Treating Autism By Adding A Lot More Love
John L. Waters
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Paper Number One Revised
Directed Study English 699
Professor Jim Dodge
Fall Semester, 2000
Treating Autism By Adding A Lot More Love and
Working Without Premeditation And Without A Conscious
Plan (Revised New Edition!)
John L. Waters
Copyright 2000 by John L. Waters.
All Rights Reserved.
September 22, 2000
For twenty years I had no income and I was supported
by my family members. That's part of having autism.
Part A:
When I sit at the musical keyboard or the word
processor I work without any conscious plan.
It is the same when I sit in the sun and
draw with a ball point pen in each hand. I enter a
trance state and a "higher process" takes over, unless
you consider memory and reason to be the higher processes,
in which case entrancement is a "lower process."
High or low it is the way I work.
This paper is long and rambling, and doesn't really
prove any point. Instead it illustrates the process which
is identified by the words, "working without premeditation
and without a conscious plan." Autistic people are good
at this method. In fact it's mainly the only process I can
use to get a fresh, new idea!
This method worked very well as I sat
with a book of poems in front of me and I just sang
out a new tune for each poem, at the rate of about
twenty new melodies an hour. I did this almost every day in
Hollywood during the years 1972 to 1976. And I've done a
lot of composing here in Humboldt County as well.
I've created thousands of singable tunes, mostly
to Mother Goose rhymes and poems I wrote which are
rather like Mother Goose rhymes. I mean these poems
are not intended to be especially deep, subtle, and
personal. You might say they are light
verses rather than serious poems. And it took me much longer
to compose a hundred new poems than it took me to
compose a hundred new melodies. I even composed sixty
new melodies in one four hour session. But that was
more than usual.
Quantity? You bet. But what about quality? That's a
moot question. 90% of my tunes no one else has ever heard.
In 1978 I was offered a contract on four volumes of my songs
by a new york music publisher, Cimino Inc.
They had deliberated on the project for about a year.
The problem was that they didn't offer me all the benefits
I asked for and they didn't negotiate. They just sent back
the songs. I also distributed a song cassette to six local
elementary schools and I received letters of recommendation
from six teachers. Two wanted to buy a copy of the song
cassette.
Creating melodies by singing was like being on a roll.
It's really exciting getting a nice tune you never heard
before, just by going into an entrancement and singing it
out! I'd get started and on some days I'd just
sing out tune after tune like I was a racehorse being
ridden by an ace jockey. We'd really tear up the
track! And I would still be singing out tunes for hours
a day except that after some
twenty-thousand melodies and no way to place them in
the market I decided that I was wasting my time. And
besides I got on a new track: my independent research
on self-healing through mystical energy. And wow! That
was something else.
I haven't been good at organizing, promoting, and selling
myself. It's related to my autism and my recovery from
autism. This recovery is a slow process.
Part B:
In 1982 I met Roberta. Roberta was curious about my
healing research and she knew quite a lot about nutrition
and herbs.
Roberta had a special talent. She would
listen to a piece of music which excited her and she
would become entranced and as she was entranced she
danced so gracefully that people in the nightclub
would just stand and watch her dance. I
saw Roberta dance only one time. But I have seen my hands
dancing making freehand art on paper many thousands
of times, doing the same kind of spontaneous moving
to the music. So I know Roberta was really talented
in a rather similar way.
Roberta told me that as she was entranced she had no
conscious thought. She wasn't bothered by the
intrusion of words and thinking. She was in a
sublime detachment in which the sound of the music was all she
was conscious of, and her body just moved in response
to the music. It was in this state of "no mind" and
"no thought" that Roberta's special talent presented
itself. And naturally I was fascinated by this
because I was doing the same thing as I felt entranced
and inspired as I was making my art, and my music, and
even when I was writing.
I figured that Roberta was sensitive enough to sense
this mystical energy if I worked with her in a
location where there was a lot of it present. So I
went with her over to Patrick's Point State Park and
we sat in a grove of large Sitka Spruce trees. Sitting
about fifteen feet apart we gazed into each other's eyes
for about five minutes. During this time I saw colors
and lights in my visual field, the same as I had many
dozens of times before. And after this experiment
Roberta told me that she felt really high.
Part C:
Before I started sensing more keenly
the mystical energy, I ate regular all-American cooking
like I had for most all my life. But when I got into
sensing this sublime energy more and more I was
"told" to go without eating and recondition myself and
become a total vegetarian. And that was in 1979 and
1980. By the time I met Roberta I'd been doing this
for a couple of years.
In 1981 and 1982 I was very active physically and I
walked all over Arcata and I found people who were
interested in alternative medicine and other subjects
of interest to the "counter-culture" of those times.
I found quite a few people who were willing to
experiment with me in this sense of the mystical
energy and how it affected them. But as the eighties
progressed I sensed that the times they were still
a-changin' and people were becoming more and more
conservative. After 1984 I definitely withdrew more into
my secret joy and I started working on reading and writing
better. And I let this process just move me in the
library. I did a lot of spontaneous moving about from
library shelf to library shelf just grabbing books
and I discovered a lot of writers I'd
never heard of. I'm still discovering interesting writers.
In 1980 I got the idea that there is a "higher" mind,
a "universal" mind which knows everything and so if a
person can just get in tune with that "higher" mind
and let it guide him, he will be led to do and know
all that he needs to do and know to be a success in
accord with his talent. I figured that Roberta was
accessing that "higher" mind as she went into a trance
and danced. She had a great deal of charm and appeal
as a dancer.
The thing is, I have a talent with little
people. That is, I do not try and say I am an
artist, or a writer or a composer. Yes, I
have been very prolific! But I worked as a
professional teacher for three and a half years before
I became so perplexed and so beset by disorders
physical and mental which I had to cure by doing this
research. And when I was so rejuvenated and so
reinvigorated, and I roamed around town, I wasn't
writing, I wasn't drawing and painting, and I wasn't
making music. I was working directly with people.
I appealed much more to little children than to
adults, perhaps because young children are very action
oriented and they really like to move.
When I say my main talent is with little people I
just mean that I am good with children who aren't
trying to think, feel, and act all grown up. And when
adults are able to let go of their need to feel
all grown up, and relate to me on a sophisticated,
grownup-basis, then we can get down to this
mystical energy and interact in
ways which are more healing and more helpful. But
admittedly, children do not learn about this in
school, because in school the lessons are intended to
make the children learn how to grow up faster and
think, feel, and act more mature. But The Christ
energy which is the mystical energy rejuvenates a person
and makes a person much healthier by reconditioning
the whole brain and nervous system.
In 1979 and in 1980 I walked all around Arcata and I
told lots of people that I was starting a new
organization called The Aquarian Center.
But I found that the I wasn't very good with words and
I wasn't really able to promote The Aquarian Center
then. I really didn't have all the right words to define my
research. I'm still working at being a better communicator
with the grownups.
Part D:
I often am still and I have no thought at all.
When I must work my mind harder, I think with the help
of my moving body. That's part of growing up with autism.
I mean, if I have the idea I am going to build
a cabin, I can't plan the cabin. I just go out and
work with the tools and the lumber and over time I
build the cabin. That's how I built the cabin that's
on my property now, in 1969 just after my former wife
and I bought the property. And I was somewhat baffled at
the time, and
my family was baffled, because they wanted to plan the
cabin first. But honestly the lumber was recycled and
there were hundreds of boards and not one board was
like any other board. Some boards were fir, some were
redwood, some were pine, and they were of different
lengths, widths and thicknesses. It was quite a puzzle
to solve, building the cabin all by myself.
I learned I could do it by doing it. And I guess
that's the way I'll help build The Aquarian Center.
I became inspired and I built the cabin myself
without a plan. I had no income and I had no other
building materials. Love combines many I's together
and enables people to see all this better.
Think of all the homeless people who can learn more about
love and sharing by building homes for each other out of
recycled materials.
Building from salvage is good therapy.
In working with children I let the child lead
and this helps the child feel more capable
than ever before. Most people are not as hard
as myself to salvage.
By eliminating some redundancy and by adding some
different words, I've tried to salvage this article.
What do you think. If you have questions, comments,
or suggestions, send me an e-mail at johnlwaters@yahoo.com
Thank you.
5:00PM Friday, September 22, 2000
John L. Waters
johnlwaters@yahoo.com
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