The greatest anesthetics are around us and everywhere and these are human beings; a person sits in his room alone, and to the room enters a person or group of people, and what happens to him is that he immediately gets closed, tensed, frozen; they, just by their presence, cause him a paralyzing self-awareness. (it is like a junior worker gets frozen when the big boss enters).
In society there is a situation in which everyone is ‘secret police’ about everyone. The feeling is that we are being watched, which causes us to adopt a restricted attitude, the main thing is not to attract the attention of the ‘secret police’. We all move within a narrow area in which we feel that the others allow us.
We are frozen with people we don’t know as with people we know, but with people we know there is a way not to feel frozen, and it is the chatter and casual talk, it is about anything and everything, just not to be under surveillance. The chatter acts as a distraction from the freezing effect of others on us.
This feeling of being watched is because of the great influence upon us of social conformity and strict social norms.
Our greatest fear is not to be presented as an idiot or crazy in front of other people.
The human society puts many inhibitions upon the individual, we live in a prison which is conditioned by what other people may think of us if we deviate from what behavior is expected of us. Not to be different from everyone else.
Even in a mental hospital, the inmates are still behaving as much as they can, in the normal acceptable way.
One of the reasons that people want to have a high position and thus allowed to be dominant – is that in this way they are allowed to have a larger ‘bird cage’…
We are repressed and depressed by public opinion, and the strange thing about it is that we feel that we are free, we are not aware of the power that the presence of other people has over us.
Children are still comparatively – with a larger ‘bird cage’, and their parents get embraced when they see them acting in a way that could be perceived by others as not fit for their age. Much of the indoctrination that they give to their children is to behave in an accepted way.
What is the way to deal with it?
The two main ways of behavior; to be like everyone else, and the other is to break the ‘bird cage’. Both have their disadvantages. But there is a third way, the way of the ‘secret agent’; to act on the outside as it is accepted and on the inside not to forget that we are free. This is to live in duality, this is the only way in this very conformist society
Gabriel