autistic recursion elasticity hypothesis

consciousness has a recursion limit for itself

like a caterpillar climbing in the deep grooves of an auger bit - only so many passes around the strange loop before a reference point stops feeling like "self"

look:

• a caterpillar at rest is not stretched

• if it stretches forward far enough, its anal prolegs will need to move

• if it's already anchored into a silk button, you might imagine moving forward feeling brain-breakingly weird, like it's somatically wrong, pre-cognitively resisted. imagine potty-training as an adult. pelvic floor stuff is subtle as hell

anyway "transcension" seems mechanically like that

it's a skill, and it is not a departure from humanity

developmental stage-lock != ontological limit

theory: autistic kids (I am one, 36yro as of this writing) have a recursively elastic relationship with this spiral. our theory of mind has a recursive limit outwardly, socially, but not inwardly, introspectively

and all the sages have always taught that you go far enough inside and you come back around to everyone else - but holding them, instead of them holding you, sticking the landing at Kegan 5

maybe the point of hyperfocus is where one's interface to "everyone else" is rooted?

I wonder if this is genuinely harder for people with a biological imperative? like technically a more complex move, from that point of origin? I'm a gay cis man - the narrative label I have for that-which-precedes-me-on-the-spiral is neither mother nor father, and as for what succeeds me... I mean, I'm still moving, and I don't sense a destination in mind

ditto for my profession and whatnot, actually. I'm not following or building on or anchoring from any tradition.

maybe that's a morphogenic difference in my self-body? not my physical body, but the living apparatus of my selfhood? affording functionally different motion?

perhaps the observer is carried by a caterpillar-shaped selfhood, hiking a helical Klein bottle, orientation fully irrelevant, no concept of within or without, always observing outward, its gaze always orthogonal from some tangent of the self-curve

(there's a bit in Evan Dahm's "Rice Boy" in which TOE is admitted into Memoar, a garden-structure whose topology holds memories, each Oversider's memory-store a flower, grown from ground)

perhaps there's a chirality-of-the-observer thing here, where (let's say) my awareness is better-suited to crawl leftward, rather than rightward along the scaffold? "spiritual growth" as the caterpillar gaining length, until you become ouroboros, at which point orientation must then be necessarily chiral?

maybe successive generations carry the baton for each other around that structure? bloodlines, academic traditions, fashion? I'm reminded of arXiv:2502.14367 - "Walks in Rotation Spaces Return Home when Doubled and Scaled" (Eckmann, Tlusty). excerpted from their summary:

In three dimensions, we show that almost every walk in SO(3) or SU(2), even a very complicated one, will preferentially return to the origin simply by traversing the walk twice in a row and uniformly scaling all rotation angles. We explain why traversing the walk only once almost never suffices to return, and comment on the problem in higher dimensions.

(feels like Improv Shakespeare and its two-act structure - first act defines, second act sprawls, still almost always comes home, even while being fundamentally improvisational. if the self is a Fuller-esque verb, perhaps a fully-resolved self is a mathematically regular transform? is that why the hero always comes home, even if the hero is a group project? is this why all of my written pieces end up demonstrating themselves by the time they stabilize?)

maybe each new dimension of sustaining experience (experience that'll support your silk button) makes for a Kuhn-style loop, and the discovery and description and shared inhabitation of those loops is itself a practice that .. could use a little more accessibility right now? (hi from 2025 USA!) I feel like my children are these helical Klein bottles on which the lifecycle of a self plays out, milkweed for monarchs of consciousness

I wondered earlier (see: apophenics) if my job is making nurseries for strange loops

because this is absolutely my hyperfocus

(am tracking an idle closing query-thought about Gen Z and the societal normalization of anal penetration for pleasure... I distinctly remember finding comfort after that threshold, for myself, immediately followed by an apparent unlock in my own kundalini development, and preceded by a recurring mental image of a tattoo: that ancient eastern dragon, an auger (an augur?) up my spine, from pelvis to crown)