One of Carl Jung’s most poignant observations is that people don’t possess their beliefs but rather their beliefs tend to possess them.
When you think about it the beliefs that you are held by are not exclusively yours. They hold a lot of other people as well, in a very concise in often limiting set of parameters. And they were around a long time before you came along. They were tweaked here and there, but essentially fall in line with very ancient biological, archetypal, cross-cultural and mythological ideas.
And possessed is not too strong a word; for they are far more than just dead words on paper. It is like they have breath and a spirit of their own, out-living and outlasting many generations of the people they possess.
What were the Nazis or the Marxists but possessed of an ideology?
They were just ideologues, of marginalized free will, mourhinf little but the hackneyed cliches of a set of abstract beliefs, hopes, and assertions.
So what about your beliefs?
Do you possess them? Or do they possess you?
Rare is the person who is not possessed by a few.
© 2026 – SoulSequel
14 responses to “Do you have your beliefs or do they have you?”
As a card carrying conservative; I am not possessed by it. I can look left and understand the value. I don’t automatically consider anything to the left of centre as bad. Only closed minded idiots do that, who have soft skulls that let political machinations control their mindsets.
I believe in God but not in the way that shit for brains individuals consider the Almighty. So that belief, although drilled into me an an early age has been shaped by my effort to try and understand how I feel about it personally, versus socially.
I am possessed by the belief that I don’t need a gun. I have tried to be open minded about thinking that I would feel safer if I had one to respond to a life threatening issue, but I can’t, and wont, imagine that I would ever be in a movie story line where I can shoot and kill a bad guy instantly, while I could take multiple gun shot wounds and continue my struggle until I am victorious.
I can see how beliefs can own us.
@spitfire3dc
Lol!
Intelligence and “consciousness” are the proofs against being possessed by a belief — BUT it still can happen; because a lot of very intelligent people become possessed by their beliefs. Becoming just another ideologue (an un-reasoning mouthpiece for an ideology) is really a very complicated and devious process. People rarely set out to become addicted to these things. But like a drug, the positive affirmations of the echo-chamber become a compelling thing: a mixture of hive-mind, with illusions of security and the actuality of power (1 angry bee vs an entire hive ticked off at you).
I hear the shit-for-brains thought. There is this notion with both the possessed and addicts, that they opened the door and dabbled with something that ought to have been left alone. But once it owns them, how responsible for their actions are they?
I don’t know. That’s a hard one to discern using both Truth and compassion. To be fair, we all have a lazy-gene. And it can be a very tempting process to fall to something that is 1) easier, 2) gives you good feelings and 3) gives the illusion of personal power.
Your last thought is a compelling one. I can see how such a belief can “possess”. I wonder where the line is between “a belief” and “a knowledge”?
I owned guns for a while, when I lived a lot closer to the wilderness. They were both functional, and in their own way, fun. But as I moved closer and closer to civilization, the need for them waned; and the weight of responsibility in owning them increased. They became illogical.
And I think the people wanting to own them when any manifest need is just a construct of imagination, take that illogic in owning them and spin it around to an illogical need TO own them.
So an analogy: am I “possessed” by the belief that I don’t need recreational marijuana? Or do I just know that I don’t need it?
Interesting, that. Casting a difference between “belief” and “knowledge”.
Do you feel “exorcised” of your possession by changing it from something you belief . . . to something you know?
@griz I agree with a number of points you have made, but that first paragraph is chock full, as a description of the issue. Read that one three times and every time it lit up a few cranial crevices.
Your closing question is also intersting. How do we know that we know, or are we just running through an alternative belief orientation that we may want to hold based on a “feeling” that is a more noble orientation.
This song just popped into my head for a visit: Windmills of Your Mind
Round
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that’s turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the…
@spitfire3dc
Oboy! I just sat through a deep psych lecture where Dr. Peterson dove into the notion that we only think we know what we know . . . and are even more clueless when it comes to who we are and what we think and why!
We are the most complex things in existence as we currently know it. Even our best scientists still don’t understand the full complexities of the sun . . . and we are magnitudes more complex than a star.
But he points out the perplexity of the task as a background for highlighting just how incredible the human spirit is for wanting to delve into these things anyways and try to make some kind of sense out of things: ourselves primarily, and the world around us secondarily. (But do you notice how even this has become twisted around in past few hundred years? We’ve turned making sense of the world around us (or more accurately, assessing scientific data about it) as our primary concern. Even children in school learn far more about handling the raw data about the physical world around us than about understanding themselves.)
The task of better understanding ourselves is an arduous one. Even more arduous than trying to understand everything there is to understand about everything else!
So perhaps the “nobility” is in our willingness to ponder even the basics of who we are and why we might do what we do. Feelings are a part of this. Just not the “lead”!
I have scientific proof and that’s enough.
@Jear77
Doubtful.
Science can only tell you what something is physically made of and how it physically works.
It cannot tell you how you should behave in its presence. It cannot measure ethics or intrinsic value.
Science can for example, tell you about the mechanisms of pain. But it cannot tell you how to deal with the phenomenon of it in the absence of pain-killers.
And how does science even begin to gauge a phenomenon like suffering? It can measure the biological changes that come with intimate relationship. But it cannot tell you that you diminish it in horrendous ways if you don’t reserve the best of it for just one person. Actually, pure science in such cases actually advocate unethical behavior.
And this is what would create in any of us, a very great existential dysphoria: wanting science (such as it currently is) to be all that we need . . . but knowing that it is not. You know for a FACT that science cannot render the phenomena of suffering — and this is why you are possessed of a drive to blame manifest reality (or God) for it.
Mr. Cain!
@griz “science can’t tell you what to do in the absence of pain medication.” Wrong. Studies show meditation is a viable option.
@Jear77
But science cannot bring you success at it.
It just tells you “what it is”. Not how to successfully use it.
Jear, you’re becoming little more than an ideologue for Scientism. There’s not a single original creative thing in your responses that I couldn’t find (and predict) by reading one of their manifestos.
Which is a tragically high cost for someone who fancies themselves creative.
@griz meh.
@Jear77
I don’t think meth will help.
@griz meh, a statement of noncommittal
@Jear77
Final statement:
No scientific evidence of humor?
@griz my humor is DRY
@Jear77
Climate change?
(Sorry for “violating” the rules of “final statement”. My non-dessicated humor got the best of me!)