The Price of Not Blending In
When in Rome, act like the Romans, they said. The advice is sound. It has merit. Because it primarily teaches you to blend. Camouflage yourself. Conceal your intentions. Hide your incentives. Prioritise survival above everything else. It turns you into a chameleon. So you can advance faster than the rest. So people do not treat you like a stranger.
The antithesis of this is a strange detachment. You feel no urge to blend in. You feel out of place. As if you could see through the matrix. As if you are observing from the outside. When that happens, it shifts your perspective. It reveals the futility of everything. The absurdity of blending in. The camouflage suffocates you.
There are two ways to deal with it. One is to discard the camouflage. Be who you are. Speak what you feel. You risk exposure. Someone who speaks a different tongue. Someone who is an outsider. You risk being treated like one. You will be at peace with your identity. But you will be ostracised for it. And that is the price of not blending in.
The other way is to blend in. Pretend that you are just like them. No different. You share the same frustrations. You care about the same things. You are part of their tribe. You will follow the code. You enter a reality and accept it as your own. You embrace those people as yours. Instead of calling out the matrix, you become part of it. And thereby benefit from it.
Most people, if given a choice, would pick the first version. They would want to shed the camouflage. But they are too weak for that. The fear of isolation is too threatening. They will gladly choose the second way out. No coercion required. Just the fear of being ostracised is enough for people to throw in the towel.
That is how most people live their entire lives. That is why truth is so elusive. Not because it is hard to see. But because it is so hard to accept. The pursuit of truth means parting ways with the reality you had long embraced. Leaving everything you once believed is hard. Leaving the matrix is hard, especially when the matrix is all you have ever known.
This is why you sometimes feel trapped among people. You always feel you do not belong. Because you are standing outside, looking in. You have not blended with that reality. This is also why meditation transforms people. It trains them to see from the outside. It cultivates detachment. But detachment comes with a price. The price of isolation.
For some, isolation is a reward. A threshold to a new journey. For others, it is a curse. The pursuit of truth and the journey toward God demand the same thing: absolute surrender. It is only when you surrender that you become capable of accepting the truth without being unsettled by it.