Neurodivergent Non-Duality
Could the insight of ‘context blindness’ be an organising idea that unites spirituality and science?
Whilst training to be a psychotherapist, I was introduced to the organising idea of ‘context blindness’ or, as the founders of Human Givens, Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, had coined it, ‘Caetextia’. This insight had previously been developed by another psychologist, Dr Peter Vermeulen, co-director of the Centre for Concrete Communication in Belgium.
In a nutshell, Caetextia, or Context Blindness, suggests the following:
The human brain is very sensitive to context. This contextual sensitivity plays a crucial role in many cognitive abilities that are affected in ASD, such as face perception, emotion recognition, the understanding of language and communication, and problem-solving. Context refers to the circumstances or events forming the environment within which something exists or occurs. Context reveals and directs our perception and therefore influences and directs our response.
In particular, Joe and Ivan and other therapists explain that context blindness is an explanation for the spectrum of neurodivergence that, on the extreme ends, concludes with Autistic Spectrum Disorder on the one hand and Psychosis on the other.
Interestingly the ancient understanding of non-duality suggests that accepting that the essential nature of the Self is, in essence, an indefinable yet real conscious experience and is not to be confused with being a definable experience such as a thought, bodily sensation or perception which are not real in themselves but are, in a manner of speaking, “borrowing” their reality from consciousness. To identify as the latter would be to identify the self as a temporary finite object and instantly lose sight of the non-temporary non-spacial experience of being an undefinable conscious experience (referred to often simply as ‘Awareness’). Losing sight of being Awareness (being context blind) is the instantaneous cause of existential fear and a sense of something lacking as we have lost sight of our true experiential “home” of being the experience we may call the Reality That Is Aware and the container of all things.
Here again, we see an example of ‘context blindness’. On the one hand, consciously contextualising the Self as the undefinable reality of Awareness and on the other contextualising the Self as the temporary experience of a thought, bodily sensation or perception (or combination thereof).
In both cases, what liberates us from the negative effects of being contextually blind is to recognise that this blindness is at the root of the psychological suffering we may be experiencing.
We could consider these two forms of Context Blindness as being like two axes. On the one hand, a vertical axis that the context of consciousness. On the other, a horizontal axis is the context of a neuro-divergent brain. These two forms constitute our living latitude (north-south) and longitude (east-west). We are all somewhere on the map determined at any moment by these coordinates. This seems to be the nature of the experience of the biological localisation of consciousness.
What has been called ‘spiritual awakening’ is experiencing being in the context of the Aware Reality and letting go of the contextual experience of the belief to be a separate body (traditionally called “ignorance”). We could view this as being on a contextual spectrum of identification and non-identification in practice. From the vantage point of a liberating experiential “glimpse” of our essential real nature of being Awareness, we can; over time, dissolves any remaining psychological habits arising from the belief that contextualises the self as a temporary object which is the cause of unnecessary psychological suffering.
What could be called neurological “awakening” is awakening to the phenomena of patterns of behaviour that arise due to the spectrum of neuro-divergent make-up so that we are no longer at their mercy. Whilst this is most notable with brains on the more extreme ends of this biological spectrum, we are all on it somewhere. Although we cannot change neurodivergence, we can, through awakening to it, ameliorate its negative effects largely in society through greater understanding and inclusivity.
I suggest we are all on the spectrum from being “Context Awakened” to “Context Blind” vertically and horizontally.
In practice, therefore, the task of navigating the world happily seems to be a matter of being as “Context Awakened” as best we can. The organising idea of context blindness seems to offer the recognition that this involves understanding two axes of biology and consciousness and not just one and that we are all on a spectrum. The modus operandi is inclusivity, not exclusivity. Finally, this concept seems to offer the possibility of a language that unites both spirituality and science, where we can do away with ancient terms such as ‘ignorance’ and see that both the worlds of consciousness and science can work together to help people be Context Awakened.
Love,
Freyja
