Openness: The Enabler at L7

Function & Name

Openness is the THEE-Name for: «an active experiential state that maintains the potential for creating meanings and perceiving diverse meanings in stimuli and events».

Being Open ensures preparedness in the form of

  • receptivity so we can perceive Meanings-L6, &
  • generativity so we can produce Meanings-L6.
Openness is the 7th Level element in the Primary Hierarchy of Communication, working together with Meaning at Level-6.

Openness-L7 allows us to freely play with alternative possibilities when receiving and when expressing meaning-L6. It is a form of self-mastery showing up as deliberate free-floating attention or situational awareness. We are then ready for communicative phenomena to happen. While being natural and spontaneous, it is nevertheless mysterious.

Properties

Being Open is an enabler. As a state of being, it does not exist to do anything as such, and we cannot do anything actively with it—as we can at all lower Levels. It simultaneously senses and integrates the multiplicity of other factors in the various relevant contexts.

All we can do is activate openness-L7 and then allow things to happen within us. In the open state, ideas rise to the surface, intuitions emerge, possibilities are seen, perspectives are brought to bear, the world around us appears to change.  All seemingly automatically. This imaginative work is intrinsic to handling situations creatively. It is available to everyone—if desired and allowed. As a fortune cookie said: «a closed mind is a good thing to lose».

Openness-L7 provides subtlety and helps us hear and couch our communications in such a way that the meanings-L6 via other elements/levels recognize our own nature and interests, and also that of the other.  

The Openness-L7 state may function automatically, but activating that state and maintaining it requires a deliberate choice and determination.

Openness implies some curiosity—about oneself as much as about the other. Personal inhibitions or socio-cultural habits or expectations may interfere.

Personal issues, in regard to some specific topic or to relating in general, may serve to dampen or block the operation of openness .

Communication suffers when a person does not recognize their own limitations, blockages or inhibitions in respect to a particular aspect of social reality. As usual, all lower Level errors and difficulties can also interfere.

Still Higher Levels?

The complete 7-level Primary Hierarchy of Communication.

The diagram at the top asks if there can be anything higher and beyond L7-Openness?

Just as stimulating and sensing stimuli at L1 are only just beyond the biological, so openness at L7 is pure experience, intangible and even difficult to refer to or confirm. So it seems reasonable to conclude that the hierarchy is indeed complete, and there are no higher Levels.

Beyond Communication as a whole, we can identify endeavour-related entities within THEE. These depend upon, assume or imply Communication, while Communication flows from and implies them. 

In all THEE Primary Hierarchies: At L7, the form taken by the entity is an experiential and imaginative manifestation of the nature of the hierarchy-as-a-whole. L7 is also a potential, and it affects the L6 potential, and so infuses, affects and organizes the functioning of the actual entities: L5 through L1.

In this case, L7-Openness enables and infuses the whole Communication framework with sensitivity. This provides for awareness, subtlety and new possibilities. Together with L6-Meaning, it enables the effective use of L5-Terms, L4-Symbols, L3-Signs, L2-Signals & L1-Stimuli in discussions, inquiries, arguments, conversations and human interactions of all sorts.

We have now clarified, formulated and broadly described seven Levels, one by one, in Communication: i.e. PH5, the Primary Hierarchy.

To better understand the properties that discriminate the various levels, we must now consider them all simultaneously. Making comparisons is a great help in understanding both the Level entities and their properties.

  • The initial page in the section is an overview.

Originally posted: 6-May-2011; Last updated: 6-Sep-2013