Het Open Vizier

By Jacobus van Merksteijn

Seven articles. Seven entrances to the same house.

Article 1 opened with a four-year-old walking into a room and immediately knowing who's running the show. Article 7 closed with the question of who we are educating in an era when machines take over the cortex's work. Between those two points lies a moving thought, and I want to show it here as a whole — not as a summary but as a recognition.

It is the same story. Seen from seven angles.

The story in one movement

There is a species that possesses a capacity which makes it unique among all the species we know: the direct, prelingual reading of reality. The primal feeling. The instrument with which a four-year-old knows whether the room is safe. With which a dog assesses a human being. With which a mother wakes up when her child is in trouble far away. With which a scientist senses that his model is wrong before he can prove why.

That capacity is not mystical. It is the evolutionary foundation of human social life — billions of years old, refined in the evolution of mammals, at its strongest in the first years of childhood.

And the species trains it away.

Not consciously. Not as a plan. But systematically, in an organised fashion, generation after generation. Through a school system designed in the nineteenth century for other purposes and not fundamentally revised since. Through an upbringing practice that imposes the time dimension, the moral dimension, and self-definition on children who are not yet ready for them. Through an economic order that pays away the presence needed to build self-recognition with the necessity of a second income. Through screens that actively drown out felt sense with stimulation and speed.

But systematically, in an organised fashion, generation after generation.

The result is a civilisation that is extremely good at producing arguments and extremely poor at reading situations. That does not solve the climate crisis while the facts have been available for decades, because facts do not move people — feeling does. That polarises because the direct perception of the other has disappeared, leaving only cortex-based positional manoeuvring. That produces burn-out and loneliness on an industrial scale, because the connection with one's own inner life has been systematically interrupted.

That is the story the seven articles tell.

The structure beneath the story

Article 2 gave the structure: the 7-dimensional feeling model. Not as an abstract schema but as a map of the reality that people inhabit inwardly. The oval with love above and hate below. The right arc of real feelings — respect, pride, power, jealousy, envy. The left arc of unreal counterparts — disrespect, non-pride, powerlessness, fear, non-jealousy, non-envy. The diagonal empty-functions running through the centre. The tiltable G-axis that says heavenly and earthly perspective are both valid.

That map is not a scientific proposition that must be proven before it is useful. It is a navigation tool. Whoever works with it discovers its value in practice.

Article 3 added the architecture: the three brain layers, and what happens between them at night. The daytime stream — the welling of feeling toward word. The nighttime stream from above to below in sleep — the descent of knowledge into felt sense. The explanation for why insight alone never brings change: the cortex names, but the limbic layer only changes through the nighttime stream. That nighttime stream is the bridge that converts knowledge into wisdom, and it is blocked by insufficient sleep, by too much activity, by the systematic absence of the stillness that protects the processing.

Article 4 posed the most dangerous question: do primal feelings communicate directly with each other, outside the ordinary sensory channels? I gave no answer. I posed a hypothesis and invited researchers. That invitation stands.

Article 5 turned to upbringing and education: what exactly goes wrong when all seven dimensions are unleashed on a child at once, too early. Article 6 went deeper still — to the first years, to the building of self-recognition, to the sentence "mum, I'm hungry" as the beginning of the self. Article 7 opened the perspective toward the future: what a human being still has to do in an era when machines take over the cortex.

Seven entrances. One house.

The core of the objection

There is a line of reasoning running through all these articles that I want to name explicitly here, because it is central but easy to overlook.

The objection I am making is not that modern civilisation is malicious. The objection is that it is structurally inconsistent with itself. It has produced on a large scale the problems — climate change, polarisation, loneliness, mental health crisis — by which it now threatens to destroy itself. And the reason it cannot solve those problems is precisely that it has trained away the capacity needed to address them: the direct felt sense of reality.

A society of people with intact primal feelings would have felt the climate crisis before they understood it. It would have broken through polarisation via direct perception of the other, not via debate about positions. It would have recognised burn-out as the bodily signal it is, long before the system collapsed.

It would have recognised burn-out as the bodily signal it is, long before the system collapsed.

That is the society we could have been. We are not, because with every new generation we have done the same thing: trained away the compass at the moment when it was most vulnerable.

That is the core of the objection. And it is an objection that cannot be resolved with a new school curriculum, with more screen-time regulation, with better therapy protocols. It demands a fundamental reorientation — on what a human being is, on what education does, on what upbringing builds or dismantles in the first years of a life.

What society is asking of itself

There is a structural discomfort in all these articles that I do not want to evade. It concerns power.

A society of people with intact primal feelings is ungovernable in the current sense of the word. That sounds alarming, but it is not a conspiracy theory — it is a description of a structural logic. People who read reality directly are less susceptible to manipulation via good arguments. They recognise the hollow ring of the politician who sounds like he is saying the right thing but is moved by something else. They buy less impulsively. They vote less out of fear. They no longer work at things that feel meaningless.

That is not welcome news for established power structures. Not because those structures are by definition malicious — many are not — but because they are built on the assumption that people can be steered through cortex signals: through prices, rules, incentives, penalties, campaigns. A society of people who navigate primarily through the primal feeling undermines that governability. It is self-regulating in a way that makes external steering unnecessary.

This is the deeper reason why the school system is as entrenched as it is. Not out of conscious conspiracy, but out of a structural logic so deeply embedded that nobody recognises it as an interest: a managed society needs manageable people. Manageable people are people whose primal feeling has been contained. That is not a cynical conclusion. It is the diagnosis of a system that guarantees its own continuity through the people it produces.

This has an ethical implication that weighs heavily. If it is true that civilisation has set up a system that systematically robs its own population of its most fundamental capacity — in service of a manageability that serves structures which themselves have no primal feeling — then that is more than a pedagogical problem. It is a civilisational question.

And the civilisation that does not dare ask that question is not ready for the crisis it has built for itself.

Where this thinking comes from

I write this as someone who has preserved the primal feeling throughout his life — not by his own merit, but through a confluence of circumstances I described in edition 2. Those circumstances were not only good: they cost me decades of lived life. But they also spared me an instrument that most people around me have lost.

That instrument I used in technology — in materials science, energy conversion, industrial designs that only work if you hold the end result in mind and work backwards from there. And the same instrument, the same way of looking, I used for the human system. For the question of what a human being is, how they learn, what is taken from them and what sustains them.

The foundational text I worked out — the 7-dimensional feeling model — is not the product of academic research. It is the product of a lifetime of direct observation. Of the question: what do I actually see when I look at how people feel, how children learn, how feelings relate to each other? Not what does the theory say — what do I see?

The foundational text I worked out — the 7-dimensional feeling model — is not the product of academic research.

The answer is this model. It is not complete. It is a denkbasis — a thinking foundation, as the name says. A foundation on which further building must happen, by people who read reality with their own primal feeling and see whether it holds.

Where it goes from here

Edition 3 is not the end. It is the beginning of the work that must stand on this platform.

A separate reference work on education in the AI era is coming. Pilots are coming that test the principles from the manifest in practice. The conversation with researchers about the communication hypothesis is coming, if there are researchers who want to have it. The work of further translation is coming — from theory to the concrete school day, to the concrete upbringing day, to the concrete policy choice.

And there is this platform itself: openvizier.org. A place where, without diplomatic detours, what needs to be said is said. Not as an indictment but as a diagnosis. Not as a utopian programme but as an honest map of the situation.

The reader who has read this now has a map in their hands. It is up to them what they do with it. A map is never the landscape — it is only the pointer to the direction. The landscape must be walked.

Those who want to walk it now know where it lies.

The theoretical foundation for this edition — the complete 7-dimensional feeling model, the three brain layers, the communication hypothesis between primal feelings — is in the work Denkbasis voor een 7-dimensionaal gevoelsmodel. The practical pedagogical elaboration is in the Manifest voor onderwijs en opvoeding. Both are available for download on openvizier.org.