Distasteful spaciousness

Most of the doors into openness aren't pretty. They're the moments we usually try to escape.

The doors we'd rather not use

Wonder is the door we like. But wonder isn't the only way in, and it might not even be the most common. Most of the time, openness shows up wearing clothes we don't want to put on: not-knowing, social pressure, sensory overload, boredom, the feeling of being an impostor.

This lesson is a tour of those doors. The aim isn't to enjoy any of this. It's to notice that what we usually flinch from is, at root, the same spaciousness we're after — just arriving in a less flattering outfit.

Door one: not knowing

Here are two cards. One has a dot on it. The other doesn't. Watch them shuffle, then pick the one you think is marked. The widget will not tell you which is right — that's the point of the exercise. There is a real answer; you just won't get to see it.

Sit with that for a moment.

Door two: social pressure

Another place spaciousness shows up as distaste is the social domain. We sometimes alter our perceptions — not just our expressed opinions, our actual perceptions — to avoid social consequences. The classic demonstration:

Door three: perceptual overwhelm

Another door is sensory overload — the loss of a clear sense of self when too much is coming in at once. The next clip is intentionally chaotic. Listen with the volume at a comfortable level. One minute.

Door four: boredom

Now an eight-minute experiment with boredom. The instruction is simply to be silent and let the time pass. No phone, no second tab, no problem-solving. The sign below names what's happening.

Start the timer. Sit. When restlessness comes, don't fight it and don't follow it. Just let the eight minutes pass.

Boredom can be understood as a perceptual flinch — lurching away from vastness because there's nothing to grab onto. When we're bored we're trying to seize on concepts, on meaning. When boredom is allowed to be what it is, everything becomes available for appreciation. Boredom is a portal too.

Door five: not knowing how to be

Feeling like an impostor is another flavor of not-knowing. We wonder who we really are. We worry that our behavior failed to fit our self-image. We try to cultivate a "true" or "best" self with all our favorite attributes, and fear being seen as inconsistent or hard to read.

What we usually call "knowing" is having a particular concept about something. What we're pointing at here is relaxing conceptuality — not abandoning concepts, just letting them sit a little looser.

Relaxing conceptuality

A few clarifications, because this is the kind of phrase that invites misreading.

Openness is the possibility of conceptual relaxation. As we relax conceptually, we discover the quality of spaciousness. Notice which of the doors in this lesson was most aversive for you. That one is worth coming back to — in journaling, and especially when it shows up uninvited in everyday life.

Where this is going

Next: a meditation practice called Opening Awareness, with seven scaffolding exercises that give you tastes of conceptual relaxation, followed by ten minutes of the practice itself.