When Lies Become Flesh
How Ideas Possess, Incarnate, and Hijack the Life You Were Meant to Live
Most people are afraid of demons, if they believe in them. They should be afraid of ideas. We all believe in ideas, right?
An idea lands inside your head. Who knows how it got there. Maybe someone said it to you, maybe you saw it in a TikTok. Maybe it “just popped” in there one day. Maybe it sounds true. Maybe it sounds just true enough. Maybe it frightens you, or makes you excited! You’re not really sure and you’re not even really aware of any evaluation happening. You entertain it. You let it pass through unfiltered. But now,
maybe you see things a bit differently.
Maybe your neighbors don’t seem quite as trustworthy as you thought. Maybe that dress really does hug you a little tight for your current weight. Maybe they’re right that you aren’t ever going to be a real man. Rich people really are more selfish, everyone knows that, right? Those other people really had it coming anyway.
The idea starts to mediate your interactions. It starts to dictate to you what you should really think about her remark. About what that look meant. About how you must be making other people feel - really. Did they mean something positive or are they laughing behind your back?
The idea starts to talk back to you.
It whispers commentary on everything that happens. See? I told you so. When your friend cancels plans, when your boss gives you that look, when you scroll through social media and feel that familiar sting… The idea is right there with an explanation. This is exactly what I was trying to tell you. The idea begins to bury itself.
Like a tick burrowing deeper into skin, it retreats beneath layers of newer thoughts, secondary complaints, new layers of problems. You stop seeing the original idea, using it as a foundation to build on, and just see the layers built on top of it.
You're scrolling through job listings again, feeling that familiar knot in your stomach, but you tell yourself it's just about finding the "right fit." You catch yourself checking your phone obsessively after sending a text, and you tell yourself it's just because you're curious about their response. Why do I feel better when I see that there are 25 matches on tinder instead of 7 even though if I matched with this person I would feel hollow or bored or dread?
The original idea, the one that started all this, becomes invisible. It's not gone. It's just
wearing a thousand different masks now.
You start to experience it as personality traits, it’s not a tick anymore it seems more like a freckle. You feel that its just your "communication style" and your superior "career goals" and your unaddressable "social anxiety." It masquerades as personality traits, as practical concerns, as totally reasonable responses to totally reasonable situations.
Some of it may even distress you! You’ve been told you’re a "people-pleasing" so now it’s time to take a sack of money (and even more valuable time) to tarot cards or therapists or well meaning prayer groups. You never do quite scratch at the foundations you laid all those years ago and forgotten about. The surface mind stays busy with endless variations on the same theme, constantly blocking and tackling, but never noticing the underlying theme. Never questioning why the theme keeps repeating. Why would it question that? By now, the idea doesn't feel like an idea anymore. It feels like you.
The idea that landed years ago, maybe even decades ago: I am fundamentally unsafe in this world. Or I am fundamentally unlovable. Or I must earn my worth through performance. Surely, this must be me? If it isn’t me then what is it? and what am I? What is below the idea… is there anything?
The original idea becomes invisible. But maybe that's because we've been looking at this through the wrong lens entirely. What if the reason ideas feel so alive, so autonomous, so purposeful is because they are?
Ideas are spirits.
Spirits that want to be made flesh. They want a body. They want a voice. A nervous system. Hands. They want to incarnate into this world. You can do it for them.
And once they have you - once they're embodied, walking around in your skin, speaking through your mouth, making decisions with your hands - they don't sit there contentedly. They have somewhere to go. Something to accomplish. A destiny to fulfill.
The end is written in the beginning.
Every idea that takes root in you carries its own predetermined fulfillment. And here's the terrifying part: the destination was known from the start. The idea knew where it would take you. You were just unaware.
The momentum builds slowly at first. Almost imperceptibly. You make small decisions that feel reasonable, even necessary. Or they don’t even feel like decisions at all. Or they happened so long ago you can’t even remember them. You avoid certain situations. You gravitate toward others. You start consuming different content, hanging around different people, entertaining thoughts you wouldn't have entertained before. Each choice feels like your choice, even if they make you uneasy, but really you're being guided down a path that was mapped out the moment the idea first took root.
Then the momentum accelerates.
The slope gets steeper. The choices start feeling less like choices and more like compulsions. You find yourself in places you never intended to be, doing things you swore you'd never do, becoming someone you don't recognize and neither do they people you know. But you can't stop. Or rather, you can't seem to want to stop, even though some deeper part of you is screaming.
This is the rabbit hole, the trap. This is what it feels like when an idea's predetermined fulfillment is dragging you toward its inevitable conclusion. You're on a rollercoaster, screaming, but nobody can hear you. Not even yourself sometimes. Because the idea has convinced you that this is who you really are. This is what you really want.
This is how people “spiral.” This is how the enemy builds strongholds. With ideas. Lies that wear your voice. Lies that hijack your masculinity, your femininity, your creativity, your sexuality, your capacity for love and communion and power. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re fertile. Because your mind and body is good soil and something will grow in it.
Each step will feel like a choice.
Each step will feel like giving in to your "true nature." But really, you're the vehicle for a seed becoming the tree that was always written in its DNA. The destination was known from the start. The only question was how long it would take to get you there.
An idea, especially a lie, does not remain a lie. A lie becomes a life. The lie doesn't just want you to doubt yourself - it wants you in the gutter, incarnating everything disgusting and contemptible things it whispered about you in the beginning. It will take you through addiction, through degradation, through identity confusion, through whatever twisted path necessary to make you become the pathetic thing it always said you were.
you might be feeling sick
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself. Maybe you’re even feeling hopeless. How many lies am I carrying? How deep do they go? How much of what I think is 'me' is actually just spiritual parasites wearing my face? But here's the thing that changes everything: Lies have predetermined fulfillments, but so does Truth.
If destructive ideas can hijack your life and drag you toward degradation with seemingly unstoppable momentum, then True ideas can do the exact opposite. They can lift you up with far more force. They can guide you toward flourishing, toward becoming who you were actually meant to be, with truly inevitable power instead of that power which was dragging you toward destruction.
But first,
you have to find the root.
Most people spend their entire lives hacking at branches. They fight the anxiety without touching the lie that they're fundamentally unsafe. They battle the addiction while leaving untouched the deeper belief that they're fundamentally unworthy of love. They try to fix their relationships while the foundational idea that intimacy equals danger continues to run the show from the basement.
Here's how you dig deeper: follow the emotional trail backward. When you feel that familiar surge of anger, shame, fear, or despair - don't just try to manage the feeling. Ask it: What are you protecting? What am I giving up to keep you?
Keep asking until you hit something that feels foundational. Something that makes you want to stop digging. Something that whispers, Don't go there. That's just how you are. That's just reality.
That's where the real work begins.
Lies don't announce themselves as lies. They masquerade as wisdom, as realism, as hard-earned truth about "the way the world really works." They present themselves as your protectors, your guides, your most trusted advisors.
Here is what makes them truly distinct from the truth
lies are parasites.
They can only survive by sucking the life out of truth. They take something real - the fact that betrayal hurts, that rejection stings, that the world can be dangerous - and they twist it into something absolute and hopeless. They feed off genuine wisdom while poisoning it.
Truth gives life. Lies drain it. Truth opens possibilities. Lies close them down. Once you've found the root lie, you have to starve it. And the only way to starve a lie is to stop feeding it with your attention, your emotions, your choices, your agreement. This is harder than it sounds because the lie will fight for its pseudo-life. It will throw every argument, every "proof," every emotional manipulation it has at you to keep you hooked.
But what if I really am unlovable? Look at all the evidence. Look at your track record. Look at how they treated you. You can't just ignore reality.
This is the lie's death rattle.
It knows that if you stop believing it, it dies. The only way that it can exist is if you allow it to suck the life out of a Truth. So it will get louder, more desperate as you pull away. It will manufacture crises to get your attention back. It will whisper that questioning it is dangerous, naive, setting yourself up for more pain.
Don't listen.
Instead, plant something true in its place. Not a positive affirmation or a wishful thought, but something that resonates in your bones as real. I am made in the image of God. I am loved beyond my ability to comprehend. I have a purpose that no one can take from me.
And then - this is crucial - you have to tend that new seed with the same intentionality that the lie was tending itself. You feed it with your attention. You water it with your choices. You protect it from the elements until it's strong enough to grow on its own.
Remember: lies have predetermined fulfillments, so does Truth. And Truth wants to incarnate in you even more than those lies did. It wants to walk around, speak through your voice, love through your hands. It wants to take you somewhere beautiful.
