In our mood changes we sense the tenacious influence of received wisdom; when in its grip we seem powerless to know what we do feel let alone dare to act on it. 

The idea of having our heads full of such ideas occured to me when I met Gary Witheford's ability to deal direct with a sick horse. Deacon's marvellously and beautifully obscure ideas filled the gap in my understanding and made perverse  sense of my largely wasted life in that I have been driven by the compelling energy of an apparently endless supply of sacred myths and superstitions. 

These myths are nothing more than received wisdom and like Deacon's phrase can be read in fairy tale language of protection (by whom and against what or who?) ease and security. Ideas of property, possession and advantage are infectious and perish, if they do at all, only after a life and death struggle. So we feel safe until (hopefully and paradoxically) we are awakened and aroused to reflect on it all and see its macabre and devastating effects. The reality is that ultimately we are wasted and not sustained by it. 

Beware any hint of ought since it is received wisdom disguised as a belief within an authority which implicitly claims to have a hot line to god, or better. 

Beware too of simplistic axioms e.g. they must know right from wrong. 

Beware every hint that nothing can be done about it. 

King Canute's court had an idea but we have another. Once we've seen the argument we can realise that what we feel provides the resourcefulness, the nomadic and migratory energy we need to realise the potential of our fundamental biological needs and have a mind of our own in spite of the pull of received wisdom. 

Each of us has, of course, a head full of ideas clamouring to be acted upon by default; and always more, a constant supply of yet more received wisdom passing as information. Is this not similar to what Wittgenstein describes of 'a kind of general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental state from which all its acts spring as from (its own) reservoir'. 

And always the bottom line is that we can do nothing about it; and the threat of alienation. Try the Latin idea that someone who acts towards me as a friend would not is my enemy; you can just get away with a not-friend, but enemy is too close to the bone "how dare you see the world differently (to me)"and "what would happen if everyone thought like you" 

So we can't spring clean our memories but we can find new friends, those worthy of our love, critics who show us the hazards and the opportunities we otherwise might not see. 

P.S. I've come to see that received wisdom is analogous to the favourite in a two horse race; the more money piles in on him the shorter the odds become until he seems a dead certainty. All this stuff about feelings and fundamental needs seems like a rank outsider because we (with our heads still full of mebos) don’t understand the potential of our needs; hence we remain under resourced, fearful and inadequate.