Openness

How open are you? How many people really know the real you? Do your closest friends know the real you? Do you have a romantic interest who knows you deep inside? What about your family? Imagine if you had a slavemaster who forced you to go out and find friends for him. This taskmaster might even force you to go find a boyfriend or girlfriend for the taskmaster. None of these friends or partners care about you or even know you; your slavemaster takes them and you're left alone and unrewarded. That's what it's like when you aren't open to the people around you. None of your friends really care about you because none of your friends really even know you. You're just a slave to the mask you wear, and that mask is your cruel slavedriver.

If you wrote a book, would you censor it? Blotting out key passages, ripping out whole pages, before submitting it to your readers? Would they enjoy reading such a mutilated work? Even if they did, would they be enjoying the real book? Your life is like a book; how open is it? Have any parts been scratched out? Are any pages missing?

Are you afraid of what people would think of the real you? (It's okay, I know I always was!) Think about this. One day, you will die. Every person who ever walked the earth, is dead, or dying. The same goes for you, and two hundred years after your death, noone will remember you. Life is short, baby. Short and sweet. Why would you spend your precious few days parading around in a mask? On your deathbed, wondering how many of your friends were real friends.

You don't have to wear a mask. You have the option to take it off, and let the world see the real you. You have the option of opening up. Taking off the mask is hard. Some people have worn their masks for so long, their faces are weak and pale and burn in the light of scrutiny. But light provides vitamins and nourishment, and leaving the mask on will only make the real face weaker and paler. The only way to heal it is to remove the mask once and for all.

I've spent a lot of time wearing masks. I was the least open person I knew. When I was growing up, my parents were worried because I wore such an extreme mask, I didn't even show emotions. I was like Spock from Star Trek, cold-blooded and calculating. In my later teenage years I hid from the world, fleeing into online games, to which I was terribly addicted. In the Air Force, I pretended to be happy and content with my life, the truth was that I suffered such a terrible loneliness. I hid that loneliness deep beneath a mask, telling people I just didn't want a girlfriend at that time. When I escaped the Air Force and went to university, I assumed a fugitive lifestyle, living out of lounges and libraries, homeless by choice, and hiding it from everyone. And still I could not reveal my loneliness to anyone but some of my closest friends. In graduate school I finally did something about my loneliness, joining a secret organization of pickup artists, but again I kept that lifestyle secret with all my strength.

Now I realize that all the progress I could ever make with a mask, all the friends I could ever make, any lover I could coerce into being with me, any fame I could win with my mathematical research, any readers I could attract with my articles here, it would all be fake. All would belong to the Masks which I used to wear, before I chose to be open. The real me would suffocate beneath layers upon layers of falseness and ego.

I want to be totally open. I want people to appreciate the real me, and love the real me, but first I have to introduce them to the real me. If I walk around hiding things from everyone, the real me closed off from sight, noone is going to know the real me.

Being closed doesn't mean you have to be dark or emo or introverted. When I was a pickup artist, I was the exact opposite. In fact, part of my mask was that I made myself seem more extroverted than I really was. Of course, I didn't win any love for the true me. I remember telling a friend that I was basically a shy person, and she refused to believe it, saying I was one of the least shy people she'd met. The truth is she had no idea about the real me. I was so closed, I was like an actor, acting out a role, day and night.


BE OPEN ABOUT YOUR FLAWS

We all have flaws. That's part of being human. A common way of dealing with our flaws is to hide them. I hid, or tried to hide, my many flaws, for so long. Here are some of my flaws right now. I'm disorganized and messy. I spend more time on the computer than I ought to. I wish I had more close friends. I don't know how to drive. I wish I was better at parties. When I'm not going to go out and meet people, just taking it easy by myself, I'll rewear the same clothes days in a row. It's difficult for me to write such things here, where everyone can read them. I feel ashamed. But I know that by putting them in the open, only then will I be able to have friends who accept me the way I really am.

Also, by being open about these things, I'm removing the option of ignoring them. When you have a flaw, you have three options. You can ignore and hide the flaw. Or you can learn to accept the flaw. Or you can fix the flaw. The second and third options are good and will grow you as a human. The first option is just stagnation, and will only make the problems get worse. Now that I've listed some of my flaws, I'll have no choice but to accept them in myself or else rid myself of them.

Will I ever rid myself of every flaw, or accept every flaw in myself? Of course not. I'll always be growing and changing and improving as a person. I'll be doing so in an open way.


OPENNESS IN A RELATIONSHIP

I'm very lucky that my girlfriend and I are totally open with each other. Well, it's not luck, so much as, we've consciously determined to be totally open with each other. It elevates our relationship to a whole higher level, bringing us so close we're like one person.

When I get mad at my girlfriend, I let her know how I feel. Many guys would tiptoe around the issue, saying things like, "Oh, it's okay, I don't mind really." Such relationships are one-dimensional, whereas an open and totally honest relationship is multidimensional, spanning the whole range of emotions. When one of us is sad, we share it. Afraid? We share it. Jealous? We share it. More than any other relationship, you should be totally open with the one you love.

The problems which come up in relationships can mostly be prevented at the outset, if the relationship is built upon foundations of Openness. If my girlfriend got mad at me, but hid it from me, the anger would simmer and fester and eventually come out in some other, more terrible form. By attempting to save each other from pain by wearing a mask, we would only delay the pain, and the pain would accrue interest.

The difference between relationship-ending drama and relationship-strengthening drama is how forthcoming the two parties are with each other. A closed-off relationship is constantly teetering on the edge of a cliff, and the slightest problem, hidden by one partner from the other, can spiral out of control. In my relationship with my girlfriend, there have been times when one of us has upset the other with something we thought was very minor. Talking openly with each other, we caught these situations, nipping them in the bud and even strengthening the relationship through them. A relationship based on open communication is a more robust relationship, and to the people in such a relationship, the problems that arise seem more like amusing soap opera which just spices up the relationship.

Only by putting yourself out there as you really are, can you attract a partner who really loves you for who you really are. If you're always presenting a false mask, then even if you can get a relationship and maintain it, your partner is in love with the fake you.


OPENNESS IN THE WORKPLACE

If you work for a boss, he or she should appreciate it when you're open. In the U.S. Air Force, Openness is referred to as "Integrity", and it's one of the Air Force Core Values. In that context means, if you mess something up, you don't try to hide it. You bring it up immediately so it can get fixed before people get hurt or even killed. If you have a boss who doesn't value this, then you need to change careers.

Some people think that they can have one life in the workplace and another life at home. People have lifestyles outside of work, but "turn it off" at the workplace. As if a human being is just an old floppy disk drive, and you can just change disks to change programs. Such behavior will eliminate any fulfillment that could be gained from work. Life is too short to forfeit two-thirds of it to a Mask just to put food on the table.

Stick up for yourself. If your boss wants you to work a Saturday and you don't want to, don't be your boss's little bitch. Let them know you can't come in Saturday. If they ask why, don't make up an excuse. You can say something like, "I've got a lot of lounging around and movie-watching to do on Saturday." Be unapologetic about it.

If you're open with God, but not with mankind, then you're presenting a false image to both parties. To mankind, your inner heart is hidden. To God, you try to hide your secular life. The result is that, in truth, you're open to noone.


OPENNESS IN RELIGION

Does your religion encourage you to be open? Are there some things you feel that you just can't share because they're sinful? Do you put on Sunday clothes to go to church? Do you have a different personality around church friends than you do around friends from work, or friends you go out with?

Do you really believe everything your religion puts forth as gospel? If not, how comfortable are you raising your voice and sticking up for what you really feel? If you follow some of the major traditional religions alive today, your religion was founded by people who stood up against the status quo of the religion of their time. Do you feel like you could proudly introduce all your friends to your church? Do you feel like you'd be comfortable if your religious leader taped you going about your typical day, and played it in front of the congregation? (That sounds like a neat reality TV show, but I doubt it'd ever air!)

If whatever god or gods you believe in, was/were speaking through you and giving you a message to tell the world, and it was up to you to write down all the holy scriptures for your religion, would the things you wrote down be the same as the actual canon of your religion? Would your divinely inspired message get you branded as a heretic, or would it make your fellow followers look down upon you condescendingly and pray for you pitifully?

If you show one face to God and one face to man, then you're really closing yourself off from both.


OPENNESS AND COURAGE

Taking the mask off requires great courage. The mask is a living thing and it will fight like hell to stay on your face. Because it feeds off your face. It sucks up your energy like some alien vampire freak thing, making you invest time and money and emotion and life into perpetuating it. It takes courage of steel to completely remove the mask. Being open requires courage, but it also creates courage.

You can begin taking the mask off a bit at a time. Just work on the things you have the courage for right now. Courage is like a muscle, and for some people it's a weak, atrophied muscle. But no matter how weak a muscle is, it can be trained by working it progressively harder. Like lifting weights, you start with what you can lift, and gradually lift heavier and heavier weights.

I had the advantage that my courage was already pretty strong when I began chipping at my mask. Being a pickup artist gave me stainless steel courage of doom. And still, I had to start with smaller pieces of the mask.

One of the first things I did to fight my mask, was I flew home to San Diego and opened myself up (for the first time since I was a young child) to my parents. I told my parents about the seduction community. To really appreciate that, you have to understand my parents are really radical Christians. They're the sort of fundamentalists who forbade me studying martial arts as a kid because "evil Eastern philosophy and mysticism"!

So there I was, telling my parents (who wanted me to remain a virgin 'til I got married, one of the dumbest things a person can possibly try to do) that I go to nightclubs and deliberately try to get in girls' pants. It didn't go over too well. Well, it went over better than I expected, rather than getting the shrieking outrage treatment, I got the condescending "prodigal son" treatment. But I'm glad I did that. At least now my parents have some clue who their son is. For the longest time, they didn't know me at all.

(It makes me wonder whether I really know my parents. In fact, I'm quite sure they're very awesome people beneath their masks. My dad founded his high school chess club and studied like ten ancient languages! I wish I could claw through their masks...)

Later, I wrote this article about some things I was generally hiding. And then a little later still, I took a real plunge and published an article about my time in the seduction community. So far nothing's exploded, I'm still waiting for the lynch mobs to come around with their torches and wooden stakes :)

There are still some secrets about Glowing Face Man that I don't have the courage to share. I'm sure there are deep secrets about everyone. The best you can do is gradually work on tearing off that mask, one scrap at a time.

I said that opening up requires courage, but it also trains courage. When you're open, acting passionately as your true self, you get a kind of stronger courage, different than the "willpower" courage of jumping out of airplanes or seducing strangers. You get a kind of deeper, more subtle courage. Your true self is invincible and immortal (if you believe in the afterlife). Your mask is weak and constantly doing everything it can to preserve itself. When you act openly, you know that nothing can hurt you. Nothing anyone can do to you will change who you are in your core. There is no worry about people clawing through your defenses, because you have no defenses, and you need no defenses.

When I was a pickup artist, every time I approached a girl, my entire ego was at stake. She could destroy me (and, believe me, I got destroyed quite a lot of times!) Now that I've openly talked about how bad I always was with girls, and how lonely I always was-- what can any girl at a nightclub possibly do to me now? When you're totally open and hiding nothing, what can anyone possibly do to you? "Hey, nerd, I bet you used to play dungeons and dragons!" "Yeah.. I did." "Oh.."


OPENNESS IN BABIES

When you were born, you were born in openness. A baby is totally open. Know how to tell when a baby's not happy? Hint: listen for the ear-splitting shrieks and wailing. In other words, the baby doesn't dance around the bush.

We should all be more like babies. When a baby wants something, he gets it. That's because the baby doesn't tiptoe around anything. If a baby were your partner, he or she would never say something like, "Oh, it's fine, honey, I'm not mad, go right ahead and step all over me again..."

When a baby is happy, it lights up the whole room. Noone can be unhappy when a happy baby is in the room! Just thinking about a big grinning baby, cooing happily, makes me smile. It's because the baby's joy is shining directly through, unobscured by any mask. Be that baby, and light up the world with your unobscured smile!


MY RESOLUTION TO OPENNESS

My resolution is to open myself up more, flexing the muscles which let me put my real self forward. Some people may dislike the true me, but that's better than working to make friends for a fake mask. I resolve to be conscious of the places where I'm presenting a false image, and work to open myself up more in those places.

With the opening up I've already done, I've been pleasantly surprised at how accepting people are. Things I thought people would hold against me (like being homeless by choice for a lot of my college days), people actually thought was pretty cool. I'm confident that as I open up more, this trend will continue. I'm also confident the same holds for any reader who chooses to join me in this resolution.


OPENNESS-RELATED MATERIAL

Being open requires great courage. It also requires great self-discipline. Self-discipline isn't just genetic, it's something you can train. Training self-discipline is one of the biggest gifts you can give yourself, not just for openness, but for accomplishing goals in general. Think of how much you could accomplish if you could think of what you needed to do and then just do it. That doesn't come overnight; read more in my article, Training Self-Discipline.

Being open or closed is something that builds momentum. If you're closed, natural behavioral momentum will keep you closed. If you're open, behavioral momentum will keep you open. In order to change, a deliberate force must be applied to counteract the momentum, like when society deliberately programs babies and closes them up. Read more about behavioral momentum at my article, What is Karma. If behavioral momentum is keeping you closed, apply a deliberate outside force right now by resolving to be more open.

The masks we wear are very resistant to change. They view change as death. That's why when we act through masks, lacking openness, our action lacks real courage and potency. If you're closed off, opening up might usher in a whirlwind of change. Change is good. Embracing change will help you open yourself. I wrote a whole article, The Joys Of Change, about embracing change and welcoming change.

I wrote a short story about the false masks we wear. Short Story: The Mirror. It's all about the false masks of the world and the invincibility of the inner self.