We are easily influenced, deeply inclined to suggestibility. Our thoughts and emotions, if you look at them carefully, do not belong to us. They are programmed into us through beliefs, fashions, education and instruction. We give them an air of individuality, but in truth we are thought of, guided, forced to feel and believe in certain ways. The strings that govern our actions are not in our hands, rather, the threads that move our lives are… elsewhere. We say: “I desire this”, “I think this way”, “I want to do this”, but this way of understanding ourselves is a mistake. There is no such I, rather there are hundreds, thousands of little “I”s in each of us… Right now, it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, infinitely. Man is a plurality in movement that believes itself stable and fixed, and his name is legion.
Most people never admit to themselves that this is how their inner world works, and rightly so. They call their daydreaming “thinking,” and their negative emotions sincerity, altruism, generosity. They sincerely pretend to have an intention behind their actions, they imagine they have good intentions and are masters of their own life. But in time, anyone who experiences the true reality of things firsthand, being struck by it, realizes that the Truth of Life is just beyond everything they have thought and believed themselves to be up to that point.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus addresses this issue with a man possessed by demons, asking him his name. The man, spontaneously and truthfully, answers: “My name is legion, for we are many.”
