Recognizing, understanding the self

Zsolt Hermann
2 min readSep 22, 2021

Question from the Internet:

“Does the society or community we live in have any significance in understanding the self? Why?”

We have no chance of understanding, even properly researching ourselves with other people around us.

We cannot understand ourselves while delving into, searching within ourselves. It does not work, especially not considering our inherently egocentric, subjective, self-justifying consciousness and perception of reality.

In order to recognize, get to know ourselves we need an honest — mostly brutally honest — mirror we can look into.

We need to see ourselves through the eyes of others, according to how we relate to others and what responses, what emotional impressions we initiate, awaken in others reflected back to us. I have to completely change how I think about, relate to others, as they can become the actual medium, instrument through which I can research, judge, and improve myself as if they had no free choice” by themselves but how they behave, react solely depended on me, on my attitude, relationship to them.

Of course, for this to work most effectively, we need a unique, closed, mutually responsible, mutually supportive environment where each and every member tries such self-recognition, self-improvement through the others.

Then this process can yield very quick and strong, tangible results, and the members of this environment can also fine-tune, prepare themselves to relate to the larger, general society with the same intention, introducing a positive influence into the fully integrated, interdependent human network wherever they were.

This process — apart from getting to know ourselves better — yields much deeper results with great significance. As we keep concentrating on how we influence others, watching their emotional changes, reactions, we get used to existing in others instead of being stuck in ourselves. And that gradually also liberates us from the usual, inherently egocentric, and subjective limitations of time, space, and physical motion, providing us with a completely new, limitless, timeless sense of existence.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.