Paranormal experiences?

Hello, everyone. 

I wanted to ask the following question, as it really intrigues me:

Have you viewed your paranormal experience(s) differently since becoming aware that you are autistic?

Hello, everyone. 

I wanted to ask the following question, as it really intrigues me:

Have you viewed your paranormal experience(s) differently since becoming aware that you are autistic?

Yes. No. Maybe. 

I don't think of them as "paranormal" so much as... not currently explicable using a modern scientific/cultural frame of reference.  

I think of autism as largely a filtering problem. 

The brain is not a processor, it is not the seat of our thoughts, or even of our memories. It's a filter, with some other functions like coordinating sensory signals and motor instructions. The world is way bigger than what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Those are just the sensory organs we've been able to study pretty well.  But even with those...  your eyes don't filter.  You see everything around you. In order for that information to be useful, your brain filters out most of it, so that you see only what's useful to you, and kind of mute the rest. Normal people filter out most everything, and are able to zero in on what's immediately relevant to them. Autistic people have inefficient filters. We tend to see a lot more, and we're crap at filtering it, so we are often overwhelmed by the deluge of information. Ditto for the other four physical senses. 

Now, think about all the stuff we don't see. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Radiation. Those things are all real, but we don't have the equipment to perceive them.  The world is bigger than our physical perception. 

Then there are other categories of real things that we can't sense physically:  the number fourteen. The square root of nine. The concept of running.  Love. Hate. Confusion. Forgiveness. Grace. Stories. You can't touch or smell those things, but they are nonetheless real and important. They're not physical, we just find handy ways to represent them symbolically. 

Now, consider that basically every human civilization since the dawn of humanity (excepting our remarkably weird materialist age) has believed that there are whole other planes of existence apart from the physical (heaven, hell, hades, olympus, nirvana, valhalla, dreamtime), and that those planes are just as real, are concurrent with our physical plane, and that there are all sorts of beings that live there: spirits, gods, ancestors, ghosts, angels, demons, djinn, fairies, etc. 

I could be completely wrong of course, but in the context of autism as a filtering problem, it makes perfect sense to me that: 

A) in our current materialist age, it is maladaptive to perceive things from other planes of existence. Culturally we've chosen not to believe in those, so in the process of growing out of babyhood and pruning off un-needed neurons most people lose that perception. They filter it out. Tell a kid "that's not real" enough times, and they actually stop seeing it. Normal people see what they're supposed to see, and nothing else. And for the most part, this works well for them. It's functional. What's interesting is that completely normal people in other cultures, and in the past (effectively a foreign culture) can/could see those things because everybody believed in them, and it was not dysfunctional to perceive them, within their own cultural context. 

B) We're poorly adapted, specifically because we could not prune our neurons efficiently during development and now we do not filter out enough. It makes sense that we might, more often than the average NT, have perceptual experiences that are both real and outside normal and culturally acceptable perceptual parameters. 

No. Other than that someone once told me she had done some research on autism, and read that autistics are sometimes attracted to astrology. Well, I've encountered one or two astrologers who have recently come out as being on the spectrum. I would say that just as many are not.

I still say that autism is to do with a set of cards that you are dealt. Possibly more important is how you deal with them, but of course many people don't know they are on the spectrum, which wo t help if they know there is something going on with them, but don't quite have a handle on what it is. 

Well, sort of.  As I mentioned above, I believe - and I think this is born out by my personal experiences - that our senses are often calibrated differently.  Now, I think they might be more or less sensitive than others'  (hypo- or hyper-sensitive) and in this case I think that many of our senses are dialled up so that our perception is heightened. 

In the light of that, and depending upon the particular senses, I would expect some to experience what might be described as clairvoyance, others clairaudience, others clairsentience more generally.  I would also go so far as to link this to empathy, although often in the literature we're seen as somehow lacking on that score.  I think that we might in fact often be extremely empathic, to the point where we might be described as empaths.  We might, of course, express it differently, but I think this is adequately explained by Damian Milton's double empathy work. 

Although I was always aware of my sensitivity (which I view as a double edged blessing in our current culture), being able to link this with my autistic identity has made me feel stronger, more certain of myself and, in many ways, more integrated as a human being.  And, by that last observation about integration, I think that I previously thought of these experiences as somehow anomalous, one off and strangely disconnected from my general experience.  I now see them as integral and on a kind of continuum with my overall way of being.