Tyler Cowen, in The Age of the Infovore:
[A]utistics are the culmination of Buddhist thought and indeed Buddhist practice, even though few of them are following Buddhism in any deliberate sense. Oddly we call these tendencies glorious when they are affiliated with Eastern religion but we call them pathological, or we think of them as just plain weird, when they are performed by autistics.
This brought to mind the art film, Samsara (IMDB), which depicts a group of Tibetan monks tediously creating a beautiful mosaic of colored sand over many days, only to blow it away once finished.
The effect at the end of the film was powerful—an illustration of true non-attachment by allowing their work to be destroyed in seconds.
And yet, the dedication of hours over the preceding days could be seen as a pointless waste of time. Don’t we also think the same of autistics who spend hours memorizing 𝛑 to twenty two thousand digits or years obsessing over trains?
What an interesting observation of that double standard.