Het Open Vizier

By the editors of openvizier.org

Edition 1 asked why a platform like this is necessary. Edition 2 answered a different question: who writes here, and what shaped him. In that personal piece, Jacobus van Merksteijn laid open what makes him the thinker he is — the primal feeling that never went out, the protection that both constrained and spared him, the scale on which he thinks and the price he paid for it. That was neither therapy nor self-justification. It was laying the foundation. If you don't understand the man, you won't understand his work.

Edition 3 is the work.

Seven articles on what the human being is, what is being taken from him, and what society needs to make it through the twenty-first century. Written in the voice openvizier has made its own: direct, without academic detours, without the conceptual scaffolding that makes a text feel safe but leaves it empty. The reader needs no background in pedagogy or psychology. What he needs is the willingness to take seriously what is said here.

The seven articles are connected. They are not seven separate contributions on a theme — they are seven sides of one moving argument. That argument, stated as simply as possible: the human being arrives at birth with a capacity that could have helped him solve his greatest problems, and he spends his first eighteen years systematically destroying that capacity. Then he wonders why the climate isn't getting better, why polarisation isn't subsiding, why so many people burn out and nobody really feels connected anymore.

The answer is in edition 3.

Article 1 begins with the primal feeling itself — what it is, how it works, what it costs to train it away. Article 2 introduces the 7-dimensional feeling model: a map of the inner life that for the first time gives a more precise language to what we always knew but couldn't articulate. Article 3 goes deep: the three brain layers, sleep as a learning machine, the reason why insight alone never brings change. Article 4 poses the most dangerous question of the edition: do people communicate in ways that science has not yet been willing to measure? Article 5 turns to upbringing — what we actually do to children when we unleash all seven dimensions on them at once before they are ready for it. Article 6 goes to the first year, and the second, and the third: what is built in those years and why you cannot outsource it to a schedule. Article 7 closes with the question the future poses: who are we educating in an era where machines are taking over everything the cortex can do? Four answers. And the question of whether we dare give those answers fast enough.

All of this is published on openvizier.org as one coherent work. The reader who is ready reads the seven articles in order. Those who want to skip around, skip. But the movement from article 1 to article 7 is larger than the sum of the individual parts — it is the story of a species that threatens itself by training away its own compass, precisely at the moment when it needs that compass most.

The theoretical foundation for everything in this edition is fully worked out in the text Denkbasis voor een 7-dimensionaal gevoelsmodel by Jacobus van Merksteijn. The practical translation into education and upbringing is in the Manifest voor onderwijs en opvoeding. Both works are available for download on openvizier.org. Edition 3 is the accessible entry point; the documents are the depth. Those who want to read further will find more there than fits here.

openvizier.org, edition 3 — June 2026