Magical Personal History

Another aspect of the magical thinking I described in my elaboration of my introductory post is the way I think of my personal history. In the magical mind state, I see my past as a series of discoveries that promised to be the answer – going to grad school, doing the Gurdjieff work, Buddhist practice, psychotherapy – and them not working out. So the past, in this view, is a series of attempts at salvation. Disappointment and despair set in because experience seemed to have taught me that nothing works, i.e. nothing saved me. I was looking for something that would be It, what I would do, so that I wouldn’t have to search anymore or have to question things fundamentally all the time.

It's an essentially religious, or magical, way of constructing personal history because it is based on salvation and redemption. Some bad (read: sinful) way I am would be transformed by finding the true path.

The alternative view is that my life is a process, a development, and these were encounters I had which I was drawn to, learned from and some of which I incorporated into my present way of being.

A therapist was talking about my process of self-development. I told him that I don’t know if I have a process. He said, “your process is finding out whether you have a process or not.” It’s a curious, profound, contradictory intervention. On the one hand, it leaves me still struggling to make something meaningful about my life, and yet it also suggests a way of understanding even that struggle as that meaningful path. But on the other hand, the struggle itself doesn’t allow the belief in the meaningfulness of the struggle.