Private Religion

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. Both are needed to answer life's questions
~ Temple Grandin

“One of my favourite authors is the great Russian writer of the end of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. He created a character representing one of the ‘highly intelligent people’ seeking answers to the most important questions – Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, whom the author endowed with Christ-like spiritual attributes and a child-like naive and innocent belief in the possibility of achieving heaven on earth. Myshkin can be seen as a Russian ‘Holy Fool’, hence the title of the novel: The Idiot. (Interestingly, many characteristics of Prince Myshkin correspond to the ‘symptoms’ of ASD.)

The majority of critics in the West consider this novel as one of Dostoevsky’s weakest works, some complaining that the ‘good’ prince makes everyone’s life harder and achieves nothing. For me, The Idiot is a masterpiece, along with Dostoevsky’s other novels, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Demons and Crime and Punishment. What critics do not take into account is that The Idiot was never supposed to be a fairy tale with a happy-ever-after ending. It is a tragic story, and the tragedy is not that the character ‘achieves nothing’, but rather that the world is not ready for him.

Here we can see a clear parallel with autism – as Jim Sinclair expresses it powerfully in his classic essay ‘Don’t mourn for us’: ‘The tragedy is not that we’re here, but that your world has no place for us to be.’ Prince Myshkin is a tragic figure not because of his intuitive feelings and moral attitudes – allowing him not only to see but actually feel the cruelty people around him inflict on each other, and come to the rescue of those who have been wronged (even if only with comforting words and understanding), but because in a world where belief in God is replaced with ‘belief in nil’ (for Dostoevsky, atheism is a faith – faith in nothing), amorality flourishes, and Prince Myshkin, with his virtues and principles, living his life of honesty and humility, becomes an ‘idiot’.

Another favourite of mine, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, claimed that there are at least two types of purpose of life: practical and spiritual ones. On the one hand, humans have to deal with everyday objects and notions to make their life functional and protected from outside dangers. On the other hand, they have their own self-consciousness and spiritual existence to consider. Bergson urged people not to be satisfied with any purely naturalistic interpretation of mental life but rather to understand the qualities and abilities within themselves, which shifts the focus from interpretations of the impressions of the external world and applying them to satisfy bodily and practical needs to the recognition of the spiritual value of the human nature, of a personality, capable of obtaining the understanding of the life of the spirit, with needs beyond bodily and intellectual satisfaction:

The man who seeks merely bodily satisfaction lives the life of the animal; even the man who poses as an intellectual finds himself entangled ultimately in relativity, missing the uniqueness of all things – his own life included. An intuitive philosophy introduces us to the spiritual life and makes us conscious, individually and collectively, of our capacities for development.

Recently, the concept of spirituality has attracted a lot of attention from both researchers and lay public, and research papers and books on the spiritual dimension of different groups of people have been published. At long last, there is some recognition of the necessity to understand the spiritual dimension in autism. The first book devoted to spirituality and autism was written by a professional working with autistic individuals (Isanon 2001), followed by a trilogy written by an adult with Asperger syndrome (Stillman 2006, 2008, 2010), and quite a few books written by parents of autistic children, from the perspective of different religious denominations. All the research on spirituality suggests new and more creative ways of helping people (both with disabilities and ‘normal’) to find their place in this world and live meaningful lives…

Another reason that spirituality and morality are at the top of the research list is that since the last decade of the last century we have witnessed what seems to be a large-scale breakdown of morality and deterioration of social relations, increase of violent crime, riots, feelings of entitlement to everything without contributing to the community, and so on. We have no explanations for many phenomena related to what lies beyond ourselves, and beyond what we know (one of the reasons contributing to our ignorance is that we are not looking for answers because we do not know what questions to ask). It seems that the best some researchers can do is to ignore everything that does not sound scientific; the worst, to label those who have ‘unexplained experiences’ and those who try to understand them as ‘stupid, crazy, delusional’, and so on…

The attitude and prejudiced reasoning of the scientist is also important. For example, this statement sounds very ‘scientific’: ‘Science cannot categorically prove that the sense of being stared at is not true or will never be true in the future, but the evidence is so weak or nonexistent that it must be regarded as unproven’ (Hood 2009, p.241; emphasis added). But what about a very real phenomenon of ‘distant touching’ some people with autism experience: when someone is staring at them they can feel it on their skin (O’Neill 1999)?

The exclusion of the transcendent and the sacred from the jurisdiction of science makes impossible in principle the study of, for instance, certain aspects of psychotherapy, naturalistic religious experience, creativity, symbolism, mystical and peak-experiences, and even poetry and art, as they ‘all involve an integration of the realm of Being with the realm of concrete’ (Maslow 1970a, p.16). A shift in perspective is becoming a necessity…

Autism has often been described (and perceived) as being ‘mysterious’ because of the differences in sensory perception, cognition, language development and communication that sometimes seem incomprehensible to ‘normal’ people.

Exploration of the spiritual side of this condition can bring better understanding (or more confusion!) to the way we see ASDs and our role in helping autistic individuals and their families. On the other hand, autism (with its differences in sensory perception, cognition and language development) can bring us closer to understanding the phenomenon of spirituality…
I believe narrative methods may be the most effective means of depicting the subjective experiences of people with autism in ways that are faithful to the meaning they give to their lives… There is a problem, however – how can we interpret the narratives of those who cannot speak/write/communicate in any conventional ways?...

To fully appreciate the spiritual perspectives of autistic individuals we have to take into account their specific ways of perceiving and processing information about the environment and their own selves. Spirituality plays a significant role in the lives of many autistic individuals and their families. It is time we opened our minds to a diversity of interpretations of human experiences, and, without any acquired bias towards these phenomena, we should respect individuals’ ways of perceiving and understanding the world, the meaning of life and, yes, mystery. Those who live and/or work with this population will not only gain new knowledge and understanding of the autistic children and adults they are involved with, but also might find that they have to re-evaluate their own lives, values and their own ‘selves’.

Spirituality can be a powerful element that will help autistic individuals and their families to overcome their difficulties and find meaning in their lives. Is this book ‘practical’? No and yes. No, if you are looking for bullet points of what to do and what not to do, because it does not provide ready-made recipes to ‘fix autistic behaviours’. And yes, if you want to understand how some autistic individuals experience their inner worlds and how these worlds shape the spiritual dimension of their lives. It does provide some explanations of why the connection between autism and spirituality is so strong, and what we can learn from ‘autistic spirituality’ that will help us understand our own selves… I have come to my beliefs and ways of thinking through certain experiences, that is, I have developed into the ‘present me’ who sees the world, people and science from a very different angle than 25 years ago. As I was born and brought up in the former USSR, when I was growing up I did not have to contemplate whether God existed or not, or which religious denomination would appeal to me (at the time I didn’t even know there were different religions). At school we learned that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ and, as this was a statement by the founder of Marxism-Leninism, Karl Marx, no one doubted it…

However, ‘babushki’ – old women – were ‘mercifully’ allowed to ‘bang their heads against the floor’ and ‘burn the candles’. In my childhood, my attitude to religion was simple – any religion was bad, and those very few religious individuals (typically from the old generation – those who survived the Second World War) were deluded, ill-educated ‘poor people’ who had no idea how the world worked. So there I was, happily going through the ideological conditioning…

It was in my scientific supervisor’s kitchen, at the age of 28, that I held the Bible in my hands for the first time. I didn’t become religious but it made me think that ‘scientific atheism’ might not be the only possible way to interpret our reality. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed (at the time I lived in Ukraine) and, all of a sudden, religion (the Russian Orthodox Church) was welcomed by the very apparatchiks who had banned it many years ago…

The majority of born-again, and now legal, churches were so grateful to the government that they preached in its favour, and it couldn’t be otherwise because many priests were appointed by the government from the pool of ‘new-born nonparties’ who had lost their jobs in the party nomenclature. Though I do not consider myself religious, my children have been baptised, I wear a cross (which I bought in the church of my homeland just before I left) and I have a few icons and church candles at home – this helps me feel grounded and connected to my roots. I don’t attend church services but I do visit cathedrals and churches (of any denomination) whenever I have a chance while travelling either on business or on holiday, to feel the peaceful atmosphere and the energy created by the prayers of many generations of church-goers. So, am I religious?

The answer is no, I am not religious but I continue my development from the religion of atheism through agnosticism into ‘private religion’ (in the terminology of William James).
In a letter to his niece S.I. Ivanova, written in 1868, Dostoevsky described the main idea of The Idiot as ‘to depict a positively beautiful human being. There is nothing harder under the sun than to do just that, and especially now. All writers – and not only ours but also all the European writers, who have attempted to depict the positively beautiful – always gave up.

The reason of the failure is, the task is immense: the beautiful is the ideal, and that ideal has not been developed yet – neither in Russia, nor in the civilized Europe’ (Dostoevsky 1930). After 1917, the Bolsheviks banned all works by Dostoevsky as they were seen as ‘capitalistic’ and ‘anti-Communist’; Maxim Gorky called him ‘our evil genius’. The ban was lifted only after the Second World War, when his Crime and Punishment was firmly established in the school curriculum…”

~ Olga Bogdashina, Autism and Spirituality: Psyche, Self and Spirit in People on the Autism Spectrum