Necessary Fictions
Identity, Neurodivergence and Meditation
The following article was written for the Winter 2024 edition of the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. It explores my usual passionate interests – identity, neurodivergence and meditation practice – with a primarily Buddhist audience in mind. You can find out more about the Order – which has temples and priories in the US and Europe including Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey here in the UK – and read the journal for free here.
In a recent article, written to mark the centenary of American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s birth, Kenan Malik states that Baldwin: “...had to confront not just the fact of being black in an oppressively racist world, but also of being gay in a world steeped in homophobia, not least within black communities”.1 Malik, a British academic and science writer, tells us that after moving from America to France – seeking and failing to find, like many black writers and musicians of his generation, a less racist society there: “Baldwin began to grasp that identities are necessary fictions helping us locate ourselves in the world but also trapping us within it.”
In his first major work after moving to France, Everybody’s Protest Novel, Baldwin wrote: “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth”.2 Malik argues that there is a tension at the heart of Baldwin’s work: “the tension between embracing black identity as a riposte to, and refuge from, a hostile, racist world, and recognising that a ‘new’ society could be constructed only by transcending such identities.” According to Baldwin, freedom is not something people can be given: “Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
Recently I have been thinking a lot about my own identity. After learning my son was autistic, three years ago now, I slowly came to recognise that I am autistic too. Finally I had an explanation for many of the struggles I had faced throughout my life. I had always felt out of step and I was often overwhelmed by sensory and social demands. I used to blame myself for that. Now I had a way to understand myself that didn’t frame my differences as deficits. Reading and listening to the voices of other autistic adults, there was the relief of recognition. I could locate myself. I finally knew where I belonged.
But as a meditator, and hearing Dharma teaching, I was confused. If life was undivided and free, as I was learning and sometimes glimpsing for myself, then why did it feel so important to define myself this way? Like James Baldwin, I wondered how I might embrace my identity without it becoming just another cage.
Over the months and now years, I have looked at this question through the lens of neurodivergence. But I think it probably applies to any identity: by which I mean anything about us that affects how others see us, or how we see ourselves. Regardless of the specifics – regardless of gender, ethnicity, class, disability status, age, or even whether we live as a layperson or a monk – our identities can both help and hinder. How might we engage with these identities in a way that helps us better understand ourselves, find our kin, and build lives that work, without being limited by them?
There’s an exercise sometimes used in creative writing workshops. Participants are given a picture of an unfamiliar night sky, taken in the Southern Hemisphere, and asked to find constellations in it. Looking up at night here in the UK we know the names we’ve been told – Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt, the Plough – and it’s easy to think of these as real. Looking at a new sky, the process by which we find patterns is laid bare. We make fables and monsters where there are none, perhaps based on the contents of our own minds.
Autism is a concept, human-made. Like any concept, it is a heap of disparate parts that we put together and give a name. In the face of the infinite, what does it mean to say “I’m autistic”? Asking this left me feeling uncomfortable; zazen offers the possibility of resting in an open, undivided state and we are exhorted not to waste time splitting the world into ‘this’ and ‘that’. But then it occurred to me: one way to divide the world is to take what is particular and human and decide it is beneath our attention: to try to split the ocean from the wave.
Autism is made up, but only in the way a table is made up, or the idea of love. It’s a constellation. And like those constellations, striding gigantically across the sky, such words and ideas have power. We use them to make up our world and we must choose them carefully, choose what kind of world we hope to make. Autism gave me a new way to look at myself and at the world too; for the first time it felt like I was looking through my own eyes and that changed what I saw.
However, in a recent article written for the Journal of the OBC, Reverend Master Daishin Morgan wrote that, “To define ourselves is to isolate ourselves”. Also, “There is that which is free, even free of being itself”. And, “To divide the world into this and that is not to just see. In just seeing there are no categories”.3 I read this article in the midst of the excitement and hope that came from discovering my own neurodivergence and it brought me up short. I could feel straight away that it was true. But I also knew that defining myself had, in some ways, connected me with others and with life. That, in becoming ‘myself’ I felt more free, not less. I couldn’t see how to reconcile these two apparently different views.
I’ve had the experience so many times in practice now: thinking I’ve understood something only to have the rug of my understanding pulled from beneath my feet. Perhaps that’s what practice is. The removal of rugs. The upside-down tipping. The fall. The starry flight. I keep trying to get to the bottom of it all but I suppose, really, there is no bottom; I suppose that’s partly why we’re all so much in love with it.
I sometimes hear autistic people talking as if the problems in their lives are the fault of non-autistic people. This is understandable; it’s a human impulse to split up the world this way, particularly after a lifetime of the daily micro- traumas, stigma and misunderstanding that autistic people often face. Within the autistic community there can be a suspicion of practices not specifically designed for us because so many of these, if applied without an understanding of neurodivergence, can be ineffective or downright harmful. All this sometimes leaves me reluctant to talk about practice in autistic spaces.
Conversely, I’ve heard meditators minimise the experience of autistic people, perhaps out of a sense they don’t want to label, in case such labelling solidifies a fixed sense of self, thereby keeping us from the truth. And this can leave me loath to talk about neurodivergence in these places.
I know I have internalised this split because, though I write about autism and about Buddhist practice, I have been struggling to bring them together. How might I heal this apparent split in myself?
There’s a famous passage from Great Master Dōgen’s Genjōkōan that has always spoken to me and it’s helpful here:
To study the buddha way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things.4
As I understand it, this isn’t a list of jobs to do one after another. The ‘is to’ seems to say a lot: it’s as if studying the self and forgetting the self are one instantaneous thing. In order to seek the truth, we don’t need to turn away from who we are. To do so would be counterproductive. In reality there is no split between the individual selves we seem to be and a life of practice. We can pull the rugs, but only when we’re standing on the ground.
But, like so much of Dōgen and so much of practice, this apparent reassurance soon evaporates and I end up more confused than when I started. When he says ‘study the self’ I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean ‘limit the self’ or ‘label the self’. He leaves us nothing more than the moment-by-moment experience of our lives, coming to us through our senses. But, as I’ve learned from reading about neurodivergence, even sensing isn’t neutral. Autistic people are commonly a mixture of hyper- and hypo-sensitive, so that for one the world might be unbearably loud or bright while, for another, it might be difficult to sense hunger, or anger, in the body. The sensory landscape is different for each person and at different times. What we see and hear and touch is no truer than our concepts and, in this way, our selves are not available to our senses. Though this is particularly evident in autistic people, it must be true for all of us. We rely on our senses. And our senses are unreliable.
And yet with my ‘eyes’ turned ‘inward’, I get a glimpse of ‘who I am’ and there’s no need to define it as autistic or non-autistic, as male or female, or as young or old. It isn’t personal at all. It is wholly vital and embodied, not separate from me, yet limitless and free. To see this, it’s not necessary to reject any identity.
I’m on uncertain ground here (those rugs again). This is not yet a landscape I know well. But it seems likely to me I’ll only see through the fixed idea of self by looking closely at it, not by trying to peek around the side.
In her book Neuroqueer Heresies, autistic activist and scholar Nick Walker, a Zen practitioner herself, argues that autistic experience is best seen as a ‘horizon of possibilities’. While she recognises that it can be useful for people to identify as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, she says that, “we shouldn’t allow our conception of neurodiversity and its potentials to be constrained by such categories”. Furthermore, she sees the possibilities characterised by neurodivergence as open to anybody, autistic or non-autistic. For her this is a fundamental openness to life expressed through ‘subversive and transformative practices’ that stand against the impulse to conform with an idea of ‘normal’:
The already neurodivergent can reconnect with and cultivate previously suppressed or undeveloped capacities, in order to more fully manifest their potentials for beautiful weirdness, and those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential neuroqueer mutant comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits.5
This positive view of neurodivergence is refreshingly radical in the light of a cultural understanding that still views autism as a set of deficits. It is thanks to such neuro-affirming research and scholarship that, for me, learning I’m autistic has helped me find my place in the world and to feel less unworthy. Although it is suffering that gets us practising in the first place, I have a feeling too much unworthiness doesn’t help. I need to know that I can do this, just as any other person can.
Perhaps it was something like this that Dōgen was referring to in Genjōkōan. In my confusion and pain I was holding myself back from life, trying to act like everybody else, trying not to make a mistake. Not wanting to be found out. Through the lens of neurodivergence, I see things differently: there never really was anything wrong with me; I never really was unsafe and I can trust myself. Dōgen shows me I don’t need to choose between this particular life and life itself. I don’t have to choose between the ocean and the wave. It’s paradoxical, but it has to be both.
I keep getting to this place where it’s clear that I really don’t know anything. I’m not in control. My poor old brain can’t do the sum.
I give up.
And yet here I still am, typing these words, making my constellations, trying to get to the bottom of things. This is the freedom of self-forgetting that happens at the unfolding edge of experience. In order to be free of yourself, you first have to fully be yourself. The only place to do that is in the moment- by-moment practice of your life.
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Malik, K., James Baldwin taught us that identities can help us to locate ourselves. But they trap us too. Observer, 28th July 2024.
Baldwin, James, Everybody’s Protest Novel: Essays, Beacon Press, 2024.
Morgan, Rev. Master Daishin, I, Not I, and Beyond, in The Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, Spring 2024, p 6.
Dōgen, Great Master, Actualizing The Fundamental Point, in Enlightenment Unfolds: Essential Teachings Of Zen Master Dogen. Kazuaki Tanahashi, ed. P 87.
Walker, N., Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press, 2021.
I've been thinking about these ideas some more, get ready for a spill...
'When he says ‘study the self’ I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean ‘limit the self’ or ‘label the self’. He leaves us nothing more than the moment-by-moment experience of our lives, coming to us through our senses.'
I'm wondering if not meaning limit /label does actually only leave moment-to-moment experience. I think Buddhist ideas of no-self are very difficult for us to understand. Perhaps they're easier if you're brought up with the ideas from birth, or perhaps not. I have no trouble with understanding, even knowing from my own experience, that I have no intrinsic self 'inside me'. But it seems to me that we all have a 'sense of self', perhaps the same as your 'necessary fiction'. The sense of self has no intrinsic existence, but it nonetheless exists; it keeps us sane, and makes it possible to function in consensual reality. As far as I can see, the sense of self actually needs to be quite robust, to have its own understanding of boundaries and limits, in order not to be overwhelmed by everything in the world, including other people. Without a clear sense of self we can easily be led, confused, invaded and manipulated. Without memory or conditioning or identity we can't function, be useful, or survive.
I'm pretty sure that Buddhist psychology knows and accepts this, I imagine this must link to the skandhas in some way. The fact that Buddhism teaches the need to understand that the skandhas are not the whole story doesn't mean that they don't exist; that a person has no 'sense of self'. In fact, don't the skandhas indicate a recognition of that very thing? Couldn't study the self mean exactly this - study the way that your necessary sense of self operates, investigate and know your conditioning and impulses, rather than implying that the sense of self doesn't exist?
From this point of view, your relief at discovering new ways to make sense of your being is part of the whole picture. Finding some relief in the idea of 'being autistic' doesn't necessarily tie you to a misguided belief in a self, it just refines your understanding of your socially operating sense of self, which, let's face it, we all have to deal with every day, whether or not we believe it to be 'a thing' or 'no thing'.... :-)
Excellent Sarah, you write about all of this so beautifully and spaciously. And you have a way of somehow finding resolution at the end, even as you've just described its impossibility....