Autistic spectrum and magical development

General Discussion
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I’m curious as to whether anyone’s ever touched on this topic - ie. if there’s a distinct difference in how people who are on the spectrum magically progress? Admittedly ASD is a shotgun category, more descriptive than scientific, my own dx is something like PDD-NOS and I don’t fit into Asperger’s because my ability to read and interpret other people’s emotions seems to even be on the high side but I also see where - at least on a social level - the world works on fluidity of movement based on conformity and how well you can approximate the center of the cognitive bell-curve (and the more I think about it the less I blame people for doing this who can take advantage of it) and that’s a place where I distinctly struggle.

I am genuinely wondering though, especially with the way our brains wiring seems to have a lot to do with how we engage with the gods and spirits or in what ways they can talk to us, if anyone else here is on the spectrum, has had success in opening their own internal doors, and in particular what they found their individualized needs were when it came to approaching ritual, internal alchemy, etc. I get that we tend to be lopsided in the sense that we can enjoy great strides in progress on some levels, have constantly compounding life impingements that may lead to trauma of the sort that can slow our progress. That’s part of why I’m really curious about this - I’m thinking there probably is a way around or through it but it’s quite likely a very tricky or narrow path, one where you have to grope around in the dark for quite a while to figure out where ‘your door’ either into the astral plane or through your default mode network and reducing valve on incoming datum actually is. That said I’m sure it’s just as challenging an endeavor even without ASD to find that door but life intuition would tell me that we’re not as likely to find that door in quite the same place.

Any thoughts?

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I’m a great magician because of autism, I mean, being obsessive about magick + zero social life = a lot of time and resources for magick.

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Agreed. The zero social life seems like it can be a double-edged sword, ie. a lot of motivation to make life work so to speak but that can also lay the lust for result trap even more. While I do get calls from old friends to go visit these days they’re living about two hours away, somewhere I didn’t want to move to just because I don’t trust places of employment enough and I’ve been bitten too many times for little or no good reason to trust that sort of decision.

A few things that are helpful at taking the edge off of that - working a fair amount and having other interests like martial arts, hiking, and I used to have music production on that list - hoping to get some other diffusing activities back in for the sake of good balance.

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I wired everything to magick, everything I do has something to do with magick. As for the lust for results, I’ve learned to trust the will of the Gods, so I don’t worry most of the time.

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That’s smart - ie. being able to give the expectations the breathing room for the results to be what they’ll be.

I think one of the fears I’ve been grappling with in life is the likelihood of getting dominated by external absurdity, and while I seem to have a relatively strong stomach for hard or difficult truths my tap-out point for years has been the magister templi oath of seeing every event in life as an active, sentient, conversation between ourselves and the universe. I think of the first half of the 20th century - Soviet gulags, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Japanese Unit 731, Khmer Rouge, only leaving Nazi Germany out because it’s the most sensationalized and well known (and relatively low on kill-count comparatively), and I get all of the wrong kinds of chills. It could be true that all of life is sentient in a self-aware rather than subconscious/unconscious way, all happenings are deliberate or ‘soul contracts’, and like many NDE’ers say it’s all part of God’s ‘perfect plan’ in something like a Minkowski block universe but it’s still an extremely difficult idea to digest and it really puts the fear of god in you, not the fear of a raging Yahweh but something that loves you unconditionally, is as tricksterish and playful as it can seem capricious, and it would let, or even inflict, almost anything imaginable while you’re here.

That last bit seems to be the dark side of what many new agers often refer to as Source, and I’ve found myself warming up to that term a bit because, unlike God, it doesn’t fix moral agency or contractual reliance between us and it - ie. Source can indeed ride us hard and put us away wet, God in the western sense less so.

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Well, I work almost exclusively with demons and I know how they work, so I don’t know about your idea of “God”. But you mention the magister templi degree, which I kinda have because I’ve crossed the Abbys, and if you are talking about my prophet Aleister Crowley, let me tell you that Nuit is a bitch of dubious reputation, be careful with her.

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Fair enough.

By God I’m referring to the great Solaris-type star many people have encountered, the one that hug-tackles people when they die, the one that many people have at sometimes seen dragging the entire cosmos like a jellyfish lazily drags its tentacles along. It seems to map onto Indra, and in it’s case it is it’s own net. It seems, much like Stanisław Lem’s water planet, to have a sort of consciousness that’s all about unfolding every possible permutation of reality, vigorously penning mathematical monsters and Julia sets, that it can and then obsessively checking, double-checking, and triple-checking its memory of such things to make sure every result is recorded. The odd thing about it is that strange sort of duality it has in it’s behavior, ie. being infinitely loving up close but being ice-cold and mathematical at a distance or when it’s provisionally using us as drill-bits while embodied.

I’m really fascinated to see how these ontologies close/reconcile against each other, if they can off what angles, if they can’t then why, because it seems like - and this could just be the failure of a priori reasoning of this sort - that there should be precisely one ultimate noumenal / actual world and variances in experience of it would boil down to simply seeing different parts of the same thing. If that were wrong it would still open more doors to ask the question of why - ie. manifestations of different multiverses interacting with this one? Lots to chew on with that.

Also with Nuit, what your saying almost makes her sound like she’s got fair similarities to Tiamat. Would that be a correct analogy or would you say it’s quite a bit more complicated?

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I’ve never encountered such thing nor I have experienced its characteristics as you describe them.
Do you want to talk more about autism and magick or this is going off-topic?

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That was more of a side-bar and sure - I’m happy to talk more about the main topic.

I often wonder how many magicians, autistic or otherwise, actually experience the transition from simply normal consciousness with normal boundaries into having active psychism and what that process looks like. I think that opening may look different for autists because we’re hyper-developed in some ways. Not having had that happen yet I tend to imagine it, for better or worse, a bit like Paul Atreides in Dune having the sleeper awaken. Psychedelic-induced downloads at least tend to mirror that somewhat.

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I haven’t watched that, but I know a lot about Warhammer 40k.

I think the psychic stuff is just like any other thing that humans can do. I think that mental conditions would more likely influence what the person does with those abilities.

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The book laid out the mechanics of it much more impressively than David Lynch’s movie did (whether it would have been better if it hadn’t been so vigorously edited against his wishes is a different story). The idea seemed to be that Paul’s mind was getting flooded by a landscape, the landscape of all past, present, and future possibilities within a certain relevant range and the relevant range was growing. I don’t think anyone has been quite that potently psychic in their awakening but the part of it about being a revealed landscape with stable/coherent rule sets seems to fit my intuitions.

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In my experience and in the experience of other practitioners that I’ve known, doing psychic stuff is a regular thing. I don’t know if you are looking for something tremendous, but it’s like brushing your teeth. Someday you have the Knowledge and Conversation and you are happy with it, but the line in the supermarket is still slow.

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Sounds in that case almost like nothing perceptually changes in obvious ways aside from being able to separate signal from noise better.

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I don’t know what are you trying to achieve or what you have been told that happens, but I can’t help you with that since I don’t personally want the things you seem to want or care about what you care in terms of search and development. However, I wish that you find your answers and that leads you to a better life

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I’ve had experiences that borderline LARP threads I 100% stand by happening due to mine. I’m slowly coming to realize I have extremely sensitive intuition that lets in too much information and it fucks with me.

I’m still working around it. I have tourettic OCD and tourettes is on the spectrum for sure. I also never forget songs once I’ve heard them and I have perfect pitch so I can hear a song and know how it’s being played on the guitar in real time in my minds eye. It just works that way, can’t explain how except Hail Paimon, King Paimon is a badass.

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Perhaps.

I’d say when I watch Tim Freke’s ‘What is life?’ on Youtube it seems like he’s filled with most of the same questions I have. We did get into a friendly back and forth about Minkowski space-time and block universe, I side with Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on free will and determinism.

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I am an inhome caretaker for neuroatypical adults.

They are very sensitive to vibes. I cannot perform anything baneful there, even its just blowing off steam. I’d open my eyes after meditating to a shocked and certainly worried expression on my client’s face. Ive tried this at a few different houses and all my clients have reactions to the energy being put out.

Ive thought for about a year that perhaps their brains have made up for their inability to communicate verbally by developing a sense for other means of communication. Such as sensing the state of someone’s aura.

The weirdest experience ive had with a client was when he spooked me one day and sorta charged at me and STOPPED. Caps because it was abrupt like he hit a wall. He stopped and gave me a perplexed look and walked away. He never attacked me or got rowdy with me after that.

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For me personally this has been a natural occurrence. As in i have vivid dreams, foretellings and clairaudiance to name a few. My skills do not lay in verbal mastery so forgive me for the ignorance in comprehending about half of what you have written.

I am able to draw with ease, paint etc and am a rapid visual learner. I can watch someone and pick up the technique fairly quick. I know thats not super special but its a good advantage. I also am able to recall dreams and memories from very early childhood. Think one year old age range. As well as dreams. I also have the ability to choose my dreams and participate in them fairly easily.

I think for myself the social skills are simply lacking aside from being sheltered the majority of my youth but also because most people innately know when some one is different and in society different is bad. Aside from add, I have asd and c.a.p.d. And regular dyexia (so forgive the typos) which makes conversing tedious. I far prefer to write over talking.

I am quick at learning languages which helps with certain rituals and spell work. And I am good things like Tetris and 3dimensional patterning.
I am terrible at remmembering tedious details pertaining to most names and dates. As well as recalling factual informtion…fantasy and fiction however I can recall with ease.

I obsess easily over topics of interest I.e magic and the occult. Video games, new book series.

I feel like my ability to visualize and daydream are a benefit in the occult. Not so much in day to day life but definitely in the occult. So I kinda feel like I myself am more hardwired for the occult naturally. Regular life not so much lol

Also I dive head first into my shadow work and yes it makes my life difficult to say the least as it has brought to surface many of the areas I’m naturally deficient in. But I have an easy time accessing it because of the way my brain is wired.

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Aside from dyslexia I also have a phone with terrible autocorrect and slightly out of synch keyboard :confused:

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Something that might be worth sharing a bit about is my past and mystical experiences. I had certain relatively small but poingnant ones through my childhood like disappearing objects, chance encounters with faith healers, and other things I didn’t understand quite as well like fantasy draws toward what could be best described ad super-women and before that sort of mother-like friend (when I was seven or eight) who used to drop by in dreams occasionally and play with me the way an older cousin might play with a toddler sibling.

I increasingly, just through various hardships and challenges, moved toward agnosticism and spent at least a few years as a somewhat reluctant but accepting atheist materialist even though admittedly there were some causal shakeups and odd events that made me wonder if there were at least deeper geometries to what I was dealing with. My autism, and my understanding (false at this point) that my validity as a human being counted on me overcoming it had me as an obsessive observer of social phenomena. There was one night out at the club with my friends where it seemed like me or just about anyone else would just about trip fall, and land in a fight, guys were accidentally spilling drinks in the purses of girls they were trying to pick up, I went home really trying to put away what a cluster it was when I saw an image of absolute perfect memory tracing all lines of causality, it zoomed out in that perfection farther and farther until I saw that it was a circular glowing mandala with a sort of neon argyle pattern on it. On another episode a girl I’d been chatting with online called me out of town to meet her, one thing lead to another and I unknowingly got mixed up with a married woman, I came back into town and friends who didn’t even have contact with each other had their lives turned upside down - one friend getting kicked out of another friend’s sister’s appartment because a third friend was smoking weed in there without her permission, another friend got hospitalized because his girlfriend beat the crap out of him, and there was other stuff that just seemed - pretty much like the boring, mundane, and predictable rules of life went out the window, a bit like I went from a flat plane through a range of mountains or possibly up or down a steep cliff. Yet another oddity was when I had a dream preminition of total humiliation, three months later a girl a friend was dating just about got us into a restaurant brawl (picking a fight with strangers over sports - no idea what her problem was), my friend (professionals of all things) wanted to stake the table out and get in the fight - I walked out because for one I never asked for it and second I thought they were all batisht crazy. The next Monday I was at my client’s place of work on very little sleep, feeling off, and I felt the strongest pull to do something inappropriate that I ever have in my life (clearly I stopped something from feeding and so it took a shot at me - failed thankfully).

Even despite those unexplainable circumstances I really was still in the same spot until someone talked me into seriously looking at NDE’s in 2012, one thing lead to another - ie. to looking at mediums, reading the Seth books, trying the Blavatsky / Bailey stuff but not really feeling it, felt like something was off so I want briefly back to Chrsitianity and read the bible several times over and it sort of came apart in my handle - largely that I just knew it was a woven braid of pagan philosophy by that point. What I think really kicked things into overdrive was reading Manly P Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages. I had two overwhelming experiences - one while I was reading the section on Isis and the Bembine Tablet, an absolute gale force of love and white light (quite beautiful and seductive) hit me like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and something about two-thirds that strength hit me in a slightly different way when I was reading the part about Thoth. I didn’t know what to make of it, sat on that experience for a few weeks, decided to 2nd plateau DXM (I’ve had better luck normally with lower 3rd but in this case it was more than enough), decided to try and talk to her (Isis) and what came of that day started the most unusual two weeks of my life (June 2013) where I had plenty of times where I felt like I was about ready to pop out of my body, I had a three foot radius of touch at a distance, could feel these light entities around me when they entered my sphere, one was laying next to me in bed one night and she was giggling at me in this very Buddhistic way, half impishly a bit like Eva from Wall-e, I woke up one night around 1:30AM with my heart being cradled in a sheet of energy like a mother was holding a baby, and there were at least one or two other major experiences albeit something in this also drew succubi and that sort of closed the tail end of it.

After that, and after I’d caught up on sleep (during that two weeks I was averaging something like two or three hours of sleep a night - I’ve heard flights of ecstasy can do that) it closed out. I started following trails from Secret Teaching of All Ages like reading Rudolph Steiner’s work, following that up with Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot, and it was the combination of Tomberg’s Martinism and some things Hall had said about the tarot being like a set of lock-picks for the brain, that made me settle on reading some of Paul Foster Case’s work and joining BOTA (and I joined AMORC the same month - mainly because they had a local body).

I had one other experience in this array, January 2014, which was the boldest and most intense vision of Isis/Mary/Sophia that I’d had to date - I’d come home from work tired, easily went into a border state while I was meditating, and saw myself on an empty plane staring forward, felt that same friendly/maternal pull I’d recognized from my dreams or occasional pulls during waking life in my childhood but far stronger, playfully urging me to look out the window, and TBH her robes were such bright white that I could barely look - it was like fresh snow at noon time on a mountain. She was holding and directing the wing of the plane, I looked back and one of my friends was there as well standing back awestruck.

2014 was where things started to get darker, I had some other experiences in 2015 and 2016 but they decreased in quality, went much more toward the shadow and the demonic (certain problems in my life were pushing me in this direction), and as far as I understand it - there is a ‘normal’ to this sort of cycle. I’ve met one or two guys who’ve had an encounter very similar to mine and they ended up down the road getting into grimoires, Luciferian philosophy, and had problems off and on with meth and heroin, and my best guess is - it’s very difficult to be ‘here’ after that sort of revelation without having the darkness magnified in comparison or, maybe another way to put it, the vision of Isis/Sophia could be the front side of a big wave where the back-side of it is shadow.

I could say more but I think that pretty well describes a fair amount of where I’m coming from, although I’ll add one more thing - my work life has been hell. Graduated highest honors from business school in 2006 (graduated high school in 1998 and couldn’t figure out what I wanted to be), had a dead-end job for six years that I didn’t know was dead-end until I tried to apply for other jobs, temped at dead-end jobs for six years, found out the work world wasn’t about accounting for your other performance but it was how well you made people you had no authority over do their work, I ran into people constantly who wanted to destroy me just for being there or being the slightest bit different, and the current job I’m at now and during 2018 was the worst nightmare of my life as far as work goes - ie. not only trying to learn a computer language I didn’t know on the fly but pretend I’d known it for years, for a client who already wanted the moon on a stick and wanted to pay next to nothing for it, so I worked like 80 hours per week for six months straight, and if that wasn’t enough I had two or three coworkers who really seemed like they wanted to slit my throat and drink my blood. Somehow that mess passed, just about lost my health over it, things started to turn around in late spring, but needless to say - it’s been rocky.

The fun part as well - being near 40, living at home (largely because of all of the financial volatility), and I had significant anger issues that caught up with me a few years ago that I had to wring out - part of why I started working with Lilith. To say I felt betrayed by life and the world I lived in was an understatement, and it’s not like I was interested in playing the victim - it’s more like these emotions were based on accurate observations and there was no way I could bury them, they had to be processed.

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