What does freedom mean to us?

Zsolt Hermann
3 min readJan 9

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Question from the Internet:

“What does freedom mean to people?”

By default, freedom to human beings means individual freedom, total independence, when the person can do whatever one wants, fulfilling one’s dreams and aspirations as one wishes.

This is the kind of freedom we have been fighting for throughout history, this is the kind of freedom that is romanticized and coveted, especially in Western culture, and this is the kind of freedom we are all told we should have.

There is one problem with this freedom.

Such truly individual freedom and independence simply do not exist in Nature. This total independence and truly individual freedom exist only in our inherently distorted, egocentric, and subjective human consciousness and perception of reality.

Nature’s system is a totally integrated, mutually co-existing, and mutually complementing system where none of the comprising elements have any individual freedom. each part and element plays out its predetermined, unique, and irreplaceable role and function for the sake and well-being of the whole.

Just imagine our own biological body. What individual freedom do our cells or organs have? Disease, for example, cancer, occurs when cells start acting based on their own calculations after losing their mutual connection and interdependence with the rest of the body. And such behavior inevitably leads to the destruction of the whole organism.

Still, in our minds, this is the kind of behavior we are dreaming about; we educate and prepare ourselves to. We think that we can control and hold together billions of cancer cells by some arbitrary and constantly modified laws and agreements when inside, we are all trying to break free and do whatever we want anyway.

Human beings are born from Nature; we still exist in nature and are integral parts of the system. Nature’s laws and the finely balanced and strictly governed mutual integration that sustains life are obligatory for us as well.

So why did Nature create us with such an “unnatural,” inherently egocentric, subjective, and individualistic nature?

It was purposeful, so we could willingly and consciously learn what our true freedom is, and by that, we fulfill our true and very high, evolutionary Human role and purpose in the system.

Our true freedom is the liberation from our inherent nature that stubbornly drives us towards individualism, excessive consumption, and ruthless competition to succeed and survive at each other’s expense, like cancer.

By liberating ourselves from the clutches of the human ego, above and against this ego — which cannot be suppressed or erased — we will be able to build a Nature-like, mutually integrated, and mutually complementing humanity.

It is this conscious and willing adaptation to Nature that will raise us to the very high and unique evolutionary Human purpose in Nature: to become the whole system’s only conscious, integrated, and the same time independent observers and equal partners.

The benefits of such a mutually integrated and collective existence are immeasurable and unimaginable from our present viewpoint. Just like how individual cells in our body comprise and benefit from a collective consciousness we feel as our “self,” we can build and access a unique Human collective consciousness that can encompass Nature’s system in its totality, above any limitations by time and space. And our egocentric and subjective perception also turns into an unlimited and total, or “quantum” perception.

This is something we can learn, come to feel, and even truly want through a unique, purposeful, and highly practical educational method.

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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.