The most iconic personal discovery ever recorded? It has to have been the revelation (he was blinded by the light from heaven) on the road to Damascus that the Apostle Paul underwent, with his sudden conversion to belief in Jesus. Discovering a religious truth is only one possibility for seeing the light; others might include recovering a childhood trauma (psychological truth), or discovering a political truth (falling under the sway of ideology, e.g., Ayn Rand followers), or discovering a sexual truth (coming out as gay or ...
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The most iconic personal discovery ever recorded? It has to have been the revelation (he was blinded by the light from heaven) on the road to Damascus that the Apostle Paul underwent, with his sudden conversion to belief in Jesus. Discovering a religious truth is only one possibility for seeing the light; others might include recovering a childhood trauma (psychological truth), or discovering a political truth (falling under the sway of ideology, e.g., Ayn Rand followers), or discovering a sexual truth (coming out as gay or transgender), or, not least, a scientific truth (think Galileo or Watson/Crick). Thomas DeGloma has spent years intensively researching such forms of awakening, which usually consist in a process of rejecting one worldview and embracing another. There s a formula to these narratives, which tell of an individual s being contained in a world of darkness and ignorance, and subsequently awakening to an enlightened understanding of their experiences, and this book reveals the social contexts of the stories people tell as autobiographical account of their personal discoveries. In addition to the Apostle Paul s story, other iconic instances include the story of Zarathustra, Plato s allegory of the cave, the Buddhist story of Siddhartha, the Western Enlightenment narrative, the Marxist account of false and class consciousness, and Freud s theory of the unconscious. But personal stories are the real meat of the book, and DeGloma identifies the autobiographical formulas that transcend historical contexts, setting, and subject matter. Communities of memory get formed (the internet is a great catalyst for these), and we learn a great deal about the awakening of Iraq War veterans (converted to anti-war protest), sexual abuse victims, converts to Mormonism, members of Ex-Gay cults, and much else besides. We discover that stories of coming-to-believe and coming-out-of-false-belief rely on the same tropes and narrative structures. What we get in the end is a new kind of inquiry, and an exciting one: the cultural and cognitive sociology of autobiography, which opens up the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of truth (i.e., truth ). "
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