Why Losing Truth Can Be a Good Thing

To save your life, you'll have to lay down your stories and, minute by minute, day by day, give your life back to him. Preferring your stories to his life is sin. - Adam S. Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon

Any truth - any truth - must be grasped gently, taking care that the fit between the world and the idea is proportional. We have to be ready to let it go as we and the world we inhabit change. - Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color - something which exists before all forms and colors appear. - Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

In Emanuel Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia or Secrets of Heaven, he embarks on a project to explain the "inner meaning" of Genesis and Exodus to his readers. Some of these "secrets" or "arcana" are hard to understand, but I feel eager to share one of them with you today: the inner meaning of the moment where Pharaoh wakes up from his dream about good cows and bad cows.

First, some context. Context is everything for Swedenborg's interpretation of the Bible - an image or a person signifies a spiritual reality only because of the way that image relates to other images. It's all based on relationship. For instance, what does "Pharaoh" signify? Swedenborg  says that he represents "memory-knowledge in general." A "memory-knowledge" is just truth in the "natural" level of the mind, basically the Book of Mormon's natural man. Ken Jennings has a lot of memory-knowledges. They're trivia, factoids, data: any definite answer you can give to a question. The Pharaoh is the level of your mind that can win at Jeopardy.

In the dream, there are seven bad cows that eat seven good cows. For Swedenborg, these good cows are "truths of the natural" and the bad cows are "falsities" there. So just as the Pharaoh is the mind that thinks in facts, these cows are the facts themselves: a group of good ones and a group of bad ones equally matched. To put it more relevantly, these cows are thoughts. They're the concrete thoughts you get to do a certain thing. The good cows are a thought that says "you should do your homework," while the bad cows are thoughts that say "no, you can play that video game for five more minutes." The first thought is true; the second thought is false.

Clearly, something's gotta give. This stalemate needs to be broken; someone needs to tip the scales. This will be Joseph: what Swedenborg interprets as the "celestial of the spiritual in the natural" (say that five times fast!). In brief, Joseph is an unspoken resolution to do good, a feeling you have bursting within you that wants to go out and help make the world an image of heaven, perhaps not using these words, but which surges out of your heart with golden-gooey fire and feels fond of everyone. This is an urge or an impulse, not yet something actualized. In other words, it's not recognized by that natural, Jeopardy-champion level of your mind. But then it descended into the prison there to cast aside the baker (the origin of those instinctual, let's-eat-cake thoughts) and elevate the butler (the origin of those intellectual, don't-eat-cake thoughts) by his insight. That is, it was Joseph that broke the stalemate between instinct and discipline inside your mind. But even later, when the residual thoughts from the impulse eat cake (the baker transposed into the bad cows) still remain and are apparently powerful enough to entirely displace the good thoughts (eat the good cows).

Swedenborg says that that's the way it's supposed to happen. Why would this be the case? It's because these good thoughts are becoming deeper and less concrete. They're burrowing into the more profound, less visible parts of your mind. For when you say "Let's not eat cake," is that always true? Maybe it's good to eat cake sometimes. Maybe you have problems with sex addictions, but sex isn't always a bad thing either. In short, that thought you had that said "Do this good thing" or "don't do this bad thing" is an oversimplification. Sometimes what looks universally good on a general level has bad side effects, and sometimes bad things have good side effects. And the nuances aren't always so clear-cut. What kind of cake is it good to eat? Carrot cake? Chocolate cake? When you discover this, this newfound relativity might make you think that there is no good and no evil but that "thinking makes it so." Wrong! Instead, what you're noticing is that the good thoughts are slowly becoming like a projector: close up, the image on the wall is blurry, but far away, you can see the nuance there. The "far away" is the internal "feeley" level of your mind; the thoughts are the projector; the wall is the Jeopardy-champion level of your mind. Though the familiar blur is gone, eventually it will reconcile into a greater, more accurate truth. That is, the simple fact "You should never eat cake" becomes something like this: "You should eat cake at parties and other get-togethers, occasionally from left-overs, but not often." This longer sentence is a more high-res version of the simple "Never eat cake." It fills in detail where the shorter one generalizes.

This realization of the nuances is what the Pharaoh "waking up" symbolizes. In that "dark night of the soul" where bad thoughts dominate and there are no good thoughts to fight them, it might seem like it's best just to abandon to relativism and let the bad thoughts win. You think "The clearest thought I have is that I should eat cake! Why do I find it so hard to avoid that temptation?" This is the state symbolized by the bad cows eating the good cows. But light is coming. What's really happening here is that the good cows, the good thoughts, are dissolving and becoming stronger on another plane. They explode into pieces and suddenly become refracted into an army of cows, an army of thoughts (or a store of grain, as the case may be). So don't give up hope! The death of a cherished truth means that it's becoming a legion of even more powerful truths. Out of (only) one, many.

No-thing-ness

I, together with the spirits around me, was in an indeterminate state, which state was such that they could not reflect at all upon themselves, but became, as it were, reduced to nothing in the universe, which accords with the popular idea of spirits. As relates to myself, I could scarcely tell whether I was in the body or out of the body, for I perceived nothing of the body, inasmuch as it was not given to reflect upon it. Thus the perception I had was independent of the body, for the ideas were determined to a vague universality [in universum], and thus, as it were, dissipated, having no determination in myself. Determination in one's self causes that the subjects of it should seem to themselves to be such as they think themselves to be. In a word, the state was altogether different from the ordinary state, nor was there anything but bare speech, for the spirits spoke and I spoke, but the speech was as if it proceeded not from any particular man, but was a mere voice sent forth into vacuity. [Above] there appeared nothing but the celestial blue vault [sprinkled] with little stars. Hence it may be inferred that whatever spirits may appear to themselves [to be or to possess], they have it from the determination of ideas in themselves; and from reflection upon the things which they say, and that without such determination neither spirit nor man appears to himself to be anything. - Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #1706-1707

"There, there, let me rub your feet with cold water. Those bad, bad fire ants!" Mother's voice would continue to distract me while I heard my voice scream. I would scream and I would wonder. I would wonder about the mirror upstairs. I was sure that it was forming a story in red and green once again. The red of fire ants and the green of grass. My voice would scream, and I would wonder whether the mirror upstairs was aware of my screaming. I would lose all control over my screaming voice, and I would wonder when it would stop. My voice would scream, and I would realize Mothers' voice was singing something familiar in my ear. I would slowly concentrate on the words of her song and try to mentally sing along because she repeated most of her songs so often that I had them memorized. After listening to the words of her song, I would wonder why I could no longer hear my voice screaming. And, to my reilief, I would realize that my voice had stopped screaming. - Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk if My Lips Don't Move: Inside my Autistic Mind

The schizophrenic is the universal producer. There is no need to distinguish here between producing and its product. We need merely note that the pure "thisness" of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing. The table continues to "go about its business. ... The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. - Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 

The World Between Walls

Boundaries are everywhere. Not only do you find them in buildings, streets, and computers, but every cell has a wall, you have skin, and every bug has an exoskeleton. Thanks to these walls, there is an "inside" and an "outside." But what would the world be without these walls? There would no photosynthesis to absorb light; there would only be light. There would be no animals that drink water; there would only be water. Without walls, there would no "place" at all. In order for there to be place, you need a "here," and you can only have a "here" when you divide it from a "there" by a boundary. Apart from walls, there is only "here-there," a reality where both imply and exist in each other. There is only a "between."

Insides and outsides aren't real in themselves. You couldn't eat anything or see anything if this division were absolute. Your eyes are places where inside and outside meet and the "between" gets revealed. This is true of every part of your body that opens to the outside world. Just like you need a wall of skin, you need holes in that wall. And the walls of life correspond to the between. My skin follows the flow of my blood vessels, and my blood vessels follow the flow of my blood. The eye "traces" the reality of light itself. Since they depend on a current that exist on "both sides" of inside and outside, all organisms are merely elaborations of the "between" that existed before it did.

As such, life is what happens when walls follow the between. Moreover, this means that I am not just my physical body. Sight isn't just the physical eye; sight is the between of light that happens through the eye. So too with me: I am not my body but the between that happens through it. And as there has always been light, even if there was no eye to see it, so I have always existed in some way, even before my body did. Just like an apple tree produces fruit, I am the "fruit" of the world's between. This between is a sea, where currents have sub-currents and sub-currents have sub-sub-currents. It is normally invisible. In fact, this between-world can only become visible when there it makes use of already existing walls to elaborate itself. Before you could exist, there needed to be people, and before people could exist, there needed to be animals and, before that, life itself. But as a between yourself, you've always been latent in world's between. You've been building your body over billions of years.

Thus the pre-existence didn't happen in another world at all. It is this world, only regarded as to the between that hasn’t yet expressed itself in visible walls. So too with the spiritual world: it is a world of the between, the inside-dash-outside that has always existed and will always exist. And within all of this, divinity is the between itself. It is the current all other currents express. The world is its revelation in the same way that the eye is the revelation of light. So are you.

Why the World is Waking Up

The world is changing. And not just in the way you think -- even with the horror that's happening in the world politically, there is something beautiful bubbling up to the surface. This beautiful thing is bright, warm, and big. And it is becoming more and more apparent for those with eyes to see.

It's true that the world looks hopeless right now. But that's the darkness trying to distract you. It wants you to become hopeless and discouraged. That would make it stronger. But the light is rising, and nothing can stop it.

And I have some evidence that this is the case. About two years ago I consulted an inner figure named Aurora in active imagination. Active imagination is where I enter a state akin to daydreaming and converse with the figures who emerge and write everything down. I usually just talk to Aurora about my own life, but in this particular session, she became a kind of oracle, predicting the future. And the things she said have come true. For instance, when I asked her:

"What of gay people in the church?"

She responded with this:

A: Those you love will lose their heads over this. The problem of gays in the church will lead to an act of rebellion, of voices crying out from the ground toward forgiveness in the light and reminiscence in the day. You'll see this change come to pass when voices begin to whisper from high places to begin an act of slaughter to the innocent, to re-ignite the flame that caused so much burning hate.

This was in January of 2015, so of course I had no idea that next November the Church would adopt a new policy about the children of gay parents in the Church, which many people did perceive as a "slaughter to the innocent" and which did "re-ignite the flame that caused so much burning hate." When I looked at these prophecies again the following year, I was astounded. She predicted this exactly. So I decided to look at what else she said was going to happen. And I became overawed at what I saw with new eyes.

While I'm not allowed to share everything that was in those prophecies, I can share these prophecies that she made about the future still to come. She spoke of "a flash of intense fiery brilliance," which will "teem at the edges for a while until it grows calm in its resentment toward the light of day." Asking for when it would happen, she said this:

A: It will occur in the even-time, when all things fade into blackness and auroral dimness.
C: What will happen after this dawn?
A: Things will change. The night will become strange, and the desks you work at will become dim and empty. The world will wake itself up to the dance, and all things will come out to play.


And after I asked her about this night that would occur prior to the emergence of the brilliant light she said this:

A: The night is already here, Christian. It is upon us and blackening fast. You will know that dawn is about to break when the emblems of the source come out to meet you in the light of day. Those emblems will herald the new day.

And while I wasn't going to share more, I feel prompted to share this that she said right after, when I asked her about resurrection:

A: The resurrection will occur in blackness and in tongues of words. It will reunite the lost and forgotten with the words that will bring them out into the light. The words will show us the way home to love, peace, and joy.

There are hidden meanings galore in these words. They have hidden implications that I'm still teasing out. But she is clearly saying that this night we're experiencing -- with Donald Trump and international terror and the death of facts -- is actually an "auroral dimness" that will lead to dawn. This dawn will break when the world breaks into a sea of symbols, when meanings pop out of the woodwork and the world comes alive with the life that was always there behind the scenes, waiting for the veils between the worlds to become thin enough for it to communicate to us. This is the resurrection: when everything dead gains life, where the worlds become transparent to each other. When this happens, more and more of us won't care about the foolishness of our concerns. Donald Trump will get more and more absurd, and the world will make less and less sense. But this is the light of higher worlds breaking apart ours like a root underneath a sidewalk. Eventually, the worlds will follow each other's contours, and those who recognize this fact will dance to a different tune, leaving their desks to become "dim and empty." And this change will happen very soon.

For me, "the emblems of the source coming out to meet me in the light of day" are in the thick of their heyday. Everything speaks to me; what Carl Jung called "synchronicities" are happening more and more often. Unlikely serendipitiese happen every day; far more than they ever have. People message me with the same thought I've just had. In every movie and every play I see, there is a hidden meaning in it that speaks to me of my own life. Dr. Strange speaks of how to dance with injury and disappointment on any scale. La La Land speaks of the world overcoming rigidity by meeting "every collision with a kiss." Pleasant Grove High School's Secret Garden speaks of the hidden life coming out of death. The world is entering into conversation with itself, and I am thrust in the middle of that conversation because I am willing to hear. And not just me. My friends have also been having these strange revelations, one of them a vehement ex-Mormon who's rediscovering his spirituality in the most unexpected yet wonderful way. At a performance of Mary Poppins at BYU, something spoke to him in it about his life, which neither the actors nor the writers knew about. He saw a light pop up in the darkness; he saw the world waking up.

So I urge you, reader: listen to the light waking up in the world around you. There are conversations beginning to become louder. They speak to you in random coincidences, the words you overhear in a song, the thoughts that pop into head. Soon the world will begin dancing. Make sure you're one of them who hears the tune.

Video: How I See the World with High-Functioning Autism or Asperger's Syndrome

Hey all! I did something new last Friday and posted a video on YouTube. It's about what it's like inside my head. I have Asperger's Syndrome, so that's a big theme. Enjoy!

How I Understand Energy Healing

If you would have told me three years ago that I’d be writing a post about energy healing, I would have laughed at you. And yet here I am. I’ve worked with two energy healers in that time, and both of them did me lots of good But I’d rather not talk about my experiences today. I’d rather talk about my theories about how energy work…well…works.

 On Manifestation

Energy healing is healing with energy. And though energy is everywhere, it's hard to understand. Energy doesn’t have a form in itself; it is the wind that “bloweth where it listeth,” of which you can “hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” (John 3:8). It is what exists before “things” exist. It is the open field that manifests “things” in the first place. If things are currents in an ocean, energy is the water those currents are made of. Things are condensed energy; energy is an evaporated thing. Things are “nounitude;” energy is “verbitude.” Energy is the bright no-thing-ness that precedes and surrounds all thinghood.

Energy and “things” go together by nature. Each thing has a "vibration" of energy, and all energy wants to manifest itself in a thing. Your body and your personality both have an energy. So does your computer, your chair, and every book, video game, and movie. This isn’t because you or the video game “radiate” that energy. Far from it. Rather, things are “filters” or “prisms” that energy uses to become “many.” For energy is one in itself. It is God's light. But just like light, energy needs to “reflect” off of things in order to gain variety and manyness.  Things do that for energy; they are many ways by which it can discover itself anew.

This "thing-ification" of energy happens on many levels, both cosmic and microcosmic. For one, this is how the famous "Law of Attraction" works, which says that one's thoughts and feelings attract like circumstances in the physical world. I have found that this law works, but it's not obvious why it works. However, when you think a thought or focus your attention on something, energy is pouring from its formless, at-one state into the "mold" of that thought. From there, it radiates out into the world in that thought's "vibration." This law describes how these vibrations find each other in the world. They do this because energy is the ultimate reality. Like goes to like because like is like.

On a more mundane level, the energy-becoming-things process happens whenever we speak or write. What lets these words and sentences you're reading combine together to make sense?  The "sense" of this essay is their energy, at first undifferentiated, limit-less or end-less, but limited into a fixed form by the definitions of the words. As such, any word develops a specific vibration of energy when it gets paired with another word. It blocks some energies from flowing in and it specifically invites others. The reason Nietzsche feels different from C. S. Lewis is because their words act as so many "irrigation channels" that thing-ify energy in very different ways.

In truth, every thing is just a limited face of the limitless - it is a lens that reveals energy by displaying only some of those vibrations. In other words, things differentiate energy that would be undifferentiated without things. But there is always an "overlap" or "excess" of energy between things; there is a part of each thing's energy that applies to other things as well. For instance, in a conversation with you, we share a specific energetic vibration that lets us meet each other as fellow humans Or in a text, each word in a sentence shares a vibration with the next word. Otherwise, the collective vibration of the text as a whole could not emerge.

How Energy Work Works

This energetic excess is what makes energy healing and energy work possible. For when an aspect of someone else's energy falls within the scope of my own "thinghood" or "nounitude," I can manipulate it. After all, I can change my own psychological and physiological well-being by directing energy through my thoughts -- the well-known placebo effect shows this. Why not in another? If I overlap energy with another person, my thoughts can affect their health just as well as it can affect mine. Moreover, this can affect things in the physical world, as with miracles. 

So say someone goes to an energy healer and that healer uses a prayer to heal him. In this case, the energy healer is using her thoughts and her words to help energy descend from a divine place to the physical. Any physical actions or utterances are just aids to thoughts: energy irrigation channels that go down a bit further from heaven. If the person is open to it, he will be helped by the energy healer to the extent that the energy itself is willing to heal him. For energy has an will of its own. If it's not God's will, the energy healing will not work. Healers just facilitate the energetic descent; they don't cause it.

But energy work isn't something only specialists do. You do it every day. For instance, take a conversation around a table in a classroom. The teacher is about to make a joke, and before he reaches the punchline, his lips quiver a bit with a smile. Then when he says it, a few fractions of a second later, we all erupt in laughter. What the teacher was struggling to contain in his smile -- and what erupted in our laughter - is energy. But when he tells the joke, suddenly the energy in him gains an "excess" in us. We "get" the joke and the energy bursts free as a forceful exhalation. The words and movements the teacher made deliberately channeled the energy into his students.

Moreover, key to understanding the concept of energy work is the idea of "correspondences." A thing "corresponds" to a specific vibration of energy if it "emits" that vibration. As such, that vibration manifests itself physically in the thing that corresponds to it. But the key is that -- if energy knows itself by looking at its reflection in things in -- doing stuff with things does stuff with energy. Since things are the "face" of energy, changing things actually brings about a change in the energies involved. Of course, as I mentioned before, the energy can refuse to cooperate. But we can help it do what it would do blindly without us. This opens the door to all kinds of techniques for managing your emotional and physical well-being. If you need energy, for instance, drink orange juice. Orange juice might not be physically energizing (I don't know), but it does have an intense, "zingy," vibe to it. It is a blinding sunrise in liquid form, so you can channel those vibrations into your body by drinking it.

And notice that energy work requires attention. I wouldn't have laughed in the classroom example if I didn't "get" the joke, and I wouldn't feel energized by orange juice if I was doing it mindlessly. This is also why you need consent to do energy healing: if the person isn't expecting it, it won't work on a conscious level. Energy work only "works" with an open door of conscious attention. For example, one day I was sleeping in. I was almost asleep again, and in the half-asleep, "hypnagogic" state, I half-imagined, half-saw a demon of some kind sitting on me. Then, a Gregorian chant started playing on my Amazon Echo from a Spotify playlist, and the demon fled in fear. But crucially, the demon only left when I noticed that the song had changed to a Gregorian chant, when I consciously recognized its energy. If I didn't notice the song, the demon wouldn't have left. The energy healing wouldn't have taken place.

Most importantly, know that everything has its own kind of energy. The above manifests as the below. And as an old aphorism says about this idea: "with this knowledge alone you may work miracles."

On Verbitude

Pick a sentence. Any sentence. Actually, I’ll go ahead and do it myself:

“The weathered veteran beside Cenn turned and inspected him.”

This sentence (from the first pages of Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings, which I’m just starting to re-read), is pretty normal. Specifically, it has nouns (”veteran,” “Cenn,” and “him,”), and it has verbs (”turned” and “inspected”). But which of those parts of speech is more important — nouns or verbs? You’ll probably think: “Nouns, obviously. The sentence is about the older veteran and Cenn, duh.” But I’ll go ahead and counter that claim. I’m going to assert that it is verbs — and not nouns — that label the sentence’s heart.

What do I mean by this? Do sentences even have a heart? Well, when you read anything — heck, whenever you look at anything — some parts of what you read take the foreground and some things take the background. For instance, in that sentence, “Cenn” is probably the most important word to you. For nouns typically take the foreground and verbs take the background. That’s just common sense. But here common sense is wrong — there are other ways to look at language. When you take nouns as central, the verbs are only extensions of the nouns; “inspecting” describes the veteran and Cenn. But if you switch the priority between the two, verbs become the stars and nouns the supporting roles. This drastically changes the way you look at language. Suddenly, the sentence up there isn’t about people anymore. It’s about a “turning” and an “inspection.” Who turns, what the turning is toward, who is inspecting, and who is being inspected are irrelevant or at best secondary. 

But what does this mean, practically, about the fictional situation that this sentence is trying to describe? Well, notice that when I read it in terms of nouns (or “nounwise,”) the sentence is about separate actors. However, when I read it “verbwise,” separateness is no longer a factor. There are actors, but they are not defined by their distinction from each other. Where before what was linked by the verbs was the main focus, now the link itself is what we’re paying attention to. The link’s the thing. No longer are the “weathered veteran” and “Cenn” separate; in that moment, they are one by virtue of the “turning” and the “inspecting.”

Notice something else: the “turning” and the “inspecting” don’t last very long, perhaps just a moment “The weathered veteran” and “Cenn” can last a much longer duration (but not much longer for Cenn, as readers will remember…). However, my point is that the verbs give the sentence a very different “temporality” or “time-sense” than the nouns give it. The sentence’s “nounitude” (the sentence’s character as seen through its nouns) is about actors that existed in the past and will exist in the future. However, the sentence’s “verbitude” (the sentence as seen through its verbs) is about something that exists in a specific moment or duration in time. It can’t exist outside of what’s happening in the moment since it is that happening. You can talk about nouns timelessly; you can’t talk about verbs timelessly. Verbs are inherently temporal, whereas nouns can be spoken of abstracted from time.

But actually, nouns are much more subject to the constraints of time than verbs are. Nouns can be abstracted from time, sure, but that’s always just a mental exercise. There is no such thing as a timeless noun, since whatever exists at some moment. However, the case is different for verbs. Since verbs define the time of the nouns, you can say that verbs aren’t “in” time at all. They may last for a certain duration, but it’s more proper to say that verbs define duration in the first place. If we didn’t have the “ticking” of a clock, the “revolving” and “orbiting” of the earth (all verbs), we wouldn’t know what time even was. In truth, verbs aren’t in time; they are time.

This is true of every “thing” in your life. You, your closest friend, and your computer all have a “nounitude” and a “verbitude.” The nounitude of your computer is that computer as a thing — an object, a fixed point in space that persists for a while through time. The verbitude of that computer is that “persisting” itself. It is the “happening” of it, the way that computer’s nounitude participates in actions with itself and other nouns. As such, verbitude is more fluid. It is movement and change in itself, and it takes part in the nouns of whatever participates in the action it is. When I type, that typing is a verbitude. When I speak, we share in the verbitude of speaking. As nouns, we are separate. As verbs, we are one. Nouns exist in the medium of verbs just like fish live in a river.

But here’s a question: what does life look like as seen from verbitude? Well, it’s actually very different. If nouns see “things,” verbs see processes. Nounsight (what I’ll call it) only notices the actors in a situation, but verbsight notices the processes those nouns take part in. But this has an interesting consequence. With nounsight, you can easily switch from one process from to another, since you have a sense of your own nounitude. But if you use verbsight, it’s not so easy. Someone who can “verbsee” would only ever identify with the process he is in at a given moment. And since verbs are transitory, that person would have a hard time switching tracks. They would hate change since every change from one verbitude to another would feel like dying. There would be no permanence to bracket change in a normal way.

This, as you may have guessed, is at the root of autism. As I pointed out a few posts ago, autism is what happens when the fire of higher worlds gets lost in this world without ever adapting to it. These higher worlds work much more easily in a verbwise way; the “fire” is verbitude. But this world works nounwise. Here, “things” rule the day; processes exist to serve them. But in these higher worlds, nouns exist to serve verbs. Here, time exists because nouns delimit and interrupt the experience of verbitude. But in these spiritual worlds, there isn't nearly as much “interruption.” In the words of Rudolf Steiner:

In this kind of experience it is just the same as when you say about any point of the whole circumference of a circle “Here it begins” and, having made the whole round, “Here it ends.” You have no feeling of having lived through a period of time, but rather the feeling of making a round, of describing a circle, and in this experience you completely lose the feeling of time that you normally have in sensory existence. You only feel that you are in the world that has the fundamental characteristic of being round, of being circular. A being who has never walked the Earth, who has never lived in the world of the senses but has always lived in the world of which we are speaking, would never be struck by the idea that the world once had a beginning and could be coming to an end. He would always think of it as a self-enclosed, round world. Such a being would have no inducement to say that he strove for eternity for the simple reason that everything around him is eternal, that nowhere is there anything beyond which he could look from the temporal into the eternal. 

This feeling of timelessness, this feeling of the circle, appears at a certain stage of clairvoyance, or in the conscious experience of sleep. With it is intermingled a certain yearning, a yearning that arises because in this experience in the higher world you are never really at rest. Everywhere you feel yourself in this revolving movement, always moving, never staying still. The longing you have is: “If only a halt could be made, if only somewhere one could enter time!” This is just the opposite, one might say, of what is experienced in sensory existence, in which we always feel ourselves in time while yearning after eternity. In the world of which I have been speaking, we feel ourselves in eternity with this one desire: “If only at some point the world would stand still and enter time existence!” This is what you realize to be the very fundamental feeling: the everlasting movement of the universe, and the longing for time; this experience of eternal becoming, this becoming that is its own surety, and the longing, “Ah, if only one could but somewhere, somehow, come to an end!” 

With autism, we are holding on to this experience of timelessness (which is really just time as it exists in itself). We never said “If only a halt could be made,” and we go kicking and screaming into the world of nouns and time. We never gave up our verbsight; we retain all of our verbitude. But because we have bodies with a lot of nounitude, we tend to overpower them with our verbitude. This is what a savant is — a verbitude (like drawing or math) that completely enslaves its nouns. All “things” serve that process. Likewise, this is what happens when the autistic person “info-dumps” — the “special interest” is a verbitude that completely overpowers the nouns in the situation. The autistic person is nounblind.

But an autistic person can gain nounsight. It feels like death to us, but we can do it. The process is one of letting each noun have its own verbitude instead of forcing your own verbitude onto it. Let the chair be a chair-ing; let your friend be a “friending;” neither should be a “me-ing.” This is scary for the autistic person because it feels like abandoning a very expansive sense of self. But this is based on a misconception of what the “self” is. When neurotypicals say “I,” they mean the nounitude of their body. However, when autistic people say “I,” they mean the verbitude of their body and whatever it interacts with. The key for an autistic person to cure nounblindness is to spend time and effort “separating” verbitudes from each other. You do this by “naming” them: “There’s the door-ing, there’s the computer-ing, there’s the burger-ing,” but all the while, you keep in mind that you — as a body - have your own distinct verbitude. This isn’t giving up the expansive sense of self that autistic people tend to have; it’s grounding it in an “avatar” that represents that expansive sense of self to the world: your body. It is this separation of verbs from verbs that builds nounsight. Nounsight is the separation of verbs from verbs. Nouns are what separates verbs from each other.

Finally, if you’re neurotypical, you can learn to have better verbsight if that’s what you want. You do that by saying that “not just.” That chair is “not just” a chair. That person is “not just” a person. I am “not just” Christian Swenson, etc. There is a level of “excess” that happens when you do this. You see that all things give of themselves to other things into a shared “middle.” This shared middle is the verbworld, the shared verbitude of things. By practicing this, you begin to see the world less as a collection of things than as a flowing river of interconnected processes. For the verbitude of things opens up and gives; the nounitude of things closes up and withdraws. Verbitude is mercy; nounitude is justice. Verbitude is goodness; nounitude is truth. Pay attention to verbitude to feel at one; pay attention to nounitude to feel like a unique individual. The one links; the other separates. They are both necessary.