Open and Closed
Wherein I give you a phenomenological referent
I’m gonna sound esoteric. This is to be expected: we don’t have an agreed upon language for what I’ll be trying to show you. We don’t have agreed upon language, in part, because we don’t have explicit consciousness of the phenomenon I’m about to describe. In this essay I’ll try to guide you to that explicit consciousness.
So here’s the esoteric thesis, which I’ll clarify, unpack, and exemplify as I go on:
You can be more and less open, to various things, all at once.
Right now, as you read these words, you’re already open - and closed - to various things, in various degrees, all at once.
I’ll show you what you might be open and closed to now, or have been in the past, in the hope of making you consciously aware of it, of giving you the ability to consciously modulate it. It’s not easy because I’m trying to guide you to find various “dials” within yourself through a text. But I’ll do my best. We’ll do it, together, running through examples in various areas, starting with the most attention-grabbing one.
SEX
Sex is one of the easiest domains to start to get a feel for what I’m talking about. Think back to a time when you had really connective sex. I bet that - at least for the duration of that experience - you were open to their body, and their body was open to yours.
This kind of sex, that you might have had, shares the name and some superficial similarities with the kind of sex you can have when you are closed to one another’s body - but it’s an entirely different animal. And you can tell, both from the inside as a participant and from the outside as an observer: the sex of people who are closed to one another’s body is what you see in pornography - two bodies mashing against one another, mechanically.
This openness to one another’s body is necessary for that connective sex experience you had, but it isn’t sufficient. You must also be - at least for the duration of the experience -, open to your own body. You must be - at least for the duration of the experience - embodied.
EMBODIMENT
It’s weird but true that you can be closed to your own body. A classic victim of this situation is the nerd who exclusively exists “above their neck”.
Yea…
The expression “exists above their neck” is tracking something real: someone who isn’t open to their own body. Someone who is disembodied. Someone who’s disconnected from their own body. Hence the interoceptive difficulties: forgetting to eat, to drink, to go out and get sun and fresh air. It’s tough to get signals from your body when you cut yourself off from it.
It’s also tough to vibe.
vibing
Vibing - our group’s little special interest - requires both being open to each other’s bodies and to one’s own body. In that sense it’s kinda like connective sex, except it’s usually done in a group, and minus the sex.
Being open to your own body, being embodied, is a precondition for vibing. Which is why nerds can’t vibe.
Now, nerds can have amazing banter. You don’t need a body for that. You can have great banter online. Banter only requires being open to your own head, and that of others. Which nerds are. But, being closed to their own body, they still can’t vibe.
Can’t, but want to - of course: who wouldn’t want connective group sex, just minus the sex? - and so they try to vibe while being closed to their body. They are, in fact, using their mind, or their head, to mimic what being open to one’s own body looks like, from the outside.
But the body is a beat too fast and the mind a beat too slow: which is why their social behaviour can look “stilted” or “robotic” or “unnatural”. It’s just… “off”. Exactly like pornography sex, and exactly for the same reasons: trying to do something that requires being open to one’s own body while actually being closed to it. Ultimately, nerds vibe how porn actors fuck.
Now, don’t get me wrong: a blanket “open to body good” is commonly seen in the form of “embodiment good” but it glosses over the reasons why someone might’ve closed themselves off to their body in the first place.
For example: being open to one’s own body entails acting from it, and acting from your body dissolves the sense of mental ownership you have over your own actions. You’re much less the one who ‘chooses’ what to do and then executes it and much more the one who ‘observes your body doing of its own accord’. And this combination of being responsible for actions one doesn’t feel ownership of is, if you have a modicum of responsibility, if you don’t have a good grasp on what the range of actions your body might take are, terrifying.
Not just that but vibing - with the precondition of being open to your body, and those of others - is fully at odds with controlling what happens. The latter requires you being closed to your body, or those of others, and both. It’s the only way to control your actions.
I’m certain many people have vibed all the way into unspeakable things, at the same time that the ones that tried to close up, who wanted to take control of the situation, who wanted to stop it, who wanted to avoid certain outcomes were dismissed as just “killing the vibe”.
Vibing is terrifying.
And yet, people do it. They do it because being open to your own body and to someone else’s while they are too open to their body and to yours feels really, really good. When people say they want “connection” or “to feel connected” - this is what they’re talking about. Even if they don’t have the words to convey it.
R e l a t i o n s h i p s
Imagine this: a frustrated girlfriend complains that she wants to feel “more connected”.
Effectively it’s a complaint that her partner isn’t as open to her as she’d like. She complains with the language she has and he tries to appease her, the way he knows how to.
But - just like a nerd trying to vibe - he just mimics the observable consequences of being open to her, while not actually having changed how open he is. She doesn’t feel any change along the relevant dimension and grows increasingly frustrated. He sees the only effort he knows how to make devalued and feels defeated. They grow apart.
Btw “grow apart” can be visually depicted. Just imagine moving from bottom right to top left. This image is taken from the Inclusion of Other in the Self test. Using just this can predict whether a dating couple will still be together in three months. Coincidence?
Relationships are sort of where the dials of what you can be open to and closed to explode and - in my boy’s defense - it’s fair enough that he didn’t fully want to open up. It’s hard to make the relevant distinctions in what you open and don’t open to.
It’s trivial to open up to someone’s pain and mistakenly open up to taking on their feeling to be your own too. It’s very easy to open up to someone’s mood and end up opening to their beliefs too. It’s hard to be both open to someone’s pain and closed to their beliefs about what’s causing them pain. This is part of why it’s really difficult to support mentally ill people. This - I think - is why lots of people are violently rude to homeless people. They can’t open themselves to them without opening fully and so instead they close up fully.
Specific people
You can be completely open or completely closed to an entire person. This is usually an extreme response for solving an underlying problem. Maybe the person is pushy or violates your boundaries or uses their influence on you unduly and irresponsibly. And it’s hard to make the relevant distinctions and so you just “shut them out”. This might mean physically shutting them out, or, if for some reason you have to be in the same physical space, closing your body to them. A third observer could describe you as being “closed off”, or “standoffish”, or “cut-off”.
On the other extreme you have people who desperately need something they don’t have. Maybe knowledge from a guru, or acceptance from a hero, or reciprocity in feelings from a romantic interest. They fully open up. They’re vulnerable, and non-threatened. Relatable. And this can be very destabilising.
Your own feelings
The lack of stability caused by excessive openness will generate all kinds of overwhelming inner experience, and it can lead to cyclical dynamics in the form of idealising and devaluing someone else, leaving the idealised and devalued target dejected and confused.
You can also be too open to your own feelings. It’s effectively being high on your own supply, having no judgment. People who are too open to their own romantic desire will experience painful bouts of limerence.
But, it’s not only to your own body, and someone’s else’s, and your feelings and specific people - and any specific thing really - that you can be open or closed to. You can also be open or closed to to the outside as a whole.
“Outside”
Being closed to the outside gives you a sense of internal stability, while being fully open to it makes this sense evaporate. There’s no “ground to stand on”. People who’ve become fully open - by mistake, chance, or bad actors prying them so - feel this loss of bodily stability.
People who feel the meaning crisis “in their bones”, who have existential crises, Descartes’ relatable despair trying to find a bedrock of intellectual certainty, nihilistic crises, teenagers’ instability and emotional volatility -- these are all instances of bodies that are entirely too open. They feel something amiss.
Contrast this to the blessed souls that have no idea and no interest in what these people could possibly be on about since they never lost that felt stability in the first place, they never had the problem of having become that open in the first place.
Teenagers caricature adults as stiff and square - both euphemisms for “not open”. Adults scold them for acting like children - and they’re right in that those who are more open to the outside will have much higher emotional variability, reactiveness, and attunement. Think of the prototypical poet who takes on all the world’s pains as his own. Now contrast that with the prototypical high-powered CEO: open to his own body and mostly closed to everything outside himself. An execution machine whose security in himself is infinite and independent of external facts. (Like Trump.)
You can go too far with this and be totally closed to the outside, while being open exclusively to yourself. This is the condition of the narcissist: being open to yourself, but not to anything else. Hence why they can’t connect.
Excessive openness to the outside also explains the difficulty some people have acting, and deciding (a form of acting). Without being somewhat closed to the outside it’s very hard to find grounding in one’s own body from which one might act from. Tragically some people react to this phenomenological loss of ground by opening themselves further, by seeking information that will help them “decide”.
Eventually it is so open, so overwhelming, so destabilising that the best option - since you don’t have the dial close your body to the outside - is to just close yourself to your body. They start “living above their necks”.
Artifacts
Finally, finally, finally, - and I debated whether to include this at all - you can be more or less open to an artifact. Both when you experience it, and when you create it.
When someone says a movie, or a song really touched them, they mean they were open to them during their experience.
When someone “pours their heart out into the pages” while writing, they mean whey were open to them during their creation.
Have you been open to this text, or closed, as you read it?
Because - shockingly to me - if you’ve been open while reading it, and if I was open while writing it - and I think I was - then you’re gonna receive from me in a way not entirely dissimilar as if we’d been vibing in person.
Yes - I’m claiming that
It’s possible to vibe, at scale, asynchronously, through text.
And that this is what makes books such insane technology. It’s not just that they can transmit knowledge - although they do that too, of course. It’s that they can transmit vibes. And people can organize around vibes. Ultimately, a holy book, a holy text, is one that transmits holy vibes.
P.S.: A friend and early reader said he got a lot from the essay by going through it a second time while paying attention to what he was open and closed to, how much, and whether he wanted to modulate that. I would never ask you to go through it again, but he suggested it might be a good idea.
Nerds vibe how porn actors fuck, will stick with me haha