How Open?

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of ground, or Air, or Ought —
A wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

— Emily Dickinson, in Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Fall 1990, p. 51.

     This is the amazing phenomenon of a myth, which is so important to recognize today, when we can't avoid falling into the habit of explaining every step that we make. Suddenly we encounter a quite different form, a form which speaks very powerfully, with very precise, immediate recognizable meaning: and that meaning is there, we receive it, we seem to understand it, yet when we try to dissect it, it slips between our fingers. This shock that comes from encountering a great myth acts upon us, in a sense, by opening the mind. Now, to be really open in an unexpected way, we need to reach the state of great emptiness that is so often referred to in different traditions — that moment when there is nothing but a complete void: and music exists, poems and sounds exist, so as to lead us straight to that  extraordinary state of pure openness, of real freedom.
— Peter Brook, "The Sleeping Dragon," in Ibid., p. 52.

     It is important to recognize that the process of waking or coming to oneself is by no means automatic; indeed, it may be uncommon.
Kierkegaard writes:
"And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and is now possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die." [Either/Or, Lowrie (tr.), V. 2, p. 172]
     Their loss is compounded: they have lost the ability to recognize that they are lost. Their entrapment is internal, not external. They are not trapped by circumstances, but by not being aware of being trapped. Put positively, an expanded vision would allow them to perceive new opportunities. This is why only radical change will save them — because they are unaware of their true location, doing more of the same does no good. If adversity arises, they may, like the sailors on Jonah's boat, row harder, but this kind of effort will not bring the right kind of change. It is like words spoken in the wrong language. Kierkegaard notes that such a person "learns to imitate the other men, noting how they manage to live, and so he too lives after a sort, . . . but a self he was not and a self he did not become." [The Sickness Unto Death, Lowrie (tr.), p. 186]
— James L. Bull, "Rethinking Jonah: The Dynamics of Surrender," in Ibid., pp. 81-82.