Are beliefs housed in cellular memory, and is that why they can be over-arching and persistent?

Indeed, beliefs are housed in cellular memory. This is why they are provisional, particularly in the young, because this is the consequence of literally changing one's mind. This is why children are so flexible on the one hand, and so maddeningly unpredictable in how reliable they will be, once they have been told something they are expected to remember and believe and act on that information accordingly, in a responsible fashion that is predictable and consistent. What parents will see, is their child will seemingly have forgotten all about previous instruction, and what is truly happening is not that the memory is faulty, but that the information and the attempt to influence the child was to create an inner belief they would act on through memory, resulting in the desired conduct or behavior. And the child was simply reconsidering that belief that was promoted by the parent and decided it wasn't needed and something else put in its place. Children are much more flexible in doing this, and lose this ability as they grow. Part of the reason is that beliefs strengthen over time. And so, with a wider and wider involvement with the world and a greater and greater load of sensory input, knowledge, and information coming in, especially with the learning of language, and then the expectations of school attendance and in interacting with a wider circle of others to keep track of and learn from, and incorporate suggestions and ideas of all kinds into their working model of the world and their place within it, many of the beliefs stick and are not revisited for some time. And the mind may not even recognize any longer, the beliefs that are present, except in certain circumstances when push comes to shove and what emerges is an old belief that now stands squarely in the way of progress by limiting the person's options in some fashion. This causes all sorts of difficulties and irregularities and sources of stress for people trying to make sense of their lives and live a life that is free and easy and spontaneous. It gets harder and harder with so many hidebound rules from old beliefs that are remnants from prior life experiences of all kinds. These can be loosely organized under certain categories with the maturation of the individual, just in the way people can devise routines and inner strategies of thought to cope with vast quantities of information, inevitably, from all of their learning. They have long-term as well as short-term memories to house factual information needing to be recalled at a later time, and all of the events of the life they wish to retain in memory as a kind of framework for organizing things and keeping them in touch with who they are becoming, through accessing prior episodes from the life, and so on. That degree of sophistication and organization coming with maturation, is an imposed hierarchy of importance within the beliefs and a rearrangement within cellular memory to create these hierarchies so the person has a kind of order of priority of those most important being on top, reachable quickly, and with great certainty, because they have proven their usefulness and the need for them reinforced, and hence have earned their place in the top rungs of the hierarchy of the belief system. This is why it takes some doing once such beliefs have been created and, in effect, carved in stone by invitation into that hierarchy, it will be quite difficult to go against them, and override them, certainly, with something quite different or the opposite. Many of these are created by default because of trauma, and the mind draws false conclusions about what was experienced, and in that way, creates a false view of the world and the person's own image they take away from the experience, if they have been victimized, for example. Or if they have given in to temptation and taken advantage of another, and were rewarded in some way, they may come to have faulty beliefs of their own worth, and importance, and entitlement to act in a non-divine way, because it is rewarding to the self and they get away with it. So there are many nuances and many gray areas that become quite complicated to act on and sort through, and there can be beliefs competing with one another with opposing perspectives. This is another reason for gridlock with respect to the mind and its workings and can leave people in a state of confusion and inner frustration without realizing what might be happening. They might hesitate because there is a conflict going on, and the mental apparatus is simply juggling alternatives and unable to decide which way to head in the moment. So you can see this is a rich area for discussion and a need to understand deeply, in order to make sense of human behavior, human learning, and human frailty involving the emotional life, in particular with respect to thought, feeling, and decisions about behavior.