The Spellers

I recently had a couple meetings with some Spellers and people who work with them. “Spellers,” as most of you know, are non-verbal autistic people who have learned to communicate by pointing to letters one by one on a letter board.

I came away from the meetings with a clear sense of the importance of the Spellers for the future of humanity. That intuition first stirred when I listened to the Telepathy Tapes (a popular podcast) earlier this year, but meeting them in person formed it into something more specific.

First some background. Wait, no, first before that a caveat. The background I am about to give is not universally accepted in the autism community. I’ll explain more about that later.

For many years, non-verbal autistic people were generally considered to have intellects too feeble for speech. Actually, the problem is a lack of fine motor control along with various disconnections between mind and body. They cannot control their bodies in the same way most people can. They might stand up suddenly and spin in circles, or pound the table, or utter a string of nonsense syllables or words. To all appearances, they are demented. However, when they learn to spell (usually a very difficult task requiring a lot of practice and concentration, like you or I learning to ride a unicycle), they reveal a level of intelligence equaling and sometimes vastly exceeding normal people.

In addition, they also display astonishing telepathic abilities. I was given a demonstration that filled me with delight. I wrote a word on a piece of paper and showed it to the teacher. She looked at it and asked one of the Spellers to spell what she had seen. He did so, nonchalantly it seemed, without any possibility of having seen what I wrote. The word was “squeebit.” No one even knows what that word means.

The main conventional explanation is that the teacher subtly cued him as to which letters to point to. That interpretation is related to a more general dismissal of the Spellers, which says that they aren’t spelling at all, they are just thrusting the pointer and their caregivers are guiding their hand or moving the board so that it looks like they are choosing letters. It’s just wishful thinking, this account goes, on the part of their teachers and parents. They aren’t spelling, they aren’t thinking, there’s nothing going on inside.

Another conventional explanation is fraud. Any stage magician could easily replicate the “trick,” using mirrors, maybe, or some kind of cuing. So I am not saying I saw “proof” of telepathy. But I’m not looking for proof. One can always bend evidence to fit belief. What to believe is ultimately a choice. It should not ignore evidence, but it cannot be entirely subordinated to evidence.

Facile dismissals of Spelling depend on ignorance of the patience and commitment required to teach and learn it. I observed a classroom where tutors were teaching non-verbal young people to Spell. The kindness of the teachers and the perseverance of the learners moved me deeply. It’s not like the tutors are getting paid a lot of money to sit there, hour after hour, encouraging their students. “Raise your eyes.” “Focus.” “You can do it.” No one would spend that kind of time at $20 an hour to cater to wishful thinking.

To maintain a conventional view that dismisses Spellers and their abilities, I would have to also believe that their whole community is a collection of hoaxers, scammers, dupes, and delusionaries. I would have to sit through the demonstrations holding an attitude of suspicion and smug superiority. “Look at those fools!” Or at best, patronizing tolerance. The various narratives I could hold about the Spellers (it’s delusion; it’s authentic) each fit the data points. They are intellectually co-equal, but they are not emotionally co-equal. A state of belief is a state of being.

I also got to be in conversation with a group of Spellers. The intelligence behind their succinct messages was palpable. I could feel it, a kind of presence. You know how you can feel someone’s presence? But in case that weren’t enough, the content of their communications also revealed deep thought and understanding. They were highly literate—sometimes deploying a vocabulary beyond that of their teachers. One demonstrated how fast he can read. He had enough motor control to swipe a finger across a screen, as one must when reading on a tablet. Swipe, swipe, swipe… faster than one page per second, with total recall.

What also moved me was the level of suffering these people endure. There are, I was told, 30 million non-verbal autistic people in the world. Because they have been considered demented, they receive little of the kind of education or stimulation that an intelligent mind needs to thrive. They might be physically restrained. They might be warehoused in special daycare centers where they are stuck in front of the Teletubbies or Sponge Bob. The parents suffer too. Taking care of these children (or adults) is practically a full time job.

Imagine being one of those parents, being told for years that your child is demented, maybe even convinced of that yourself, only one day to find a genius lurking behind the veil.

I’ve decided to devote some of my time and energy now to the Spellers. Compassion is only part of my motivation, since, while they are not the only ones on this earth who are suffering terribly and unnecessarily. My other reason is that I believe that without them and their gifts, humanity cannot navigate the transition before us.

If we limit ourselves to the human capacities that fall within the bounds of consensus reality, and include only those who are “normal” within that reality, we will not pass the initiation of the metacrisis.

What is true of the nonverbal autistic applies also to everyone else who has been cast to the margins of reality. People incarcerated in prisons, for example—some of the most extraordinary people I have ever encountered were in prison. Some of those who have passed through extreme trauma and not been broken by it, but have healed from it, carry an exceptional kind of sanity and moral clarity.

I encourage anyone who has not listened already to listen to The Telepathy Tapes. We have to start cognizing the full spectrum of reality. It is in the nature of an authentic initiation that it calls forth capacities you didn’t know you had. That is what we need collectively right now.

To be sure, telepathic abilities and supernormal intelligence are not limited to Spellers. These abilities and many more have languished in exile for a long time—exiled from society, and exiled from ourselves too. What abilities and which ways of being human are accepted, rewarded, and celebrated, and which are ridiculed, suppressed, and pathologized? Many of us have experienced, to a lesser degree, the condition of the Spellers. Maybe you are one of them.

Nonetheless, I still sense something special about the Spellers. Perhaps they are souls that have not fully incarnated, who are just starting to enter the reality of our recognition. They have been shut up, shut out, and shut in to an often hellish reality. They told me that themselves, how much they suffer. Well, now the walls between their reality and ours are crumbling. We know about them now. Some of us, anyway, see them now. “You see us true,” one of the Spellers told me. And there are many others who do, more and more. What we are willing to see, we admit into being and make real.

One more thing. This transition, this revolution, this great turning, is not the kind where some people make it and some do not. It is not one where some people get left behind by those who think the mission to save the world is so important that we cannot afford the luxury of attending to those who would burden it. Our systems of money and power do not recognize real value and real power. Real power, transformative power, awaits where we haven’t yet looked.