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By Eric Francis
Imagine you're sitting in a restaurant with a group of your friends, and a discussion about a potentially sensitive subject comes up. A few of your friends express their views, and you decide to take a turn, something you don't usually do. You speak your mind and the room goes chilly. There are stares in your direction. Your stomach turns; you've crossed the line of social appropriateness.
It's like a nightmare: you've revealed yourself and been rejected for it. In a single moment you realize that in order to maintain your social relationships from this point onward, you would have to ignore the difference in values and suppress your views and, in reality, yourself. If you were to be open about them, you would basically be unacceptable. Suddenly you feel very alone in the world. Could it be that these people were not your friends at all? What is a friend? And could it be that you really need to invest more energy into actually expressing who you are, rather than in conforming to what other people think for their convenience?
If you look closely at our world, it's easy to see a thousand ways in which we put up with such compromises every day. Generally, in our era of history, we deal with just about everything by suppressing it. Either that, or distracting ourselves with all our fabulous means of entertainment. Most entertainment is passive and antisocial; in the U.S. most bars play the music so loud you cannot hear your own voice, much less someone else's; people walking down the street wearing an MP3 player are not going to be available to meet new people, say hello or even make eye contact. The examples go on.
Suppression is really depression and a lot of people are depressed. Many are resorting to coping through antidepressants; it seems like the best most people can hope to do in life is cope and it seems that we are in a "whatever it takes" phase of history. These drugs are showing up in the water supply, and they are also making an impact on our social relations, though it's extremely difficult to point to what it is -- it exists as a kind of psychic climate change.
There are so many factors influencing us to bury our real personalities and the real issues we have on our heart and mind that they are too numerous to count. At the same time there has been another trend, which is toward the spiritual or opening-up practices that are available to exist as private experiences; things we do alone rather than together, or where social relationships are discouraged in the name of integrity.
