ANALYZING AN OPEN SYSTEM
The call of my soul is the call of analysis, and I derive my pleasure from the systematic disassembling, testing, and reassembling, of various systems. After the analysis of that system is completed to my own satisfaction, it is followed by boredom and discarding, and followed by a new system with a new set of rules.
I am extremely imperfect in my analysis, finding myself utterly weak and unable to produce full and clear pictures of many things I analyze; unable to recombine the systems to their original state; and unable to use my insights for any practical purpose, without a concert of other skills working equally well in tandem to produce a desired effect.
Despite this weakness, my eternal enjoyment of the game and journey of analysis has lead me on such a rich journey through the life of mind that I struggle to bump into others who take the same broad views I do. This constant and eternal frustration has lead to many bizarre symptoms, including the creation of internal characters to talk to, internal symbols, and internal worlds, which I struggle to explain.
Putting this aside, I turn to the problems of open and closed systems. Closed systems are usually the objects of study for scientific analysis, as the goal is to isolate the relationship between two individual variables to determine with granularity their cause and effect. Of course, in the real world, nothing is isolated from anything else; everything is spilling onto everything else, making things messy. The world is in a state of openness: the boundaries of everything are blurred.
Analyzing a system at one state and at one point in time is like analyzing the footprints left behind on the beach: they are immediately washed away and replaced with new ones. Analyzing a tree requires not just an understanding of the tree but an understanding of the soil, and an understanding of the forest it grows in, and an understanding of the sun and the rain which bombard it, and ultimately
... It begs an understanding of the earth which evolved it, and begs an understanding of why trees exist at all and the physics and gravity which produce its peculiar form, and its difference from other trees, and other organisms generally.
Understanding one thing takes the understander on a journey to understand everything else in order to understand that first thing: in this way, the particular and the universal are always linked.
You can apply this same problem to oneself: to understand oneself, one must understand one's parents, one's society, one's universe, one's history, one's psychology and biology and physics: for all these universal things are present in you, just as you are present in the world.
Small things and big things are reflections of one another, with each smaller thing containing echoes of and subsets of the larger thing. To look inward without looking outward is as futile as its opposite: both journeys must happen at once, and are mutually developed.
Systems are open with respect to their evolution in time as well as their interconnectedness, creating greater complexity: to analyze oneself at one point is to know oneself as one was; and the very act of knowing oneself as one was, changes oneself.
Therefore, this game of self knowledge, as well as knowledge of the external, is never-ending: the knowledge itself, changes what there is to be known. Knowledge makes itself out-of-date.