Personal Mythology as a Gateway to Autobiographical Writing
Before beginning to write your autobiography, it’s worthwhile to undertake an examination of the lens through which your life’s events are interpreted and accorded significance. In this regard, creating your personal myth is a most helpful tool. It acts as a loom on which the raw materials of daily experience are woven into a meaningful narrative that coheres with the collective narratives of all your days.
Our memory is selective. As the psyche attempts to create a coherent narrative over time, many events are left out of the final, remembered story. A personal myth self-organizes our experience of the world. We become conscious of the world through ‘categories of awareness’. These categories determine what experiences will influence us. Nothing can be woven into our personal myth that we are not first aware of. A person who has, let’s say, 35 categories of awareness will process and understand a much broader realm of influences than a person with only five such categories. Suffering, loss, and victimization can be huge categories of awareness for some people. Having more categories of awareness doesn’t mean a person knows more; it simply means that person processes more, is aware of more. Through these categories of awareness our lives are molded and shaped, but not self-determined.
The psyche, or soul, exists in a world of analogy and metaphor. The formation of analogies is a basic law of the psyche and the psyche. The psyche is fundamentally poetic, yet how often are we caught up in literalism, which kills the poetic, assassinates the imagination, and runs a stake through the heart of the imagination.
A personal myth frames the all of what enters our awareness. The soul navigates through the world of “as if”, constantly finding analogies of itself. It is this “as if” quality of our days that expresses of the mythic principles by which we live.
When we're in a conversation with someone or perhaps overhear a conversation, we continuously hear people say, "You know, it's like . . .” , or , “It was as if . . . " – that is the language of the soul animating. It's finding an analogy to get at the essence of expression. We all know how frustrating it is when we can't find the words to describe something. And that frustration is the soul’s not finding where it wants to be.
A personal myth is flexible, protean, elastic, and organic. However, a myth can become a cadaver, and when it does, it becomes an ideology. All ideologies are once living myths that have suffered sclerosis. It can't be moved. Ideologies were once organic mythologies that lost their gut, their flexibility, their elasticity. All forms of fundamentalisms are myths that have grown cadaverous and have hardened in place. You can’t have a conversation with a fundamentalist; real, give-and-take conversation are out.
A personal myth is a mode of perceiving that is open, willing to yield, and able to shift when necessary. Myths are attitudes, ways of perceiving. If you have a lousy attitude, that's how the world's going to come in. If you lighten up your attitude, the world is going to present itself consistent with that mode of perception.
Our personal narratives are temporal. The primary material of the soul’s experience doesn’t easily accommodate personal narratives, which tend to override, dominate and ignore the internal processes from which our connection to the ancient myths spring.
We continuously navigate between two worlds, the personal and the eternal. One is the world of the ego – of whims, needs, and illusions that are often purely secular. The other is the world of the transcendent. Once we enter the realm of transcendence, ego dominance takes a backseat.
The relationship between our personal moments in which we begin to articulate our own story and the myths that have guided humanity since the beginning of time become a telling of something that connects our life to the lives of all those who have gone before us; it bridges the ego into the transcendent and the archetypal.
Writing from the ego is merely a story of the ego, while the work of myths is a telling of the eternal, the story of soul and a wisdom that far transcends conscious understanding. These are two very different approaches to storytelling. We must be able to distinguish whether our story is created for the benefit of aggrandizing the ego or whether they are moments where the self and pure inspiration eclipse the wishes of the ego. These are two different worlds.
The stories we plot are often unconscious. Nonetheless, they comprise both ways of seeing and mythopoetic modes of knowing and discerning through particular imaginal constructs that are embodied as paradigms. They rely as much on a method or a way of seeing as they do on the content of those perceptions and fantasies. But they need only be true for you. In addition, only you are in a position to tell your story. Others relating your narrative is nothing more than hearsay. What’s important is that each of us takes the opportunity to tell our own story as unedited as we wish and to risk speaking in as authentic a voice as we dare.
A myth is a manner and style of being present to the external world as well as to interior ideas and thoughts. A myth is like a fulcrum balancing two realities: the external world I meet day-to-day and the inner psychic world that has its own objective narrative, not needing me to exist but rather working itself through me so that I may come to a fuller awareness of what I am.
A personal myth includes a way that allows things of the world to present themselves to me in a particular style of intellectual and emotional presence. I may react conservatively to one life situation and idealistically to another. We’re each polluted constellations of both tendencies. Discovering our personal myth changes and shifts the contours of our lives and is indispensable to self–knowledge.
My personal myth, then, is in large measure the consequence of how I structure my images of reality based on patterns that I have developed from my life experience and a deeper understanding of the pre-existing myths that are embedded in the psyche of all of us. The energy fields of the psyche that are unique to me also transcend me by participating in a much larger cosmos than my own micro world is capable of holding.
To study the contours of one's personal myth is to discern the patterns in the processes of our lives, in the politics that dictate our ways of knowing, and in what shapes reality to conform to the inner terrain or landscape of our being. The more each of us is able to understand the format and energies that shape our fantasies, daydreams, night narratives, modes of perception, what tracks our interests, what repels, what is distasteful, boring, ugly, beautiful, where and what we distort, disturb, and see within those patterns as they unfold, the more honestly and fully we comprehend the deep taproots of our narratives, the elaborate fictions we are, and the more the complexity of our life’s plot reveals itself.
Patterns of images, narratives and energies compromise the psychic scaffolding of life, both consciously and unconsciously negotiated. In the words of Carl Jung, we may never have an answer to our questions about lives “other than an inner certainty that we are on the way to discovering our own mess”.
Sometimes the most important aspects of our lives are in the margins of it, and writing may be a way to write those margins into the fuller consciousness. Marginal matters in our lives may become most meaningful through writing of them in a meditative way. Our peripheral vision picks shards of our myth and highlights them in consciousness: fragments from dreams, parts of conversations, overheard conversations, and ‘for instance experiences’ can yield the greatest insights through meditation and writing. Patterns of energy exist in each of our personal biographies that guide, twist, distort and dissemble us along with gifts of genius and creativity into the individual we are destined to become. Such a journey, however, requires courage, conviction and knowing that it may take a lifetime to accomplish.
Imagination and intuition rather than reason and analysis will be the guiding modes of inquiry into your personal myth. The intent is to reclaim a ‘politics of myth’ rather than an analysis of mythology. Mythos will be honored over logos as a motive of knowing. Tension arises between the realms of what is imagined as fiction and what is remembered as personal history. Allow and encourage yourself to enter into a deeper penetration of the self as it relates to the world rather than simply as writing a diary, bits and pieces of your daily plan, or the broken shards of what may be coming. Let your intention be to retrieve that which you are through the death of your ego and the informing instinct of your soul. Inviting a fuller and deeper consciousness through imaginative writing will trump data processing or information herding. Have a fundamental trust in the soul to reveal what is necessary to complete, not analyze, to confront and not flee from, and to recognize as part of your own shadowed and illuminated being, the doors of light opening into your soul’s ambience.