In summing up his life with Asperger’s, Page reflects:
I cannot pretend that Asperger’s has not made much of my existence miserable and isolated (how will I get to sleep tonight?). I hope that young Aspies, informed by recent literature on the subject, will find the world somewhat less challenging than I have.
As one of our young Asperger’s children said: “There are some things I don’t know so much about…. Teasing is one of them.” Absent teasing, the Asperger’s child misses out on a layer of social life, of dramatic performances where affections are realized, roles are defined, conflicts are hashed out, all in the lighthearted rhetoric of nonliteral language. They miss out on what teasing gives us: shared laughter, playful touch, ritualized reconciliation, the perspective of others—a life beyond parallel play.
9 Touch
FOR THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) has been engaging scientists and Tibetan Buddhists in dialogues about the interface between the science of the human nervous system and the 2500-year-old tenets of Tibetan Buddhism. The intention is to uncover commonalities and differences in how these two ways of knowing arrive at claims about the nature of mind, emotion, and happiness.
I have participated in two Buddhism-Science panels, one at MIT and the other through the Dalai Lama Peace Center in Vancouver Canada. Each event evoked out-of-body feelings of the unreality of a wedding day. There was the swirl of the 200 photographers who track HHDL’s every bow, smile, laugh, attentive head nod, finger pointing rhetorical flourish, cough, and sneeze. At MIT, bomb-sniffing dogs circled the space-age auditorium, sniffing under chairs and behind posters protesting for a free Tibetan state. Stone-faced secret service agents, mumbling into collar microphones, stood in dark suits positioned in perfectly proportioned geometric arrangements to protect the space that HHDL moved through. Outside the MIT auditorium at 6 AM hundreds of meditators, peacefully arrayed in rows of upright torsos and braided hair, sat in contemplative anticipation, occasionally awakened by the strike of gongs. The dozens of volunteers who made these events possible, long time practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism from the west, uniformly spoke of being touched by HHDL. Literally touched. One recalled clasping his hands years ago in New York. Another recalled a brush during a bow in Daram Sala India, where HHDL resides. Still another recalled his hand on a shoulder at a reception following a talk. They could remember the precise instant of the touch, the warm feeling that rippled through their bodies, and the lasting change this contact introduced into their lives. Often the act of recalling the touch produced bright eyes, a flush, a head tilt, tearing, and an intimate but remote look in the eyes.
On the stage in Vancouver before our dialogue, HHDL entered stage left and proceeded to greet the four panelists with his customary bow and clasped hands. The sighs, tears, appreciative head nods, goose bumps, and embraces of the 2,500 people in the audience produced a crackling ether that filled the art deco auditorium. I was the last panelist for HHDL to approach. From eighteen inches away I came into contact with HHDL. Partially stooped in a bow, he made eye contact with me and clasped my hands. His eyebrows were raised. His eyes gleamed. His modest smile was poised near a laugh. Emerging out of the bow and clasped hands, he embraced my shoulders and shook them slightly with warm hands.
As he turned to the audience, I had a Darwinian spiritual experience. Goose bumps spread across my back like wind on water, starting at the base of my spine and rolling up to my scalp. A flush of humility moved up my face from my cheeks to my forehead and dissipated near the crown of my head. Tears welled up, along with a smile. I recalled a saying of HHDL’s:
At the most fundamental level our nature is compassionate, and that cooperation, not conflict, lies at the heart of the basic principles that govern our human existence.
For several weeks after I lived in a new realm. My suitcase was missing at the carousel following the plane flight home—not a problem, I didn’t need those clothes anyway. Squabbles between my two daughters about the ownership of a Polly Pocket or about whose back-bending walkover best matched the platonic ideal—no bristling reaction on my part, just an inclination to step into the fray and to lay out a softer discourse and sense of common ground. The frustrated person behind me in the line in the bank, groaning in exasperation—no reciprocal frustration, no self-righteous sense of how to comport oneself in more dignified fashion in public; instead, an appreciation of what deeper causes might have produced such apparent malaise. The people I saw, the undergrads in my classroom, parents at my daughters’ school, preschool teachers walking little groups of three-year-olds in hand-holding chains around the streets of Berkeley, those parallel parking their cars, recyclers picking up cans and bottles, the homeless shaking their heads and cursing the skies, people in business suits reading the morning paper waiting for a carpool ride, all seemed guided by remarkably good intentions. My jen ratio was approaching infinity.
I wish I could do full-body fMRIs of people’s nervous systems in settings through which HHDL moves. If I could, I would find that his touch produces the colorful activation of goodwill in the brain and body. HHDL’s vocabulary of touch is as precise and imaginative as a chess master’s representation of the possibilities on the 64 squares of the chessboard. As we concluded our panel in Vancouver, HHDL tickled Paul Ekman in the ribs. In the midst of a discussion about neural plasticity, HHDL squeezed neuroscientist Richie Davidson’s earlobe. In his deep, bowed greetings with other Tibetan monks, HHDL rubs the corner of his head against that of the other monk, triggering laughter. HHDL is known to fall to the floor and wrestle with Desmond Tutu, as though the two were preteen brothers. HHDL’s genius at touch is a window into an ancient communicative system by which we can alter others’ jen ratios, spreading health and happiness to others.
VIRAL JEN
In John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart, tired of bumming smokes and meals off expatriate Americans in Tampico, Mexico, encamps with two other down-on-their-luck prospectors in the arid mountains of the Sierra Madre. They are in search of gold. As their bags of gold dust mount in weight and number, the three men confront an ancient evolutionary problem—how to build and maintain trust between nonkin. In their high chaparral camp, the opportunities for exploitation are infinite—a quick escape with the gold during the heavy sleep following a day of moving dirt, a silent murder in a desert ravine, an alliance of two ganging up on the third. In the face of the pull of exploitative self-interest, the band of desperate prospectors hold tight. They are bound together in cooperative spirit by enthusiasm, camaraderie, the reverie of the meals and clothes and farms and white picket fences they envision enjoying with their newfound fortunes, and the laughter, banter, backslapping, and firm handshakes of men cooperating.