07/12/2024

Synchronicity

I opened tonight to a page in Perfume of The Desert. The book is a nightstand staple. Many a night I open to a reading before rest. It was the beginning of a chapter that I didn’t particularly remember, but I believe in synchronicity. I’ve learned to listen to the signs.

The page was the introduction to “Part Four: Ordeal and Annihilation”. It says that “every mystical journey and every spiritual tradition has a crucifixion, the requirement is that the seeker becomes destroyed by Love.”

The authors call it the dark night of the soul. They go on to say that “no one lives the resurrected life without having passed through the strippings, humiliations and torments of the crucifixion“.

It says that the “cost of annihilation is the supreme test of the seekers sincerity, and only someone who has prepared himself for a long time and been prepared by God can possibly go through“. 

Conscious Identity

So this is interesting because I am experiencing the very earth-shattering and painful death that many spiritual traditions speak of. I deeply relate to the dark night of the soul. I am in the midst of the death of what I thought I was. 

But does that also call into question who I thought I was?

It is painful to contemplate that everything we think we know about ourselves is a product of our own perception. A viewpoint, a perspective that might not be the whole reality.

It’s only natural to believe you know yourself, who you think you actually are as a human being. I am not young and it could be said I’ve become well acquainted with myself. However, It has been my experience that the more we seek, and have the courage to unveil ourselves, we come to realize how little we actually know.

Potentially, you don’t even know your own mind or reactions to the exterior world. In a way we are aware of our own habituations and how we respond. But how much does that change when we begin to compare that to how others perceive and react?

The way that you observe, perceive, process, and react to the whole world is our only viewpoint. This remains true until something comes along and challenges that. One day it becomes known that what you think and feel is not what we are calling ‘typical’.

What if everything you think you knew was not real? The fact is I have been in the dark about my perception and reaction to reality. An undiagnosed, highly masked autistic individual, yet unaware of it until now. It’s really has me twisted at the moment. 

Who am I? Who am I if I cannot trust my own perception?

I thought that the way I moved through this existence was potentially, typical. However, I have just found out that is not so. I have just discovered, by way of a medical diagnosis, that I am in fact not neurotypical. For an instant, I began to question the very lens that I have seen my life through. Questioning it all. Each exchange, each response, all my mannerisms…not typical. 

Ego Crash

If the ego is the mind’s attempt to understand itself, then I have endured a most-painful rupture of that sense of self. I have recently endured immense pain. What feels like an actual death. Grief and mourning. False as this ego may be, it is gasping for air. It is struggling for its own survival. It is begging for its old ways back. But there is no turning back time to the life where I was neurotypical. Not possible to turn back to the idea that how I process this whole life is normal.

So, I am bathed in annihilation. I am enduring the crucifixion. Everything has changed. Because neurological processing is at the core of this recent discovery, that I am an autistic individual, the sense of self has become an enigma. There are moments when I am uncertain what the self is. Which version of me is real. As I have been systematically, taking off masks on the spiritual path for years I am not surprised that an earth-shattering unmasking is occurring. Yet aren’t we always the last ones to know when the real growth is happening?

Spiritual Expansion

I am blessed with a strong spiritual foundation that has long prepared me for this phase of expansion. I was not necessarily looking for it. But isn’t that the devastating awe of the spiritual seeker? Looking for the truths, with revelations that are never anticipated.

This short one page introduction had previously been so important to me in my life. Annihilation was required when I endeavored to get sober. A full surrender. Perfume of The Desert was the gateway to Sufism for me years ago when I began to live in the spiritual solution of sobriety. Tonight I just happened to open this page. It seems to be describing part of what I’m going through. Describing to me my current trials post-diagnosis.

The death of the false self, the self oppressed by ego, could be compared to the death of identification. It could be compared to the death of who I thought I was. These fleeting and impermanent roles we give ourselves. The mother, the scholar, the hero, the teacher. The wise one. The one who understands her mind. I am well aware that with spiritual rigor the identification that traps us in fleeting labels lessens. Remembering this gives me hope. I know in my heart that this uncovering of my true neurodivergent nature IS for my growth. I am definitely experiencing a spiritual expansion. I am in the midst of shedding, dropping the veils, breaking free and dissolving forms of who my ego thought I was.

There is pain here. But I am unafraid.

It was Divine intervention that opened this page to me tonight. And all at once, I know I am right where I belong.

These waves of emotion are mine to ride.

This beautiful and strange existence is a gift.

To meet life’s challenges with a loving Spirit in my heart makes the hard days softer.

“One of the greatest gifts to all of us from the Sufi Mystics, is their wisdom about suffering and ordeal…how to suffer with increasing trust, and even gratitude, those trials that are sent by Love to help us die into eternal life”

-Harvey & Hanut, 1999

#myautisticjourney