protect yourself against gravity

The protagonist in the scifi novel “approaching perimelasma” by G.A. Landis has his mind transferred into a small robotic ant to protect himself against the gravitational field of a black hole that he intends to investigate. Why is this a good strategy? similarly, why is it that around the solar system we feel Newtonian weak gravity while on large scales we see the strong, geometric gravity of the FLRW-metric?