The lives of others, and the fear of speaking your mind

I watched The Lives of Others a few days ago, and it touched me deeply. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. I'm not generally a fan of German movies or German just about anything, apart from cars (sorry, Germans!), but this is absolutely fantastic.

At the personal level, it touched on a deep fear that speaking our mind can be dangerous, with the consequence being expulsion and/or death.

It's clearly something we have going on collectively - Galilei, Martin Luther King, and many more.

But it's also a theme in my life. I'm terrified of getting rejected for my views. Explused, hanged, tortured. A deep irrational fear. It might even be something I've brought with me from past lives to work through in this one. I've had a few strange visions of getting expelled or killed for speaking my truth. You never know if these things are just made up by a creative imagination or whatever. But it could definitely be something I've brought with me into this life to work out.

Speaking the truth can be dangerous, to this day. It's a recurring theme in conspiracy theories that people have mysteriously died because they said something inconvenient. The latest example I saw was about some "free energy" inventor. Clearly there are lots of powerful people who have a lot riding on the status quo, and the truth can be very very upsetting to the status quo.

So this feeling of needing to censor ourselves is something all humans have - we've all had the experience of checking if we hung up the phone properly before continuing our conversation, or looking around to see if anyone's listening. In this movie, it's just on steroids.