Possesion
Therefore,
if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it
takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to
meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not
in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from
outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be
made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the
incoming content.
Possession can be formulated as identity of the ego-personality with a complex.
A
common instance of this is identity with the
persona, which is
the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing
with, the world. Every calling or profession, for example,
has its own characteristic
persona.
It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public
personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain
kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people
endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger
is that they become identical with their
personas – the
professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then
the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of
his own biography.
When consciousness is incapable either of grasping or knowingly integrating a
spontaneously emerging impulse (the
lance) or content (the enemy who throws it), the individual will instead be
unconsciously possessed by it. TGL 210