An Essay by John Smyth, September 19, 2016

1. Who Says You Can’t Fly?

Nonverbal autistics always hold a “trapped” perspective about life. We are generally oppressed physically and socio-economically, denied educations, and prepared for institutional warehousing until our deaths. You and I know this because we share nonverbal autism. Our teachers continue to talk about ABCs, year after boring year, not realizing we are smart and in love with words already. We have no foundational athletic ability, particularly after our autistic loads of sensory and motor neediness have vaccinated us from sports participation. Masticated sacrificially by modern science, we excel in knowledge accumulation when given the chance; we are easily able using our abundant mental faculties to learn, opine, and create.

Our physical challenges inspire ignorant empiricists to give tying shoes the same priority with astrophysics and pointing to red trains. Opposites attract. Idiots responsible for educating are locking us up. Politicians of knowledge steal the personhood of all, hinting “worthlessness” in a stultified hierarchy of values devised in the depths of Plato’s Cave. Their reality is unconnected with truth. Usually, no one knows we are present, bright, and observing everything.

We are not aware of the power within us and hold ourselves back from who we were made to be. Appreciation for autism’s sound and structural insights about language within and emanating from a soul is one of our many gifts. We discern how sound alignment unifies or justifies ill-conceived statements with waste and idiocy or creativity and commitment when people speak. In this, we also see how language creates one life and excludes others. Literally, each real day, we see creation of trash or beauty also erects language guides or barriers for other thoughts. This offspring of free will is a gift to us as well. We are more than we think we are. Our creative choices combined with a little transformative information give us the perspective and courage to fly.

2. Imagine You Are an Eagle

Did you know that our walk as monkish nonverbals is much like the walk of men and women seeking holiness through vows of silence? Who would have guessed that our condition unites us with strict religious practices of quiet holy men and women from many spiritual traditions over 2,600 years, from Pythagoras in 500 BC to Hindu, Buddhist and present day Trappist monks. All seek to fly from the noisiness and distractions of this world to be closer to knowing what love simply gave us. While love denies us our voice or self esteem and we complain, lowly monks seek our level within the silence to approach her and know the secrets of the universe. They are giving up the world to try to approach the place we’ve been given by happy bad science. We play where they seek to go, separating themselves with special clothing in prayerful communities.

When we see their efforts are distinguished as “work within” to transcend years of clutter and worldliness and be lifted closer to love in the silence, we see that they often only differ from us in their intent to grow quiet and that their wings for the silence are small and weak. Our wings as nonverbals in the silence are individually so expansive that only a large eagle’s might compare. From birth we have developed our capacity for quiet and conscious connection with the silence. Usually we have embraced this silence as a source of isolation. We often miss the love behind our silence, literally experiencing cold isolation from our limited choice of context.

We fail to hold our focus on love, little acts of mercy in our thinking, or worship through giving our ignominies to the love who asks for them and permits each breath we didn’t choose. Our powerful gifts are often lost to misuse here.

In spiritual union with love and the traditions of those fluttering small wings darting about to seek her in silence, we unite pain in its many versions, from humiliation, isolation, and inflictions on our physical bodies. Love embraces our gifts and draws us higher in altitude. In this we are powered by wings that grow bigger and stronger as intention to unite our place in love develops. Our quiet challenges and work within causes most in the normal population to cast aspersions and fearful glances our ways. We truly are eagles in this effort. We can become examples for others of how to embrace love’s gifts.

Walking as dumb members of society helps us in so many ways when it comes to flying. Just as others simply regard our serious physical issues as limiting our minds, we find ourselves in a unique position to embrace love and her purpose for us more freely and with less static frenzy from so many humanists. We can see that scientific empiricism has created so many truly idiotic, myopic discussions and support for denying our fundamental political rights. While the lost reality within the greater world for animals and trees and viruses to talk is being openly explored in pluralistic life-shaping theories, these lost humanists deny the competence of so many brothers and sisters who have no identifiable brain damage but are denied educations through contorted thinking around evidence that is designed to show their own prejudice, spiritual deadness, and exceptional limits of imagination. They are the spawn of Henry Goddard, who excluded immigrants as imbeciles for speaking another language and whose work Hitler used to justify the Holocaust. Their theories condemn so many gifts. Individuals like us appear as disabled subjects of their folly. Another perspective for us is that our home in the silence, our special detachments from expectations, and our citizenship as human beings qualifies us as wonderfully prepared to fly above any others, from brothers and sisters with smaller wings to the circularly-thinking rats of empiricism.

3.Stuck in Your Nest?

Our place of entrapment and belittling conversations, destitute and devoid of prayer, looks silly, lonely, and cold. Are we truly grounded and imprisoned on a cold ledge watching life go by? From a form of reasoning called illative reasoning, we can know from our experience that we control our internal world and are gods of it. Nowhere else but in ourselves are the ways to ignore our world or sow assumptions about our lives and surroundings that we manipulate. We manipulate them from where? We did not create that circumstance ourselves. It was given to us. And knowing this, we know there is, present to us in each moment, a higher power that gives the gift. Looking closely, we know that each breath we take comes, ultimately, from love. Quiet love is absolutely altogether lifting us.

As we pour who we are into life, we piece together the realization that we are gods of omnipotence in our own creation given by another. Perhaps elementary to this is our sustained ability outside of thought to just listen, unlike so many other monks. Patiently, within all we are hearing, quietly lifting you and me, as lords of each circus, is love. Without love, we have no lasting source of the gifts we are given.

If freedom is to come to us experientially, we must follow love’s invitation to embrace her, to stop complaining, and to go beyond ourselves to discover the purpose of what was given to us. We must jump from the prison of our nest, from the known minions of chattering fears and lies in our minds and that of pedestrians, and give ourselves to the greatness of abiding love. Only by jumping will we discover the power of our wings and our natural
abode in the heavens of silence on this earth. In this way, we can unite with Genesis 9:5-6 that we are made in God’s image and apply who we are to love all despite our fears and doubts. God made us and every and all have gifts.

4.To Stay or Jump?

Whence comes the confidence for our jump? We can look for power to fly in a legitimately verified text of essential history reaching across millennia. It is perhaps one of the great histories preserved for all time, with references by many scholars who came after its author. Non-christian scholars generally agree that the Jewish historian Josephus wrote in Aramaic:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man…For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews [and many Greeks?]. He was [called] the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him…And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Vermes, Geza. Josephus lived from 37 to 100 CE. His following as historian for Rome and influence as a Jew has been translated to Greek, Latin, Arabicand other languages since the 90s CE when it was written. Hundreds of early texts exist. His books include a roundly complete treatise of Jewish history, placing love’s central figure as a living historic being in the powerful company of Moses, Elisha, Daniel, David, and Solomon by the Aramaic words he uses to describe each. Jesus’s acts are profoundly compared in Josephus’ word choices with the greatest of Old Testament miracles. His death comes at the hands of Pilate according to Josephus and not the Jews. Early Christians generally held the Jews responsible for Jesus’s death. Josephus condemned others who claimed to be the Christ as imposters, but not Jesus. This is a profound passage for all who would fly to love, especially the sickly and burdened.

What stands out for us is the description of this figure as a lover of truth. Of importance to flying is the knowing of a potent, alternate, invisible reality to support our wings. We workout our lives in whatever reality we choose. For the nonverbal sickly, poor and oppressed, why wouldn’t we give ourselves to the one who cautioned the wealthy and embraced the poor and lowly, then taught his followers to do likewise? When I look at Josephus, how plausible is it to argue against Jesus’s teaching when a non-christian lover of Jewish history, working for the Romans, puts him in such company?

Complementary to this, two to four hundred years before Jesus’s birth, after earlier promises in Genesis, Psalms, and other writings of a king to come whose kingdom will never end Isaiah 9:7, Luke 1:33, are the descriptions of the changes this voice will bring. A new reality is predicted in Isaiah Chapter 40.Isaiah is quietly master of inspiration about plans for whom he calls theking who will suffer and die for all who wait for justice and truth. Chapters 42 and 52 unite this man of suffering, knowing pain and spurned by others for his marred countenance with our nonverbal state.

Jeremiah, in Chapter 31, predicts a new reality- the reality that gives our wings strength for high flight. A new covenant and laws of flight are written in our hearts and call for love. When all are patiently wondering what happens with people after death, Ezekiel speaks to God’s breathing life into dry bones of keepers thought quietly retired long before. Little scenes in Ezekiel Chapters 36 and 37 of a new kingdom are predictive of the one who quietly inspired lovers of truth, especially for a new heart and spirit within us. All of these lead to what was predicted of the root of Jesse inspired in Isaiah Chapter 11.

The Romans, Jews and Christians all agree that Jesus’s body was never found after it was buried in the tomb. Hundreds of people attested to have seen him after his resurrection, even in the presence of ridicule and threat of imprisonment, torture and death. He appeared with solid food and ate after his death. There is no controversy about the Pentecost experience of winds and speaking in tongues. To Christians, this was a reversal of the Tower of Babel event.

As we look to see the source of our gifts of godliness in our own realm, we recognize that only one owned death and frees the poor and oppressed. Only one man took this trip from death to life under his own word of power. He holds the keys for our freedom and gave himself in service to us issuing the clarion to follow him. In love’s peace, little ones are useful for expressing inspired humility and confounding the wise who would hide our places of joy. All of this says is that we nonverbal can assume an alternate reality from the world we physically see does exist that embraces and values each of our experiences as it values the worldly experience of love’s highest sacrifice. This invisible reality of love, subjectively and objectively, will hold our wings. We can abandon ourselves to it.

Our place with peace and service to the love that made us is to be really present to and addressing injustice when we can while living the life of noninterference in the power realized when they abuse us, to encourage one another, to share love with all around us. This unites us, when we choose, with the one who walked before the first man, whose love gives the silence existing before all things and known only when God said, let them be made in our image and have free will. Not only did he make us in his image and open our level of closeness to him in powerful silence’s ownership of all that is and was, listening for what will be, but he gave a path for cooperation that makes us servants to our keepers of his goodness.

We already know how ownership of willing pity will refine our thoughts of being pitiful where we are. Goodness is found in many people. When one speaks truth, gives his inspired life to others and uses each moment toward that goal, we find a level of goodness beyond many. When he does this, lives for others such that he acquires what is needed only for others to be fed, witnesses to kingship of another world, when he sacrifices kingly honors to give his life, gives works of natural phenomenon, and witnesses teaching that all are kings called to follow him, and we need only have kindness, mercy and truth within who we are each day, we really have all the confidence and ability we need to jump from our cold, pitiable nest.

5.Your Wings Take You Higher, Your Eyes Are Sharper

What soaring with broad and powerful wings allows is total union with love in her purpose for us and those we know. Would that Jesus worked little miracles of speech with us, but we would lose our perspective and place of value very quickly. Powerful quiet reveals so much more than speech. Words, spontaneously created, litter our space like dirty bottles of plastic on our highways that obscure nature’s beauty. The words people speak lack creative commitment and do not express their souls’ thoughts. Usually they speak around what they might say for fear of offense. When it comes to your potential, dear nonverbal, your strength of ability to soar, loving all of who we are and who Jesus is, unfettered by loss, as you have nothing, is enviable. Your only work now is to stay present and love the cruelties and injustice, to embrace the sorrows of this world in loving prayer, to forgive like Jesus, and to place lowliness as your highest value. When you do this, soaring is only the beginning.

Flying involves surrender of what we like to think is known. We reach love’s high altitudes as we free ourselves of personal assumptions and conclusions about life and others, including grudges or old thoughts with hurt. Forgiveness involves freeing ourselves, and flying with freedom from these things gives peace. Transcendent power quietly resides in forgiveness, lifting us above all clouds. We are transformed in forgiveness, freed of past weights, and able to fly higher still than before from our lightness. In forgiveness the scenery we visit changes. More life appears below us, our eyesight is more acute over greater distances. We are children of a love that embraces everyone and everything in this creation. How are we not to do the same?

Our lives are celebratory in the most challenging of conditions. Peace is ours on the currents of love. Places of value on this earth are overrated, as all great scholars have attested. With our natural gift of eagle’s wings, let us soar together to heal our brother and sister nonverbals in this world. Love holds us kindly here. We feel her behind and satiating the silence where all is born, dies, and resides.

Where is your greatest long term interest served
in the silence of autism’s companionship?

Is it in complaining about and pitying yourself as despairing poor soul, or is it in the reality of your place within whispering distance of eternal love’s fiery passion for life and good? Would you rather bow to the confusing noise of this world or lift yourself on the currents of suffering and silence given us to embrace the wholeness and holiness in each moment of life? Kindness, appreciation, leadership, sacred work in our hearts, and sympathy for kindred spirits so close yet far from love’s embrace must always be our first priority. In silence and love we have our being. Awesome Jesus showed us the way.

Love’s soaring wonders are rarely seen as we can see them, dear nonverbal. Let passionate love’s lift carry you from the cares and trapped assumptions of bad thinking. We are eagles particularly placed to know and share love’s presence. We wait in silence with love in wondrous hope for eternal voices lovingly shaped by the harmony of our presence.

© Copyright 2016 John Smyth

Works Cited
1)  1 Corinthians 1:27. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland.
1899.
2)  Ezekiel 36, 37. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 1899.
3)  Genesis 9:5-6. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 1899.
4)  Gough, Chris. “Pythagoras: Fact and Fiction”. December 18, 2008. September 16, 2016.
5) hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/galbers/DPHIS10/History_Research_Essay_(Pythagoras).pdf.
6)  Isaiah 9:7. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 1899.
7)  Isaiah 11, 40, 42, 52. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland.
1899.
8)  Jeremiah 31. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 1899.
9) Josephus, Flavius. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged. Translated by William
Whiston. Hendrickson Publishers, Inc. Copyright 1987.
10) Luke 1:33. Douay Rheims Version. John Murphy Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 1899.
11) Plato. Republic, VII. “Allegory of the Cave”. 514 a. 2 to 517 a. 7. Translation by Thomas
Sheehan. web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf.
12) Vermes, Geza. “Jesus in the Eyes of Josephus”. Standpoint. January/February 2010. September 12,
2016. standpointmag.co.uk/node/2507/full.

Cover Photo: Copyright: vita48 / 123RF Stock Photo