By the time I finished 8th grade, I had read the complete works of Alan Watts and listened to every one of his recorded lectures. I had also read the entire catalogue of Carl Jung and worked my way through the complete mythology collection of my library. This is not the way to make friends. But it is a great way to see the world differently than nearly everyone around you. Especially in middle school.
But the truth is I had seen the world differently well before reading those books. My literary selections were an outgrowth of how I already interacted with the world. Recent studies (2020) at Emory University reported, and this has been replicated many times since, people with a well “organised” prefrontal cortex tend to be religious, monotheistic or conventionally religious as defined by their culture and are more likely to belong to common, “normal,” organised religions while people with a “disorganised” prefrontal cortex are more likely to be spiritual, pantheistic, animistic, and do not define themselves as religious in the common sense. Notice, here, the loaded language please. Organised vs disorganised. Organised equals good. Disorganised equals bad. America, the home of toxic independence and the pernicious myth of the rugged individual, sees the organised as good. A god, humankind, animals, plants, air, water, and rocks, all separate, each in their place, in a hierarchy. Disorganised?… well, who knows how THOSE people see the world. Everything connected? An interdependent web? Obviously disorganised.
But what if we change the terms? Describe the prefrontal cortex construction as rigid or diffuse? Like the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent. Typical vs divergent. Normal vs abnormal. More loaded language. Autistic folk, as an example, tend to have a more diffusely organised prefrontal cortex with greater connectivity than the rigid, less connected cortex of the neurotypical person. Perhaps that sounds a bit mean. If so, that wasn’t on purpose but demonstrates one of the effects of purposefully chosen loaded language. It also illustrates the inherent bias of the authors of the studies in this area. But rhetorical linguistics aside, the facts remain. Autistic people have greater, wider connectivity in a prefrontal cortex that is organised differently than that of the average person who has, shall we say, more orderly connections. And this is not uncommon in people who are, what this culture has come to call, neurodivergent. As the focal length of an eye changes how we perceive light, the shape of the brain changes how we perceive life. We see the world in a different way because we are built in a different way.
Greater connectivity in the brain tends to lead to, not ironically, seeing more things in the world as connected. Less division. While neurodivergent people may have very particular ways of doing things, and often seem hyperorganised, this is generally because they sense the connection between that organisation and the ripples it sends out into the world. Seeing more things as connected, seeing fewer divisions, seeing things as a system, very much affects our spiritual life.
In Buddhism, for example, there appears to be a preponderance of Autistic folk. In North America, 40% of all people who come to Buddhism from other religions are Jewish. 40%. 2% of the North American population make up 40% of the Buddhists. BuJus. Jews are much more likely to be autistic as well. As a matter of fact, one of the gene mutations that appears to play a large role in autism is seen much more frequently in Ashkenazi Jews (1:80) as compared to the rest of the population (1:20,000). There is a clear correlation here. In fact, there are many who postulate that Gautama Siddhartha was, indeed, autistic. The case is made most clearly by Dr. David Goren in his book Symphony for India, Buddha, and Freedom. Dr. Goren, as well, refers to himself as a BuJu.
Why Buddhism? Buddhists may practice together but, even together, it is still an individual practice. It is spiritual parallel play. It emphasises the connected nature of the world and a diffuse self with a decreased emphasis on the self over that of the society and nature. Buddhism is broad in scope yet has simple rules that make sense. Especially as it came to America with the Zen of Suzuki Roshi and the Tibetan derived Shambhala of Trungpa Rinpoche with their much greater emphasis on environmental and social justice in what came to be known as 4th Wave or Engaged Buddhism.
In Paganism, neopaganism, and witchcraft, we find many people who are neurodivergent. There are no numbers, no percentages, but anyone who has been involved in Earth Centered religions certainly knows this is so. Again, Earth Centered religions emphasise the connected nature of the world and everything in it. From Witchcraft to animism, you will find neurodivergent people. You will find far more neurodivergent people in a pagan group or coven than in any Baptist church.
The reasons for this are manifold. Not only is there more emphasis on interconnection in the nature of these practices, but they stress both cooperation and shared effort as well as the validity of the individual spiritual experience. There is a long history of seeing people who are neurodivergent as not fitting in. That makes for great difficulties in many churches, in many religions. They are frequently shunned, and often they remove themselves from the confines of those painful religious strictures and find other ways to express their “eccentric,” nonconforming spirituality. In days long past, neurodivergent people were often seen as changelings, or touched by the gods, and were shunned or exalted, but certainly didn’t fit into the dominant forms of the extant religion. So too, today.
Neurodivergent people are often pushed to find their spiritual home elsewhere for other reasons as well. In the general population, approximately 5% of people identify as LGBTQ, but approximately 30% of neurodivergent people do. The percentage is even high for the 1.5% of the population that is autistic, specifically. A neurodivergent person is six times more likely to be queer. For gender fluidity, the percentage difference is even higher, at eight times the general population. One can easily see why many neurodivergent people would not find a home in the religion in which they were brought up and look elsewhere for an accepting, fulfilling spiritual home.
In 2022 and 2023, The UUA, The Unitarian Universalist Association, ran a series of classes specifically for clergy and congregational leaders on this very topic. A series of seven classes with the overall title, “Embracing Neurodiversity: Pathways to Understanding.” The Unitarian Universalist Sources (Sources of Our Living Tradition – the six sources from which UUs draw their traditions and must be affirmed by the congregations) create an atmosphere that tends to draw people who are neurodivergent. The UU emphasises acceptance of the individual but fosters cooperation. They celebrate critical thinking, Humanism, acceptance of Earth-based spirituality, the individual vision, the personal journey shared with others, and the affirmation of the personal prophetic, spiritual experience, and this calls to many neurodivergent people. The seven UU Principles should make this a happy home for neurodivergent folk, but nothing is perfect and that is not always the case, lest the UUA would not be creating classes on this very topic. But the understanding there is much to learn about, and much to learn from, their neurodiverse members is a great place to start.
Neurodivergent people feel very deeply. Many may find difficulty in expression, or have a more amorphous sense of emotion, or have trouble in specifically identifying a feeling, but feel deeply nonetheless. Likewise, a difficulty with interoception, the perception of the internal world, of how the body is feeling, may often lead to indistinct feelings, and a blur between the mental, emotional and physical worlds. “Where does it hurt” may be a difficult question. Feelings can be somaticised, expressed in the body, and then difficult to describe and locate. Anger may be felt, but not noticed. It may express itself as stomach pain. But ask where it hurts, and you may get a very general answer. Doctors don’t like that. From personal experience, I know.
Even the general sense of self can feel undifferentiated. And that may be the key. A sense of self, emotionally, mentally, physically, that is experienced in an undifferentiated way leads to experiencing the world in an undifferentiated way. A diffuse self leads to experiencing the cosmos, spirit, in a diffuse way. It can lead to experiencing the universe and spirit in a way that is fluid, nonconfining, open and dynamic without solid, defined boundaries.
It can lead many to feeling awe in most all things. Drop me anywhere, any place, and I am a kid in a candystore, but that candystore is the world around me. Like Thoreau, I can spend three pages writing about a small melting rivulet in a bank of snow as though it were the most fascinating thing I have ever come across. Because, at that time, it is. I spent more than an hour once transfixed by a lone aspen leaf oscillating in the breeze while all the other leaves were still, seemingly frozen in space. Any place I go, fascination, connection, and awe. Any place I go, spirit, wonder, and beauty.
But the brain that allows us to experience the world in that way can also lead us into confusion. The poet Chris Martin put it like this: “Imagine your brain is a nest of highly charged wires, many of them overlapping in ways that bring you startling and multidimensional impressions of the world. Then imagine these same wires threaten at all times to overwhelm your ability to engage with that world. Imagine your sensory acuity is so intense that its five inputs habitually merge and surge.”
Merge and surge. One result of that merging is synesthesia. Synesthesia is the melding of at least two of our senses. It is what happens when the often mostly distinct areas of the sensory cortex, that wrinkly outer layer of the cerebral cortex that processes and makes sense out of information gathered by our five senses, overlap each other. It is how we can taste yellow and hear blue. It is how names have scents and one can feel sound. It is music flowing through space as vision and the taste of trees in the distance.
It was once thought that synesthesia was exceedingly rare. One in 10,000, maybe. But now we know it isn’t quite that rare. It is even built into our language. Cheese really isn’t sharp, afterall, but we describe it that way. The name Kiki sounds sharp too, but Obubo sounds round and soft. If I drew two figures, one round and one spikey, and let people choose between the two names, 80% would choose the soft name for the round figure and the hard sharp name for the spikey one. Now, imagine a world that is like that in so many other ways, all the time. That is the experience of so many neurodivergent people.
Studies have shown the prevalence of synesthesia is almost three times higher in people with ASD (20%) compared to that of the general population (7%), and much more wide ranging and intense. No wonder so many neurodivergent people experience a world with fewer boundaries and divisions, and, sometimes, confusion. No wonder the lines between self and spirit become blurred. No wonder we see the world in a different way.
David Derbyshire, psychologist, sums it up like this: “as neurodiverse individuals, we can find we have deep spiritual experiences as well as this empathy with others, though many may have trouble expressing it. Our sensitivities may mean that we are more comfortable spending time on our own in contemplation, thinking about spiritual issues. For some of us this may lead to experiences that some would call mystical. This might include a deep sense of oneness with the universe, or other unusual feelings and impressions including specific mental images or visions.”
I learned a word when I was very young. Kensho. In Zen Buddhism it means seeing or perceiving. It is a sudden realisation, a fleeting moment of enlightenment, when one feels a part of everything. When one realises, and feels, the interconnectedness of all things, boundaries disappear, and the ego dissipates. The I is absorbed into the universe of all that is. Try explaining that to your parents. Try explaining to them that the whole world is subfused in a golden glow.
Paul Bataille’s, the Zen teacher, in “Kenshō, Now What?,” asks, after the flash, what then? “Life goes on as usual – shopping lists, laundry, the smell of onions frying. But something invisible doesn’t quite return to its old shape.”It’s as if the outline of “me” has become transparent, the lines faintly smudged. Just the taste that cannot be described still lingering forever on the tongue.
What does it do to a young person to experience that, without the ability to describe it or anyone to understand it? This may be why your neurodivergent friend doesn’t talk about these experiences. This is why so many of us remain apart. This is why so many of us remain silent.
Adam Byrn Tritt 