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The body is constantly in a state of change, like every element of the universe. “Constantly observe that all things happen through change,” Marcus Aurelius teaches us in his book Meditations (To Himself [Εις Εαυτόν]), since this becomes the only constant of the universe that ensures the survival of all systems.
We could not imagine a universe that stops moving, the sun not setting and rising, or our respiratory system depriving us of air, without witnessing their death. The continuous motion and alternation of the state of organisms—an unceasing inflow of energy and information—constitutes the precondition for their preservation as their complexity increases.
According to General Systems Theory, every open system exchanges matter and energy with its environment, maintaining a level of organization and function despite changes in its individual components. With increasing complexity, matter acquires new properties and leads to the creation of new structures, new forms of organization—both biological and functional.
At the cellular level, more synapses are formed between neurons, and the body—constantly exchanging information such as temperature, torsion [στρέψη: could also mean strain, twisting force] and position—must process and respond to new data being inscribed. At the behavioral level, we have an increase in possible actions that could create conditions of freedom for the individual.
It is useful here to distinguish physical change, which happens in organisms, from change in a system as a matter of choice, so that we can manage to remain neutral toward the choice of non-change and the forces that maintain it—always in relation to the possibilities of freedom.
Crisis situations, such as an acute appearance of symptoms or of an emotion, the individual or social upheaval of an existing balance within a person or in their beliefs, destabilize the individual’s homeostasis and invite them to a redefinition of self. A crisis may be defined as such either by the person themselves and/or by an external observer.
In those moments, people tend to return to their personal history and use solutions from the past—even if the content of the crisis is different this time. Systems follow processes to reduce the complexity created by crises, while at the same time diminishing the conditions for the creation of freedom that would provide more information and possibilities for new connections, structures, and functions.
“Living systems are self-creating, self-regulating, and self-maintaining,” we read in the Handbook of Systemic Therapy and Counseling (2008: 85). In the same book (2008: 78), we find an excerpt from Willke, which I will quote in full because of its clarity, so we can better discern the assumptions of freedom we will follow:
“Organisms do not seek states of equilibrium and homeostasis, as the mechanistic–individualistic images of nature and humans, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis, claim... On the contrary, organisms resist the second law of thermodynamics and produce order instead of entropy... The fact that systems produce order (negative entropy), ‘improbable’ states and organized complexity through hypercyclical, metabolic, and ultimately meaning-making processes, and that this organized complexity exhibits regularities which cannot be described by the laws of physics, gives the theory of living systems its particular significance.”
References
Aurelius, M. (2015). Meditations. Sheba Blake Publishing.
Schlippe, A. v., Schweitzer, J. (2008). Εγχειρίδιο της συστημικής θεραπείας και συμβουλευτικής. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press