faintest idea how to manage a business. The accounting business led to the finance
business, which turned very successful.
I married again to another pretty lady who made few emotional demands
and lasted a full nine years.
I made a surprising amount
of money all things considered. I was
financially creative and socially awkward.
Money was amazing to me since I was never given any as a kid. In fact, I thought that I was not entitled
to any based on the neglect and silence when growing up.
Once it came, I spent it
on silly things. I loved to eat well at
least the idea of it. However, little
did I know that I never tasted the food!
I bought too many clothes but little did I know that I was simply
covering up a morbid sense of shame. I
spent it on sillier things. After all I
had made me some money but the money did not make me happy. I felt cheated.
Shrinks
I knew I was amiss even
with money so I went to shrinks to learn what was wrong with me. First was a subsequently well-publicized
psychiatrist whose first name was Christ, spelled Chris. He tried to get me to go into business with
him. Ultimately he was sued for
stealing money from some famous clients.
He was a little like my father as a self-styled genius.
Then I went to a female
classical psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side. I talked three or for days a week and felt lonelier than when I
had been at home during my silence-is-golden childhood. I also felt like I was back at home growing
up. Six wasted months by a talk
therapist plying their trade trying to address an incurable and improperly
diagnosed genetic disorder. What a
business was shrinkdom!! They can be
100% off like she was. She still got
paid. She probably wrote a misguided
diagnosis of me, earned the accolades of co-professionals. She may have won awards presenting a talk
therapy solution for a genetic and neurological disorder, won applause at
academic conferences for applying talk therapy to incurable aphasia, in my case
talking autism.
The last pair shrinks I
tried occurred about the time I first took some Ecstasy in 1986 or 1987. During my first "trip" a voice
identified itself as "I Am That I Am" and said the word "genetic". I really felt relaxed
during the first "trip" for the first time in my life. My life had been a normalized to me state of
anxiety. I say normalized because that
how I was brought up.
I took some more ecstasy
imploded my unconscious and heard other more words of wisdom like "Go back
to the first year of your life." I
started dreaming like crazy and thought it was the most alive I had ever
felt. I stayed up for three years up
to 1990 or so and recorded many thousands of dreams looking for God knows what.
I had been seeing a shrink
by the name of Dr. George Weinberg during this period. Also on an inappropriate recommendation a
group therapist named Dr. Louis Ormont.
The group therapy made me really anxious and aggravated my speech disorder. Both shrinks worked on the Upper West Side
of New York and were oriented toward "post Freudian" whatever.
There came a time when my
rote attempt to make sense of my dreams was compounded by Dr. Weinberg's all
American brand of therapy. He no understanding
of dreams and their meaning as the rest of the narrative will bear out. So two things happened: I quit therapy and my dreams started
spelling things out for me one letter at a time.
Dreams
Among the many things that
were spelled was AUTISM, one letter at a time.
Then came SCHIZOPHRENIA. Then
came FORCEPS in the birth delivery and many more. Well my dreams told me what 10 off and on years of Western
therapy couldn’t. I did not know what
any of that was, so I looked it up and like my mother and father I said to
myself, not me. My self-doubting
intuition said something else. My dream
spoke, not my mother and father. It not
only spoke but it spelled one letter at a time.
I found definitions
like: “Autism impacts the normal
development of the brain in the areas of social interaction and communication
skills. Children and adults with autism typically have difficulties in verbal
and non-verbal communication, social interactions, and leisure or play
activities. The disorder makes it hard for them to communicate with others and
relate to the outside world. In some cases, aggressive and/or self-injurious
behavior may be present. Persons with autism may exhibit repeated body
movements (hand flapping, rocking), unusual responses to people or attachments
to objects and resistance to changes in routines. Individuals may also
experience sensitivities in the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell,
and taste.”
The
emphasis was on autism as a disease of silence. So I said to myself once more.
I can talk. I really
couldn’t. I made money. I had money. I’m rich. How could I be
autistic? It was some time before
Asperger Syndrome was found. This was
pre-Internet. There were no
hyperlinks. On top of that I guess I
was surely not in a hurry to learn that I was autistic. The description like the one above was
different enough from me.
It
would take some time to learn that my willfulness had suppressed most obvious
symptoms. My memory had compensated for
major league deficits. I would later
learn that they were right underneath the surface. While the tics and ritual symptoms were not me, the periodic
illnesses and near-death accidents were reminders that something serious was
going on. These explosions arrived
regularly into my life, stark reminders something big and very dangerous was
going on underneath my willful repressions.
I
stayed up for three years with light on recording dreams, thousands of
them. I was exploding inward but it was
the most action I ever had. It was a
big guessing game. I became
self-important. I thought that I was
receiving direct access to some higher intelligence. I read a bunch of dream books and they helped not at all.
I felt
this larger than life circle compelling me do things. Messages were compelling me do things. The reservoir in Central Park had become for me a surrogate of
some invisible and unearthly spiral.
Marriage III
I had married an ex-dancer
American Buddhist who was sweet and had nurse qualities that I needed
badly. She decided over time that
American Buddhism meant tripling my overhead.
I moved up to an overpriced Upper East Side co-op which I needed like
another hole in my head. In 1990 I
acquired by accident a fancy property in Upstate New York. I should have sold it at a profit but she
wanted us to keep it and we did.
I did not know what that
was and was confused when I tried to read about it. It seemed that autistic people could not talk and I thought I
could talk. That was only half true. I was actually using my memory to memorize
speech. I was also using my intuition
to guess my way through complex social situations which I generally avoided as
they were too confusing. The only thing
not confusing was numbers since that number sense was the basis of my acquiring
several millions, which my Buddhist wife was spending much faster than I had
ever spent it.
I read and read and that
was hard. What I did was memorize and
intuit or guess. I found in the
literature Asperger Syndrome, or high functioning or talking autism. I looked at my family and saw the symptoms
in them and in me. My father was an
Asperger. His brother was a more
classical autism. My younger brother
was an Asperger. My youngest brother
wasn't but his son was an Asperger or worse.
On my mothers side, my
dissociated mother had some form of Schizophrenia, as did her mother and at one
brother and one sister. A real horror
story! The one sister who was a soulful
exception had been present at my 16 hour or so birth delivery and so the damage
arising from the delivery was the forceps.
So these were the facts,
never arrived at in therapy. I then
went methodically through my personal history to the extent that I could
remember it. I did not remember a lot
as all my attention had been focused on daily survival, memorizing speech and
even biology so I could pass myself off as a human.
What do you with all
that? More dreams came. Dreams got me going into numerology and
Tarot. With Tarot that was the
beginning of trying to see images. I
did not know at the time that my speech was memorized, just that I was
uncomfortable. Nor did I know that I
could not see, especially since I had become an art collector of sorts. My collections were reviewed or mentioned in
The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday New York Times, loaned to museums and to
the Federal Reserve for one year in a traveling exhibit. I could not see and did not know it. I had functioned by my intuition and my wits
even collecting art.
Then my body started going
through rapid-fire changes during the early 1990's. I started having feelings and sensations that I had never had
before. I could feel my body when I
went to the bathroom. I had not known
that I had no feelings or sensations before since that was all I knew. My impersonation of life was dissolving in
dreams, spending too much money, Buddhist good intentions and Ecstasy. I stopped taking the drug in the early 90's
since a dream told me not to. I took it
because it seemed the catalyst for whatever was happening that seemed good.
The first time I ever
heard my own natural voice vs. my autistic memorizing of my voice was in
1986. It came in a retreat when I
remembered my maternal Grandfather holding my hand one Sunday morning to buy me
a Bar Mitzvah suit. That was a real
shocker.
I started studying the
factual part of my past that I could remember.
It focused on my many spontaneous near death illnesses punctuated by
many near death accidents. Viral meningitis,
acoustic neuroma, falling asleep at 85 miles an hour in a Beetle Volkswagen
outside of Houston, flying over the top of a motorcycle when it started
skidding on the West Side Highway and landing on my feet, losing my oxygen
during a scuba at over 60 feet under and others. Why? What did all these
mean?
One thing started
happening that was more important than all the rest. Whenever I saw or said something absolutely true, some part of my
physical or psychological or neurological or genetic being would get better. The truth I was finding was getting me
better even if it was not getting me free.
There reached a point when
my runaway expenses from my wife Buddhist was too much. I awoke one day in early 1994 and offered a
divorce settlement in excess of standards.
In that same year I sold the co-op and the estate and much art, bought a
red Allante put the top town and left New York on Memorial Day 1994.
Never
Never Land
Within the first week on
the road to the West, I thought San Francisco; I had one car accident and fell
asleep while the car was not going too fast.
On June 6, 1994 I arrived in downtown Oklahoma City, opened the car door
and saw for the first time in my life depths and colors. I could not believe how blue the sky was,
how far away and how white the puffy clouds.
I felt like someone had punched me in the mouth. I was thrust against the car and had to
brace myself. Where the fuck had I been
all my life?
During the 90's I worked
out like crazy, burning up energy running an average of 30 miles a week for the
decade, getting my bench press over 400 while my strength in other exercises
was average at best. I lived in
Portland for three months and worked very hard to study spatial issues and
struggled to get a drivers license. I
found that whenever I took a test my mind would start memorizing things since
common sense and distances were either new, undeveloped or out of my
range. Memory was a way for me to cope
with unnamable fears of outcomes. I was
only first becoming aware of dread of some unseen thing as my condition. Learning to drive was the beginning of a
long protracted confrontation with dread.
Meditating all the time permitted me to separate with increasing success
me from myself. It allowed me to begin to
see my patterns, Jung’s insights and myself.
I stopped seeing women
since I sensed that I got super uptight.
I did not know why but my sense of dread and outcomes was heightened
with women. What was I projecting onto
them? Working out and looking good
created opportunities but found that my mind dissociated whenever I was with a
woman, especially if she was attractive.
I became the Buddhist that my wife was supposed to be. I had learned how to study my behavior and
me. I was also learning how to
transform my experiences by truthful seeing.
The explosion of vision was only one new experience. Many more would follow.
I moved to Southern
California, saw my Uncle Irv, my mother's brother. Since I could now see and was beginning to absorb real experience
a little better it was clear to me that he had a dissociation disorder and was
another tragic member of my family.
One significant experience
occurred when I was in my apartment. I
was trying to cut a fruit with a knife.
My hand took on a life of its own, missed the fruit and cut a gaping
hole in my hand. At that moment the
memory of my delivery doctor rushed in and the forceps. I had just reenacted my birth delivery.
I had two more car
accidents in Santa Monica, both minor.
I started to use my memory to measure distances when I drove. I would consciously go from here to
there. I made elaborate plans. I used maps. Could I get from here to there without dread, without accidents,
without dropping into some dark place?
This planning had the
effect of opening up inner and outer space somehow. The planning and the frequency of testing the limits increased
with much fear and lots of anxiety about possible horrible outcomes. The freeways in Los Angeles drove me
crazier. I held on to the steering
wheel life it were a life raft.
I was just trying to get
used to physical distances and space.
It felt monumental. It felt like
a further part of the experiences I had when running around the Central Park
reservoir in NYC. I felt I was in some
cosmic circle. I could not get out of
the circle. I could not run around it
or through it. I was pushing out in an
increasing concentric and somewhat loosening grip. How did my dread relate to this cosmic constraint? I felt like I was confronting a policeman,
a global policeman with a big “No” sign.
I felt like my accidents and illnesses were similar signs. I felt like I was breaking the law.
I had to move on, as I
felt stuck after a time in LA. I had
tried a few business ventures but they were literally brick walls. The only business that had worked for me was
financial. I could always find clever
economic ways to make or save money for people. I had even created a new mode of financing taxis. That had turned into a very large business
and industry but only partially participated since I kept getting sick. I was also incapable of functioning in
complex social situations. I never knew
why the extraordinary anxiety would well in me with people but it never failed.
I moved to Dallas. I went out to many nightclubs to force
myself to be in social situations with lots of sound just as I had started to
do in NY in early 1994, Portland and LA.
Driving to a nightclub felt like driving a space ship to another
planet. I would try to just stay in my
body, not lose directions on the road and not drink too much.
I went
out on a few dates. I slept with a
pretty lady who had a complicated psychology from Houston. During the times together getting into bed I
had a real disorienting time. I felt
like I was getting into bed but someone alongside of me was accompanying
me. One morning I awoke to a dream and
a voice said: "How do you like the
air conditioning?” It was the usual
double meaning. First, I was beginning
to live in space and there was air conditioning in the room not working all
that well.
My red Allante started
feeling the effects of my accidents and my learning about physical space and I
sold it. I bought a new Mark VIII. I had the Mark VIII about a week with 400
miles on it. I was driving on
Mockingbird Lane on a Dec day. I had a
head cold, took one head cold pill and fell asleep one more time in a car and
totaled it. I had driven into a lamp
pole.
The air bag exploded
open. It saved my life in several
ways. It was an extraordinary
slug. I felt shocked and refreshed. I jumped out of the car and I could feel
more embodied than I ever had since I was born. Was I reenacting one more time my birth delivery? But with all that mediating and witnessing
was I now doing it consciously? I felt
born into my body. I was a well
conditioned over 50 years old. It was
the most refreshing tragedy ever. I
felt embodied, more so than the first time around trying to be born. Over time I could see the “shape” of the
accident. The shape was that of a
spiral underneath the accident. It had
the same shape that I felt when running around the reservoir in Central
Park.
Kundalini is some
invisible corkscrew like power or fate referred to by those in the East with
great reverence. It has God-like
force. It is about Karma, fate and
forces greater than us. I now believe
that was what I intuited in Central Park. That was where I entered somehow when
I drove out of NY. I believe it
exploded in my face in Dallas. I woke
up to my body where I had never lived in yet another car accident. The Great Invisible Spiral had been my
adversary since my stillborn birth.
Every evasion had been an evasion of my projecting out my inner nearness
to the Eternal Flame. My autism was
being born into that dimension. My
redemption came in a rebirth car wreck.
I spent the next three
plus years in Florida, including Orlando, Boca Raton, Miami and various parts
of Fort Lauderdale. In 1995 I had tried
to take a course learning a software program called Act. It is a contact manager for
salespeople. I really struggled. It was the same anxiety provoking detail
work that befuddled me in Portland learning to drive, in LA navigating
Freeways. I purchase several computers
toward the end of 1996 in Dallas. Whenever
I tried to work with one they literally exploded. I went through about four that literally crashed or had some
major real physical defect. OfficeMax
kept replacing them. In Orlando, I had
also had some complicated computer experiences, returning a few for real
defects.
When I got to Boca I
applied myself to some web authoring programs.
It was a major effort. I was
really using these programs to learn them on the one hand but was also changing
my body, my eyesight, and my anxiety levels when I would experience new
things. I tried to sell my art
collection and was using the authoring program to learn how to put together a
website. My way of doing things was too
rote so I hired helpers. The helpers
always failed me because that was where I was coming from.
Like my Asperger father
who had spent his life walking around a cartoon desk saying to himself: "If you've got it, you've got it."
and then becoming a world-class critic of everything, I was too. I was blaming others for my disabilities. I could reasonably get away with it since I
was writing the check. Nothing was good
enough.
As I have come to learn I
was speaking in code. Whenever I spoke
about something in the normal world a part of me was trying to say something
else. What I was trying to say was that
my genetic structure did not allow me to complete anything. I believe that my broken double helix was
talking through me. I was blaming on
the one hand well-intentioned designers for something that was in me. It was my way of crying for help just as my
accidents were my way of telling the world that my birth was not complete, just
as my father’s mantra walking around his desk had been his cry for help.
The art collection was
also something other than an art collection.
In one way it was my surrogate for trying to escape all the cartoons
that were forced on me by my father. I
had to tolerate and couldn’t his pathological need to use cartoons to tell the
world through pictures that he was still an Asperger child needing help. It was also my need to see whole and could
not. I referred to art and art referred
to me. I had become the art.
The art was also a way for
me to identify with a higher power or self.
It was evidence, when not my father’s cartoons, of my attempt to
spiritualize language and matter. Art is
seen this way in culture. I experienced
this way with my twist. I thought if I
bought and owned art I had a soul. This
is not all that uncommon. For me having
a soul was also having a body. That was
the conundrum since I was truly disembodied both genetically and through the
forceps and how they affected my motor functions. Knowing this made my attempts at addressing my problems with talk
therapies even sillier.
Boca was my attempt to
live in the style to which I had become accustomed and was quickly running out
of money. I moved to Miami and worked
more on the computer. I also went out a
lot and spent too much money and was running out of money. In 1999 I had bought a laptop and started
living in motels throughout Broward County.
I had to change things to release my rigid patterns. It was happening. Every time I moved something inside me shifted, something health
making happened. I was destroying my
fear of emotional life and my need for sameness.
With the Internet I could
visualize my externalized behavior as a series of incomplete circles. They were my genes that I had behaviorized
and let loose on the world by driving wherever the car would take me. The key to all was seeing this strange
cosmic and subterranean spiral that first emerged in NYC. I could see myself being constrained by a
Kundalini-like larger than life spiral.
I had to get it out of me. The
only way I could was to drive it out of me and make it conscious by surfing the
Internet and witnessing how this “blank slate” kept trying to say something.
If my father’s mad
compulsion to force-feed his children on his unfunny cartoons, the Internet was
my cartoon table to witness cosmic circles that were released by the Ecstasy,
the dreams and the mediating. I had to
try to piece the patterns together.
This I did. Whenever I got it
right some part of my body started working.
An arm would move freely, a lost sense dread, my fear of sound and
telephones would lessen, more and more of the world outside and my feelings
inside made sense. Every inner
achievement was matched by a new physical and emotional freedom. I was expanding inward and outward. I was still a social horror as I rarely
spoke. I was only interested in
watching all this new stuff going on inside of me.
When I was on the Internet
I was reconciling my genetic patterns, which I could see in my driving and
other actions with the way, my hand moved with the mouse. What had really
happened was that I had learned to transform my genetics by watching how my
hand and eyes moved and failed to complete things. I had isolated, externalized and behaviorized my broken gene and
was strengthening it, repeating certain actions over and over until they
subsided, until the next wave of genetic anxieties would arise. And again.
And again.
One year of laptop
meditating. One year of living off
credit cards. I then moved into one
place in Boca. All dissociations
started to go away. Embodiment returned
in full. My voice gained confidence and
I ran out of money.
The
Big Memory
I went further and further
into prenatal memories. I remembered my tragic and fearful father talking to my
mother for months before I was born about aborting me. Those prenatal memories emerged from the
darkness. That was why I didn't want to be born. That was why my bad genes were made worse by a bad delivery. That was the origin of all of my
unexplainable illnesses like acoustic neuroma, fainting spells and viral
meningitis. That was the cause of my
many accidents.
I bought a big gun. The
gun was for me the wishes of my tragic father.
The gun was the concrete image of what was underneath every accident and
illness in my life. I could see
it. It didn't remain stuck inside. My father's prenatal wishes were now
concrete. Those memories completed the
journey born in dreams and car accidents.
Those memories were why I had tried to spend my way into health. They were too painful to confront.
After that my full voice
and embodiment returned. For the first
time in my life I had full use of feelings and sensations when they actually occurred. For the first time in my life I was now able
to experience my own feelings without anxiety.
For the first time in my life I was able to experience the outside world
in all its color and horror without dissociating, without autistic
splitting. For the first time in my
life I was able to feel myself and see the world both at the same time without
becoming autistic, without dissociating, without hiding inside, without trying
to live without blaming as had my father others for my own horrors of bad genetic
parentage compounded by a bad birth delivery.
It only took giving up
therapy, leaving NY, living like a nomad, going through several millions of
dollars, meditating 24 hours a day for a decade and remembering.
I learned a lot about the
Internet business and I am so sorry I cannot participate. I started a business to start a
business. When all was said and done I
started a domain naming business with a resourceful young man. We did not make enough sales since I was
focused on learning language more than on taking a business that was populated
and transformed in weeks and months before my eyes and was difficult to make a
profit.
We created some nice
brandable domains at www.elarming.com
and also at www.lowestcostdomains.com. Little did I know that my agenda was
language and aphasia healing before all else.
Anyone interested in valuable brandable domains that originate in
eternity? This was the only place in
the world I could uncover my true voice first heard in 1986. I had found the only place in our many
worlds beyond the senses to heal and cure aphasia, the incurable illness. There was no other place I could find it on
this planet. Domains were the final
healing of aphasia. I took the only
road available: inward. It has all been Elarming.com!!! Yes, I can speak fluently, comfortably,
without dread or fear of death, or fear of being told by my genius Asperger
father to “shuddup!”
Now that I can live in my
own skin hearing my own voice feeling my own feelings, autism dissolved in the
flame of spiritual alchemy, my life is over.
Three cheers for genetic entrepreneurship. I have tried at all times to be the good scientist. I never knew where I was going but I had to
move ahead because what was behind me was not worth living for. I relied heavily on readings of Jung because
what he wrote rang true and helped me in countless ways. My Jungian or other mantras were repeated
over and over. When they worked or
provided relief I knew they were true.
In the end everything that was true worked. Everything that worked was true.
Truth became only what worked.
Somehow I was stillborn
into a parallel world. I adapted
awkwardly as best I could with an extreme developmental set of disorders: one from Daddy, one from Mommy, one from my
birth, one from a neglected childhood at the hands of two impaired parents.
My real birth delivery
started with the accidental good feelings born of trying the drug Ecstasy. I pushed the limits with dreams and learning
to mediate. It has been all
consuming. I have been unable to work
during the entire period, as any attempt to work was little more than a
reenactment of genetic syndromes. When
I simply allowed their unfolding to work their way through my mind, body and
nervous system. That is how I overcame
autism. I stayed the course but lost
all my money in my single-minded devotion to the process. Can't have it all.
Of the many mantras the
one that seemed to work the best and seemed the truest came from the text
below: "that which is above is as
that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above". The following text allowed me to visualize
how genes, human worlds, and archetypal worlds happen: Try it.
You might like it.
“The Emerald Table of
Hermes
“True,
without error, certain and most true: that which is above is as that which is
below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the
miracles of the One Thing.
“And
as all things were from One, by the meditation of One, so from this One Thing
come all things by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon,
the wind carried it in its belly, the nurse thereof is the Earth.
“It
is the father of all perfection and the consummation of the whole world. Its
power is integral if it be turned to Earth.
“Thou
shalt separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the coarse, gently and
with much ingenuity. It ascends from Earth to heaven and descends again to
Earth, and receives the power of the superiors and the inferiors.
“Thus
thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before
thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitude, overcoming every subtle
and penetrating every solid thing. Thus the world was created. Hence are all
wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner.
“Therefore
am I called Hermes the Thrice Great, having the three parts of the philosophy
of the whole world. That is finished which I have to say concerning the
operation of the Sun.”
Unattributed Contents ă 1997 - 1999 Al Billings
Language
I
am sure I will never know whether bad birth delivery or genes or upbringing
caused which disorder. I am not 100% it
matters. I was born without language. It’s called aphasia. I used rote memory to seem to speak as best
I could. It sufficed for a time to make
profits and build a few financial businesses.
Speaking was for me painful.
There was the expectation of some big horror about to come. I lived in dread of speaking. People thought I was stupid. My unconscious but willful mother willed me
to speak. I memorized speech and my words lacked related meaning.
When
I started witnesses my physical, emotional and behavioral processes I saw
certain patterns. My speech seemed to
come out of darkness. Memory would kick
in. What words could I use? Intuition then kicked in. Where was I? What were people talking about?
What should I say? Words had a
certain shape that I could see inwardly.
They had the shape of a phallus.
My patterns of speech had the shape of a phallus. One of my big dreams had me leaving the back
of a fancy restaurant. Once there, I
vomited a gigantic phallus shaped vomit.
Was my dick in my mouth? Had I
displaced either in my genes or birth delivery my dick and my voice? Must have!
How to get my dreamt dick out of my mouth and my living anxiety out of
my life?
I
dreamt that I was born in some industrial machinery. At the bottom of a chute I arrived as a baby. Out of my mouth poured letters, one at a
time. My dreams started teaching me to
manage one letter at a time. I started
focusing all of my efforts and attention on one letter at a time. I did so for months and months. I then did the same with words for months
and years. Less anxiety. Then came paragraphs that had meanings, then
books, then movies, then people and situations. Always a mammoth and repetitive process. Always less anxiety.
Lo
and behold only ten years later I got the dick out of mouth. I could speak fluently in an expanding
number of situations. Less and less
uptight. Simultaneously my bodily
anxieties were reduced. Less and less
situational tension. Then the power
returned to my actual dick. My weight
lifting and running became balanced. I was no longer a one-trick pony doing
heavy-duty bench presses and not much else.
Then my sexual life normalized.
Then the dick went out of my mouth.
Then after many attempts I could write acceptably well, without my
family induced self-doubt.
Rages
Rages
arose out of frustration that had the same shape and quality as my language
disorder. It was not until I left NY
that I could see that. The frustrations
of being apart were as source of rage.
When not expressed for years at a time it came out as acoustic neuroma,
viral meningitis, fainting in public, motorcycle, car and scuba accidents. Leaving NY was the first trip after my long
immersion in dreams, Ecstasy and witnessing or meditation. Whatever had been below was now above. I was unleashed or the primal forces of
nature were. Now at least I could see
what was inside. It wasn’t fun.
Driving
the car for me was like automatic writing or taking drugs to see what would
come up. The car took drove
itself. I was a not innocent bystander. It took on a veritable like of its own. It was my form of automatic writing on a
piece of real estate called America.
First I fell asleep at the wheel.
Then I saw colors and depths.
Then I had a minor accident.
Then the car would choose roads that defied the maps that I tried to
follow. I became studious about driving
and retook a driving course in Portland.
I mapped short trips in LA. I
was driving the invisible power of Kundalini.
It was driving me. Finally it
exploded in Dallas accident, which felt like a birth. When in Florida I drove near the water like some primal birth
fluids. The car would go in
circles. I would get frustrated and scream
and scream and scream my lungs out. I
was getting the rage out. I was no
ordinary circling autist. I was a Buddhist witnessing Cadillac driving
transcendental autist unleashed.
When
the screaming, the circles, the rages and frustrations were penetrated I had
made conscious what had been invisible.
It was the Kundalini power underneath all my autistic patterns. It had spent itself literally and
financially. I was going broke and so
was the force underneath my health problems and accidents. When the day was done I was at one with the
primal force underneath rage, circling and illness. No more rages. No more spontaneous
illnesses. No more perpetual high
anxieties.
Invisibility
I was invisible. I was unseen at home, unseen by my mother,
unseen by my father. I created
identities, yet starved recognition and being seen. So there came much different sub personality with no central one.
I was born without and soul and raised in a homeless home without a mother who
could see me. Nor could my father
visually or otherwise see others.
Circles
I
saw the helix in a dream. I saw it in
my language. I saw it in my patterns. I watched, connected the dots on the
Internet and lo and behold, I was born again for the first time into a soul and
a body.
So What Is
Autism?
I believe the same can be
said of all developmental disorders. I
cured autism because I took the position that every symptom was what Jung
called a “denied god”. Every symptom
for me was sitting on top of a bottomless other world with healing
potential.
I believe that autism and
developmental disorders were a disease of parallel worlds. I lived there a long time. I believe that our culture and heroes are
further proof of what is both inside of us and alongside of us. Our fictions and fantasies are more than
that. Sci-Fi and UFO culture lives
simply because we project other worlds onto our beliefs and cultural
entertainments that do really live elsewhere.
These worlds do exist.
I have lived there as a
victim by birth and circumstance. Money
never changed that by itself. I have
become an unlikely spiritual warrior. I
paid my dues to cure the incurable.
Spiritual cleansings hurt. I
wasn’t alone. I was for sure
guided. Jung said much of this other
place. It affects all and there is a
method and meaning. Until this other
dimension is fully apprehended autism and developmental disorders will be
"incurable".
So it goes. One miserable life. All for the greater good. Good Lord knows what that is.
Useful Tools & Relevant Links
Useful Tools
Alchemy
Lab – the historical texts and the images were touchstones. They allowed natural processes to take over.
Defeating Incurable Illness
Individual Tarot Cards –
only knew the consumer part of Tarot until the images and cards emerged from
dreamland. Allowed me to begin to see
real shapes, forms, and ultimately meanings.
Over time I was able to see daily life for what it is and what it means.
Kundalini
Awakens – It took many strange forms working through my inherited, birth
and environmental issues. I took many
strange trips to raise my consciousness.
It surely exists.
Secret
Fire: The Relationship Between Kundalini, Kabbalah and Alchemy - by
Mark Stavish, M.A.
The Alchemy Website – images
and texts were revisited many times until I could truly see how my “acting out”
was significant in other ways.
Alchemists were also “acting out” in quest of whatever. Comforting to know I was not alone on my
journey.
The Emerald Table of Hermes – My best and
most effective Mantra. Yes, every vile
human disability of mine sat on top of an ideal. It was Jung who said something like: under every neurosis is a denied god.
The
Jung Page – Jung’s scientific and otherworldly intuitions were what saved
my life. His Psychological Types
allowed me to see that I had thinking and intuition working in overdrive while
I had no sensation or feeling at all.
(When I shared this epiphany with Dr. George Weinberg he had not the
faintest. I left shortly thereafter along with his many other blunders). This was one of my first insights that
proved to be healing. It was this
insight that began the validation process that the truth will set me free. It was the lack of truth in therapists that
prevented benefits to me.
Jung’s descriptions of how projections
work was most useful. Freud’s
descriptions of transferences were much less so. His archetypal theories allowed me to begin a decade long
separation of inner and outer reality.
I began to understand how underlying archetypes were the origin of my
frozenness. I had to separate worlds
into to get to the core of my autism. I
spent a decade watching one after another emerge. Under every stare, scream, displacement or dysfunction of every
kind and type was a denied god.
Patterns told the tale. When I saw two or more of anything that was
the first behavior pattern. The second
step was to correlate my behavior to something seen in alchemy, tarot, Jung, or
real art. When the marriage of behavior
and inner worlds were properly correlated real healing took place.
Feelings returned. Vision along with depth and color perception
returned. Hearing without dread
returned. My voice without splitting returned. My embodiment returned limb by limb with
every truth seen, experienced and accepted without the tendency of internal
residual parenting saying: No, it ain’t so!
Jung’s explanations of The Mother
Archetype (along with Neumann’s) allowed me to see how and when my relatedness
worked or not. How I felt in a moment
told me through which archetypal mother’s eyes I saw. I saw how my Death Mother arises in media and in everyday
relations all too often. I would feel
envious or enraged. I would deny the
feeling. I was in those moments my God
given witch mother.
I would get frozen whenever the
monsters in the “Alien” films arose. I then remembered my “real” Mother and her
life denying methods. These brought
back into consciousness my memories of my frozen mothering. They were then correlated to
archetypes. These were among the most
painful to bring back into memory. I
was slowly learning that I was not and had never been me.
This is all simple to describe after
the fact. It was a bitch to do and
psychologically and physically painful beyond words. Buried feelings and
sensations arose and felt like strangers. They arose as quickly as I could
tolerate them. Bowel movements were
first experienced like a walk on Mars, it was so unfamiliar. Pissing at first was like watching water
drip through a rusty pipe in disuse since the beginning of time.
Jung’s ingenious descriptions of the
male feminine, the Anima, allowed me to begin to understand my evolution. I began by correlating my earliest
attractions to certain types of women and later ones. They were always the opposite of my mother. They were all slim athletic natural looking
brunettes.
When the Anima figure first arose in
the late 1980’s in dreams, she was faceless.
It was many years before my spiritual practice allowed me to relate to
Jung’s Anima in a conscious way. Her
inner guidance has been necessarily brutal.
It has softened me. The
emergence of my own feelings and sensations has been a long, clumsy
process. Not before I paid heavy-duty
dues first. Nothing was every
easy. Nothing was free.
In the past theories of what autism is
has come and gone. One of the longest
running theories seems to be the one about the cold refrigerator mother. I believe there was a germ of truth to that
belief. I believe autism is about the
cold mother but not necessarily the flesh and bones one. I believe that autists are frozen in their
relationship to an archetypal mother.
Autism is made worse if the physical mother is cold. I had it both ways.
The Tao Te
Ching – a guide to what’s underneath “the horror” of living with
autism. Part of the map of my very long
road to health.
Autism/Asperger Links
The
magnitude of the Autism/Asperger community online is reason enough to say thank
you for the creation of the Internet.
The Internet proved in many ways to be possibly the most healing all my
experiences. Every hyperlink sewed me
back together in visible and invisible ways.
I took myself apart and put myself together by learning to witness how
my archetypal projections played themselves out through my hand on the
mouse. It was my ouija board on the
universe and my unconscious.
Autism
Biomedical Information Network
Autism Electronic Mailing Lists
Independent
living on the autistic spectrum
National Alliance for
Autism Research
The History of
Ideas on Autism: Legends, Myths and
Reality - by Lorna Wing
The Whole Brain Atlas –
images of the brain are one roadmap.
Understanding Autism – Newsweek - also Interview with Temple Grandin – articulate beyond
imaging. Great explainer of autistic
experience.
University Students With
Autism And Asperger's Syndrome
Former
Autist
Stillborn
– 1943
Survived
– 1943 - 1986
Reborn
– 1986 – 2000
Delivered
to the Great Beyond- 2000
For
further information contact:
©Arlene
Rani Ziegler,
011-524-1520967
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