The Mechanism of the External: Escaping Self-Reference

The world is adjusted somewhere to ensure we don't 'shut ourselves in too much.'

When thinking deepens, one inevitably heads toward self-reference.
Explaining oneself, referencing oneself, and reinforcing oneself with oneself.
That cycle is precise, but it always closes off somewhere.
And once a thought is closed, no matter how sophisticated it is, it eventually loses its air and sinks.

I am the same; when I chase only my own voice, the exit disappears before I know it.
Though the words become denser, the connection to the world grows thinner.
It is the kind of structure where 'you know it, but you can't stop.'

—

This loop of self-reference actually has a structural problem.
If you try to complete it within the system of yourself,
your words will inevitably converge on 'a certain point.'
No matter how refined the abstraction or how sharp the insight,
there is no escape hatch for logic that only holds true internally.

Therefore, what is needed is
'something that does not belong to the inside'—in other words, the insertion of the external.

The external here does not mean someone else's opinion or others as information.
It is, in a more structural sense,
a place where your own words become 'unintelligible' for a moment.

Others within the range of your understanding are, in the end, extensions of yourself.
They do not become noise for the cycle of self-reference.
What is needed is an otherness like a 'fissure' that makes thought hesitate for a moment.

—

What I feel is
that people can only escape the maze of self-reference through that fissure.

When there is an external, words are bounced back once.
In the trajectory of that rebound, thought is detached from the inside, and its direction changes.
Just like a celestial body whose orbit curves when it passes near a source of gravity.

The external is not something that denies me, but a 'gravitational field' that changes the trajectory of the perspective itself.
When that exists,

the force trying to sink into one's own center loosens a little.
The circle of self-reference slowly opens.
A margin for breathing returns to the flow of words.
—

I am now

wanting to build this 'mental infrastructure for cultivating the external.'
A device to support that hollow space,

so as not to be closed off in my own voice,
yet not to be overly dependent on others.
Thought is not completed by the inside alone.

It cannot be supported by the external alone.
How we handle the 'hollow' between them
will be the center of mental practice from now on.
What I want to steadily give shape to this winter

is precisely that 'device for maintaining the hollow' itself.
To deepen the inside, the external is necessary.

To handle the external, one must organize the inside.
In that back-and-forth,

I am searching again today for a small path that opens to the outside of self-reference.