The word open is used in many different contexts. We speak about having an open mind, opening ourselves to experience, becoming more receptive, surrendering resistance or remaining open to whatever life presents. These expressions can point towards something meaningful, yet they can also leave the impression that openness is primarily an attitude we adopt towards experience.
My understanding of openness has developed differently, particularly through years of observing what occurs within the human system through peiec®.
I am interested in the capacity of the human system itself: how much of what is occurring within a moment can actually be received, how much is excluded through contraction before we are consciously aware of it, and what becomes available as those contractions progressively soften. This is why I sometimes use the word bandwidth.
Human experience has a range. At any particular moment, an extraordinary amount is occurring within us and around us, while only a portion becomes available to conscious experience. Some of this limitation is an unavoidable consequence of being human. We perceive through particular senses, attention is selective, and the mind necessarily simplifies an enormous amount of information so that we can function.
Yet the range itself does not appear to be fixed.
What a person can perceive, receive and remain available to can change substantially over time. This becomes particularly apparent through sustained work with the body, energy and perception, as capacities begin to emerge that were previously absent or so subtle that they went unnoticed. The person has not necessarily acquired something entirely new. In many cases, they have become capable of receiving what was already occurring.
This distinction has become fundamental to the way I understand human development and to the development of peiec® itself.
We do not all experience the same moment
It is easy to assume that if two people are standing in the same room, they are experiencing approximately the same reality and merely thinking differently about it. At the broadest level this appears reasonable. They can see the same furniture, hear the same conversation and identify the same people. Yet once we examine experience more closely, that assumption becomes difficult to sustain.
One person may be almost entirely occupied by thought while another is simultaneously aware of the conversation, subtle changes within their body, the movement or presence of another person’s energy, the quality of the surrounding space and small shifts occurring as the interaction develops. One person may register tension only once it has become physically uncomfortable, while another recognises the beginning of contraction almost as it forms.
Even within ordinary sensory experience there can be substantial differences. Some people move through an environment with very little awareness of physical sensation unless something becomes particularly strong. Others notice temperature, pressure, texture, sound, changes in light and the movement of air across the skin without deliberately concentrating on any of them.
The difference is not necessarily that one person is attentive and the other is careless. Their systems can have different capacities for receiving information simultaneously.
This becomes particularly apparent when people begin developing energetic sensitivity. What initially appears to be an indistinct sensation can gradually acquire detail. A person who could once only say that they felt something may eventually distinguish qualities, movement, location and changes occurring in response to another person or within different parts of their own system.
The environment has not suddenly acquired these qualities because the person learned to perceive them. Their capacity has changed.
This raises a question that has occupied me for years: if our capacity for perception can develop in one area, how far can that development continue across the whole human system?
Contraction changes what is available
The easiest way to understand bandwidth is often to observe what happens when it suddenly decreases. Imagine receiving unexpected news that immediately produces a strong response. Within seconds, the range of experience can narrow dramatically. The body changes, attention becomes concentrated around the event and thought begins moving quickly. Something that occupied only one part of the external environment can begin to dominate the entire internal one.
The rest of the world has not disappeared. Sounds continue. The body remains in contact with the chair or ground. Other people may still be present. Light continues moving across the room. Countless sensory events remain available, yet very little of this may reach the centre of experience because the system has reorganised around what has occurred.
This narrowing has an obvious usefulness. Human beings need the capacity to prioritise information. If something genuinely threatens us, it would make little sense to distribute attention equally across every detail in the environment.
The difficulty appears when contraction becomes habitual, accumulated or disconnected from the immediate requirements of the present. A system can continue organising itself around patterns established much earlier. Particular interactions produce disproportionate narrowing. Certain environments change the body immediately. A tone of voice, expression or interpersonal dynamic can produce a response before conscious thought understands what has happened.
When these responses occur frequently enough, the contracted range can become so familiar that it is no longer recognised as contraction. It simply feels like being ourselves.
This is where openness becomes considerably more interesting than the instruction to be present. A person can sincerely attempt to remain present while their system is continually narrowing the amount of the present that can actually be received. The limitation is not necessarily occurring at the level of intention.
Presence has depth
Presence is sometimes spoken about as though it were binary: we are either present or we are not. My experience suggests something considerably more nuanced.
A person can be completely attentive to what is happening and still perceive only a relatively narrow range of the moment. Another person can occupy the same situation with a much greater range available simultaneously. Both can reasonably describe themselves as present, yet what is available within that presence may be quite different.
This is why I think presence has depth.
The development of presence is not only the ability to bring attention back from thought. It can involve an increasing capacity of the entire system to receive what is happening without immediately reducing the moment according to familiar structures. As that capacity increases, experience can become extraordinarily rich without anything extraordinary occurring externally.
This is difficult to describe because language itself tends to separate what is experienced simultaneously. To explain a moment, I have to tell you first about the body, then perhaps about sound, another person, energetic movement or the surrounding space. Language places these things one after another, while experience does not necessarily arrive that way. They can all be present together.
As more becomes available, it becomes less necessary for one aspect of the moment to exclude another. Sensation does not need to disappear because thought occurs. Awareness of another person does not require losing awareness of oneself. Energetic perception does not require withdrawing from ordinary sensory experience.
The range becomes larger.
This is what I mean when I speak about experiencing more of life.
Richness is not intensity
This distinction matters because the desire to experience more can easily become confused with a desire for greater intensity.
They are not the same.
A person can pursue increasingly intense experiences while their underlying capacity changes very little. Dramatic energetic phenomena, altered states, profound emotional experiences or extraordinary moments can be compelling precisely because they concentrate so much experience into a short period of time.
Greater bandwidth is different. Rather than concentrating experience, it expands the amount of experience that can coexist.
The difference can become apparent in very simple circumstances. Sitting quietly with another person can contain enormous richness when the system is sufficiently available. There can be awareness of the body, the other person, subtle movement within the interaction, the environment and the silence between words, without any of these needing to dominate the others.
Nothing dramatic needs to happen for the experience to have depth. More of what is already happening has simply become available.
This distinction has become increasingly important within my work because visible intensity can so easily be mistaken for depth. A large response is easy to recognise. Subtle change requires considerably more perception. Neither should automatically be assigned greater meaning simply because one is more visible than the other.
Over time, my interest has therefore moved increasingly towards the ordinary moment. Extraordinary experiences can reveal capacities we did not know existed, and some can alter the direction of a life. Yet most of our lives are not composed of extraordinary experiences. We make food, speak with people, work, walk through the house, stand outside, encounter someone we love and someone who irritates us, become tired and wake again the following morning.
If greater depth can only be experienced under extraordinary conditions, then much of human life remains outside it.
The body participates in how much we can receive
The body is central to this enquiry because it participates continuously in the range available to us.
If a large proportion of the body is held in habitual tension, that holding forms part of the baseline through which everything else is experienced. If the jaw, abdomen, pelvis or shoulders repeatedly respond to particular circumstances, those responses influence the condition of the system whether or not they have become conscious.
This does not mean that every physical contraction has an emotional, energetic or deeper meaning. Bodies are physical structures subject to injury, illness, ageing, fatigue, environment and countless ordinary biological processes. It means something simpler: the physical condition of the person participates in experience.
As my own work developed, I became increasingly interested in what occurred when physical holding changed alongside energetic contraction and changes within other aspects of the system. Sometimes the effects appeared considerably broader than the particular area being worked with. The human system did not seem to behave as a collection of unrelated departments in which the physical, emotional, energetic and perceptual could always be neatly separated.
A change in one area could alter what became available elsewhere.
This is one reason the work that became peiec® developed into many different techniques and applications. The aim was never to accumulate techniques for their own sake. Different aspects of the human system appeared to require different forms of engagement, and as the work and the practitioners developed, further levels of precision became possible.
The body was part of that territory from the beginning because the body is part of our experience from the beginning.
Sensitivity is not the same as capacity
Energetic perception provides a particularly clear example of how capacity can develop.
Some people arrive at peiec having felt energy for as long as they can remember. They may not have had a framework for understanding what they experienced, yet the perception itself was familiar. Others begin noticing subtle energetic sensations through practice and gradually discover distinctions that had previously been unavailable to them.
At first, the sensation itself can be compelling because it is unfamiliar. People become fascinated by movement, temperature, pressure, expansion or other experiences for which they have no immediate physical explanation. Over time, however, fascination can give way to precision.
The important question is no longer simply whether energy can be felt. It becomes what can actually be perceived, how accurately changes can be distinguished, how the person’s own system influences what they are perceiving, and whether they can receive information without immediately interpreting it according to what they already believe.
This distinction matters because sensitivity by itself is not necessarily development. Someone can be extraordinarily sensitive and have very little capacity to remain comfortable with what they sense. In that circumstance, greater sensitivity can simply mean more information entering a system that does not yet have the capacity to comfortably receive it.
Capacity therefore needs to develop alongside perception.
This is one reason I have always been interested in the whole person rather than the cultivation of isolated energetic abilities. Feeling more is not necessarily useful if the person becomes increasingly overwhelmed by what they feel. Greater openness involves not simply receiving more information, but developing the capacity to remain available as more information becomes perceptible.
Experience before explanation
As perception develops, the boundaries through which we habitually understand ourselves can also become less simple. Many people report experiences in which they become aware of another person’s presence before physical contact occurs, perceive changes in the space surrounding the body or recognise that an interaction has altered something beyond what they experience as immediately physical.
Within peiec®, the spatial field eventually became its own area of observation and practice.
I am careful with this language because there are many existing frameworks through which people interpret subtle experience. It is very easy to hear an unfamiliar description and immediately translate it into a system we already know. Once that happens, we may stop observing what is actually occurring and begin finding what we expect to find.
For this reason, the spatial aspects of peiec are approached through direct perception rather than through the adoption of a belief about what should be there. Students develop the capacity to feel and observe first. Language and understanding follow what becomes perceptible.
This principle runs throughout the work: experience precedes explanation.
A person does not become more open by intellectually agreeing with the idea of openness. Nor does being given an explanation automatically produce the capacity to perceive what somebody else can perceive.
The system itself has to develop.
Why development takes time
Once openness is understood as capacity rather than attitude, the importance of time becomes easier to understand.
A person can decide instantly that they would like to become more receptive. They cannot instantly develop every capacity required to receive substantially more of experience. Perception develops through use. The body changes through repeated engagement. Energetic sensitivity can become more precise through practice. Patterns that have accumulated over many years may reveal themselves progressively rather than all at once.
Development therefore has sequence.
What somebody can perceive after several years may have been literally imperceptible to them at the beginning. Explaining it earlier would not necessarily have accelerated that process because the missing element was not information. It was capacity.
This is one of the reasons I have always resisted the idea that everything should simply be taught immediately. Information can be front-loaded. Development cannot. A person needs time to become the person capable of receiving what comes next.
We accept this easily in other fields. Physical strength develops progressively. A musician’s ear becomes increasingly refined. An experienced designer recognises relationships that a beginner does not yet see. A skilled craftsperson perceives distinctions within material that were physically present from the beginning but experientially unavailable.
The information was there.
What changed was the instrument of perception.
Openness does not mean becoming unaffected
One of the clearest places to observe developing capacity is not when life is easy, but when it becomes difficult.
It is relatively easy to experience ourselves as open when circumstances agree with us. A beautiful environment, supportive relationships and a quiet period in life naturally place fewer demands upon the system. Difficulty reveals something different.
Something happens that we did not choose. Another person behaves in a way we dislike. The body becomes uncomfortable. Plans fail. We receive information we would rather not have received. A response occurs.
The question is not whether we respond. The question is how much of the system that response occupies and how freely it can move.
I do not understand openness as becoming unaffected by life. In fact, an increasingly open system may be deeply affected precisely because it is open. Beauty can enter more completely. Another person’s suffering can be felt. Music can move through the body with extraordinary depth. Grief remains grief, and physical pain does not cease to hurt simply because someone has developed greater capacity.
The difference can lie in what happens after the movement enters.
A difficult experience may arise strongly without needing to organise everything around itself. Discomfort can be present without eliminating everything else that is simultaneously true. Something can move without automatically becoming another enduring structure that continues occupying the system long after the original moment has passed.
This is very different from emotional neutrality. A person who feels very little is not necessarily open. They may simply be receiving very little.
The openness I am interested in is considerably more demanding because it allows life to be encountered more completely.
The ordinary can become extraordinarily rich
One of the most interesting consequences of this development is also one of the most difficult to explain until it begins to occur.
Ordinary life can become increasingly rich.
The world itself has not necessarily changed. The same house is there. The same garden. The same partner. The same cup. The same morning light arriving through the same window.
What changes is the amount of the experience that is available.
A flower can contain an extraordinary amount of experience, not because we have convinced ourselves to appreciate simple things or are deliberately practising gratitude, but because the sensory, energetic and perceptual range through which the flower is being encountered has changed.
This is a different proposition from deliberately paying closer attention. Paying attention can certainly be valuable, but I am describing something more structural. The person is not continually trying to experience more.
More is arriving.
This is what I mean when I speak about greater bandwidth. Greater bandwidth allows a richer participation in existence without requiring existence itself to become more dramatic.
And perhaps this is where the idea of openness ultimately becomes most interesting.
If perception can develop, how far can it develop? If contraction can soften, how much can soften? If something that once occupied the entire system can eventually move through without organising everything around itself, what else becomes possible as that process continues over years? If stillness can move from an occasional experience towards an increasingly ordinary condition, how deeply can it become integrated into living?
I don’t think these questions can be answered entirely through philosophy because the answer depends upon development. They have to be investigated through the human system itself.
The result may look remarkably ordinary from the outside. A person walks through the same world as everyone else. They make dinner, answer emails, talk with another person and go outside to feel the weather. Yet the amount of life available within those moments can be profoundly different.
Perhaps this gives us another way of considering what we mean when we say we want to live fully.
Living fully does not necessarily require filling a life with more experiences. It can mean becoming capable of experiencing more of the life that is already here.
That distinction has become central to the way I understand development because it shifts the question from one of acquisition to one of capacity. We can continue asking what else there is to learn, attain or experience. Or, at some point, we can become interested in the instrument through which all experience occurs.
How much of existence can this human system become capable of receiving?
I don’t know that the answer to that question has a useful theoretical limit. I am much more interested in discovering how far it can be lived.