True Freedom

Question from the Internet:

“Modern society is less free than any era before. Do you agree?”

You are right.

We live in a unique paradox. On the one hand, we think and feel as if we were totally free.

We exist in the most individualistic human society — especially in the West — where everybody is a small world to themselves. We are separating from each other so much that these days even the classical family is falling apart. Old people die alone; youth want to move away from their parents at the first available opportunity.

At the same time, we also started to understand and feel that we all exist in a totally interconnected and interdependent world. The pandemic, climate change, economic problems, and the rising chance for a Third World War and its consequences show us that nobody can escape global events and global problems.

Moreover, since now the media and information flow is truly global, news and “bandwagons” spread all across the world within minutes. The entertainment industry, together with the media — it is more correct to call them the most sophisticated propaganda machinery of human history — closes all of us into a single, totally brainwashed and manipulated Matrix.

In short, at a time when in our minds, we all consider ourselves the most “liberated,” “free,” and individualistic in human history, we are the most imprisoned and bounded into a single system nobody can escape from.

Contrary to “popular opinion,” it is not some “elite” or the “Illuminati” that created this Matrix. We all exist in the Matrix of the inherently self-serving, self-justifying, subjective, and individualistic human ego. It does not matter what position we find ourselves in the “human pyramid”; we are all tied to this pyramid through our egos. Our position is determined by the given opportunities, chances, and conditions and according to the hunger and ruthlessness one possesses.

And as long as we all blindly follow our inherent egos, we will always remain prisoners of this selfish, exploitative, and ruthlessly competitive Matrix, where each and every human being tries to survive and succeed at the expense of others.

The irony of the matter is that when we watch films or TV series like “Game of Thrones,” for example, we think we are watching something abstract, something distanced from ourselves, not understanding that we are basically watching an anatomy of human nature, we are watching our own lives, just in more graphic and sensationalized wrapping.

The only freedom we are capable of achieving in life is liberating ourselves from the clutches of our own egos. When we learn how to start existing and behaving “outside of ourselves,” beyond the instinctive and 100% self-interest, only for the sake of others and the whole system, we will become truly free.

One could say that this is also slavery, working for the sake of others instead of existing for the sake of ourselves. In action, it might be. But through existing and acting only for the sake of others, we liberate ourselves from the influence and limitations of the ego. And this also means liberating ourselves from the inherently egocentric and subjective limitations of time and space. Since we ‘disappear and dissolve” into the desires and viewpoints of others and completely forget about ourselves, we also stop associating our existence with the limited and temporary physical body.

We can actually and practically “transfer” our consciousness and sense of existence from the physical body and the ego associated with it to a “mutual cloud” we build by mutually and unconditionally serving one another. And we can do this transfer even before the physical body expires, attaining a qualitatively much higher, timeless, and unbounded sense of existence.

We can truly and realistically acquire a systemic and collective consciousness like healthy cells of the same living organism, where we no longer feel like individual cells but feel like part of the larger and complete organism. This is the state of “truly Human” existence we can all achieve right here and right now through the right, purposeful and practical method.