Closed Systems and Their Centers

Closed systems circle around a center. This center contains something which is not allowed to be put in question, criticized or changed. The center is absolutized and removed from the sphere of relativity. It gets surrounded with a sphere of faith. On the threshold to the center, knowledge ends, and the access is limited to those who believe unconditionally.

Revealed religions contain their revelations in the center. This is where God spoke to the humans, and what he said there has absolute truth and cannot be relativized in any way. In (other?) cults it is often the word of the founder which has to be accepted without criticism, even when he orders out of divine inspiration that all members of the group have to kill themselves.

Closed systems have an absolute center and everything around it is relative, related to this center. The center decides what is right and what is wrong, and these decisions have absolute power and validity. The center is perfect and everything else is incomplete and deficient. Often, there is a hierarchy among the relative, which states that the closer someone is to the center, the closer they approach completion. Those who stick to that rule, can make their carrier (e.g. in the closed system of a dictatorship), those who neglect it have to face bad consequences (e.g. a prolonged visit to hell in the case of Christianity or Islam).

The center generates rules which keep the closed system closed, although time moves on and the system is constantly affected by new influences. In the Catholic Church, there was the sentence in place: "Roma locuta, causa finita." - When Rome has spoken, the case is closed. Within a closed system, differing opinions are allowed as long as the center has declared the truth, and after that everyone has to be silent and to obey. The closeness has been restored.

For the Catholic Church, Rome, which is the Pope in person (as representative of Jesus Christ on earth) figures as center. In the 19th century, he was entrusted with the gift of infallibility about doctrines. From such a center, all the rules flow which the believers need for leading their lives in the right way. Every new influence has to be checked and be either approved or repudiated. So there was an index of prohibited books, dogmas which were defined by labelling every disbeliever as heretic, inquisitive and painful procedures against members who have opinions of their own, condemnations of thoughts or ideas, which came up outside of the church and against which the believers have to be warned - defensive measures with the aim of protecting  closeness.

Of course such a gigantic task cannot be fulfilled in a world of growing complexity. So it seems that the new Pope has chosen a new direction to primarily take care of the people in need instead of keeping up doctrines, a direction promising more openness.
Martin Luther had stood up against this centralism, which had also caused the split with eastern European Christians in the 11th century. It was one of the concerns of Protestant reformation to blast the Roman center of papacy and to replace it by the sole center of the written revelations. Luther hoped for more opening by establishing an abstract form of a center, but this was no basic escape from closeness. As a consequence, this sector of Christianity had to face an enormous fragmentation. Every new Protestant movement tried to escape the forming of a center by creating a new center of an "even truer" Christianity. Obviously, this caused a dynamics to absolutize the center even more as smaller as the system got. The most segregated Christian fundamentalisms can be found in these evangelical secessionist churches of the US Middle West. An example of the rigid belief systems of these closed circles can be found in the discussions around creationism, an ideological system formed to prove the creation of the world by God as a scientific fact. 

Also in the area of politics, sacrosanct centers are part of the game. Many political movements gather around a central idea which is declared as untouchable. For its realization, all means are justified, as the end justifies the means. Robespierre is a striking example of this delusion when he proclaimed a cult of reason at the peak of the French revolution. All those who were considered of endangering this highest value were handed over to the machinery of execution without mercy.

A plain look at today's crisis and wars does not only show the massive and deplorable destruction of lives, demolitions and dehumanizations happening there. It also gives insights into the center of the relevant ideologies which drive the conflict and war parties. Sometimes, the historical threads in these ideological centers are so densely interwoven that they seem quite complex. Yet, we basically find fears of survival, out of which the respective ideologies promise a sole exit. They also name the main adversary and enemy, who has to be defeated.

Also within the smaller context of the growing plurality of searching for sense, forming of centers play an important role. Although many of these approaches explicitly proclaim opening, they all to easily overlook their own basic presumptions, which stay out of the experiential area in which the insights can be found and which have to be believed. These phenomena can be found in various schools of self-help, psychotherapy, esoteric and spirituality.

In the field of psychotherapy, it is often the personality of the founder who is established as unquestionable center. Their concerns and insights are kept in this center like a sanctuary, against which every new insight or method has to be measured. There are also guiding concepts, which a therapist has adopted once because they were helping him and which he then applies with every client without taking care whether they are applicable or not. So a constant self-enquiry and self-reflection is important to keep ideologies out of therapy. The guideline to invent a new therapy together with every client helps to get out of tendencies towards closed concepts, as it encourages to constant openness for the experience of the moment.

The exoteric scene is virtually defined by gaining supporters via hidden ideas of centers. Trust your experiences but believe everything which is offered as explanation for them. When you had a good experience, the respective system will explain to you thanks to which angel, alien or ascended master you had received it. In case you had some doubts at these occult centers of the teaching, you get a diagnosis of lack of maturity and consciousness. The only remedy to these ailments can be found in the center.

Spiritual teachers should mark a distinction to esoteric marketing by advising their students to rigorous self-enquiry. “Look for all that is true for you in our innermost core and free yourself from all models and concepts.” Such encouragements are open as they do not pretend to know about the outcome of the search but leave it up to the student in total freedom.

Still, many spiritual teachers have their sanctum, a core of their teaching, and all too often they demand from their adherents to adopt their concepts without willingness to open up the centers of their beliefs. Wherever dependencies and power issues arise in spiritual communities or movements, an underlying center is the cause of the struggle.

By entering into a systemic form of consciousness, we face the challenge to learn to live without absolutized centers. Hence we become aware of the importance of recognizing and naming such centers when we encounter closed systems, and to outline alternatives of how to live without them.

We are used to the idea of an unchanging and always true core inside of us, which always grants us the right direction. This idea gives us inner and outer safety. Yet we have the power and inner strength to lighten up the illusions, which these seemingly safe core concepts and orientation markers claim to provide us with. For any of these illusions we can say good-bye to, we receive a precious piece of inner freedom in exchange.

Open and closed concepts

We bear a lot of concepts inside ourselves (opinions, beliefs, explanations, argumentations etc.). Some of them are conscious, and we have thought about them, had discussions and have accepted them for ourselves. Others are unknown to us although they influence our thinking and acting. They are abstractions and generalizations from experiences, which we have already forgotten.

When we have open concepts at our disposal, we have access to more inner openness. The opposite is true in both dimensions: The more inner openness, the more liberated concepts we are able to understand and integrate; the less inner openness we have, the more we are looking for narrow concepts to build into our thinking and to argue with others.

Our wish to grow implies the need to change and open our concepts. The more fears we have, the simpler our concepts will be. A narrow and plain concept will best give us the safety we are looking for. A closed system provides us with the alleged assertion to have an antidote for any risk and any problem.

Our mind is basically a service institution. It creates concept – connections of thoughts, lines of arguments, philosophies and ideologies -, which fit best to the inner climate of feelings. Closed concepts serve for founding and supporting a narrow emotional atmosphere, e.g. the concept that the world is governed by evildoers, or the concept that life is strenuous. This asserts our actual feelings (helpless or burdened) and enforces the momentary mood we are suffering from.

It is easier to adopt open concepts when we feel relaxed and free inside. When we feel connected to life, we love concepts like: Everything is fine the way it is, or: There is something good in every bad experience.

In such times it is also easier for us to look at our own concepts in a self-critical way and to let go of thought patters which do not seem helpful any more. With open concepts, we can meet the world and our companions more tolerant and accepting, while from the viewpoint of closed mental forms, the outer world can only be perceived distorted and limited. Open systems allow inner growth, and the outer perception becomes ample and encompassing.

Closed Concepts

Closed Concepts are marked by the alternative to be either inside or outside. A simple closed concept is: When you are not for me, you are against me. There is one and just one truth. Those who share it can take part, those who do not, are heretics, ignorants or idiots. This is how closed systems can be easily spotted: Those who question or criticize them will be attacked and prosecuted. For these persons are seen as a menace for the concept and have to be brought to silence in one way or the other.

Closed systems have preformulated explanations for everything.  Whatever happens had to come according to the concept. As people live in sin they have to be punished by a catastrophe. As they have improved their ethics, they have been spared from a worse breakdown.

Such closed systems own a kind of explanation generator, which is able to produce explanations appropriate to the rules. It takes care for the concept to stay sacrosanct under any possible circumstances.

Take the example of thought is creating reality. What we think becomes real. What is real, is real only because we thought of it. I think of someone, and the person calls me. The rule has been proved. I think of someone, but the person does not call me. So I have not thought of her clear or intensive enough or had an unconscious barrier against being called. The rule has been proved again, with the help of additional rules generated from the basic rule. Whatever surprises me in the world of real experiences, because I had not thought of it, serves as proof for the rule.

Another example: Someone advocates a certain method of healing or a certain remedy. It has been helpful for him and now he wants to help someone else, whether for money or not. This person gives a try but gets no benefits. So one could assume that the method or the remedy do not work for everyone and for everything. In this case, the system stays open: Research can explore the conditions for healing to take place. When the system is kept closed, the message is that the person has made a mistake in the application or has not had a strong enough belief in the healing powers.

Spirituality and Religion

The world-wide civil society has to move beyond the interpretation courts of single religions as they are full of defensive and aggressive closed concepts. The notion of spirituality, which is on the way of slowly transcending religion, is an indication for that necessity. From the viewpoint of spirituality, there are no significant differences between religions on the level of deeper truths, which are the open concepts within each religious system. Rather, it seems that every religious tradition approaches the sanctuary on a different path and describes it in a unique language by highlighting certain aspects mor distinct than the others.

If we are to find a form of spirituality adequate for the whole of mankind, we need the most open concepts we can find. We have to attune them in a way that the differing formulations can be heard as part of a common and generally shared inner sound.

The Inner Way to Open Concepts

We only can adopt truths when we are ready for it internally. Otherwise, they would threaten us on an unconscious level, and we reject them. Only when our soul has been liberated from these fears which adhere to our limiting concepts, we can put a concept into practice which we might have understood intellectually before. We need the inner vastness of liberty from fears to be able to carry a grand truth.

When we grasp an idea before being able to carry it, it can serve us as guiding star, as motivator for bringing it to fruition. Concepts can prepare for a change by providing the mental fundaments. They can hurry ahead and be comprehended before the inner change happens. They can provide the power needed for facing the fears which we have to encounter. We read a book or listen to a presentation, we get inspired and our inner conceptual world changes and enlarges. This motivates us to give new perspectives a try.

On the other hand, we can use ideas to deceive ourselves. For concepts which are more open than those we used as fundaments of our lives so far, endanger the correspondent emotional scheme. For instance, the concept “You do not need faith to be happy” can encounter the fear about how to live without faith, especially with someone who had used a system of faith as supportive backup. The idea questions a rigid conviction which so far had been a crucial element of inner safety.

So it is also important in the transition to opened and enlarged concepts as we need them in a worldwide civil society, to take care of the emotional inhibitions and restraints and to work on them. Only then can we turn an idea into a living reality with more wideness and openness.