[Aleader-dev] Re: slightly autistic

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 03:54:12AM -0400, Alan Wherry wrote:
> One thought I did have, which may or may not be use to you, was on your
> comment that possibly SY's are slightly autistic. I would think that this is
> unlikely in that since they are the one's out of the general population who
> can take to SY, presumably because their attention is strong enough to take
> on and recognize the value of Self-realization, such a comment cannot be
> correct since the vast majority of those who come to hear SMJ cannot take to
> SY and do not have the ability to recognize the value of what they have been
> given.

I agree that SY's are more sensitive than the general population.

Perhaps if I write it as a table you can understand better:

                   autistic symptoms (0=none, 10=clinically autistic)
  Shri Mataji      0.0
  SY's             0.0 - 3.0
  Avg Population   2.5 - 7.0
  Clinical Autism  7.0 - 10.0

So even if we SY's show less autistic symptoms than the
average population, there is still room for improvement.

Anyway, I freely admit that this is pure speculation.  There
is quite a lot of work remaining before I can say anything
empirically.

> I think, and SMJ has said, that especially in the West, people's attention
> was ruined by the consumer society of the last 70 years or so.
> 
> A few years ago, I watched a TV program made in England. It was a 45 minute
> documentary, made in the 1950's of people talking about the Blake poem,
> Tyger, Tyger, and it's possible meaning. On it there were schoolchildren,
> housewives, secretaries, a broad cross section of the population. It was
> shocking to watch in as much as one could see just how much we've lost in
> the intervening years - the attention of these people was much stronger than
> the attention of people today, they came across as more alive, vital and
> 'sparky', more capable of independent thought than their contemporaries.
> Also, today's audience would be unlikely to know the poem and certainly not
> have the same spectrum of independent thought as to what the poem is saying.
> Today's audience would be much more likely to know of the work of Jennifer
> Lopez or Britney Spears, to have its opinions, such as they are, by the
> popular media, to think in sound bites.

Yes, agree 100%.  I find this kind of thing horrifying -- Kali Yuga.  :-)

-- 
A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader