An Open Mystic makes it a personal focus to cognize fleeting ephemera at the edge of their consciousness.

In earlier Open Mystic pages, it was noted that all energy, knowledge, matter, etc. exist as particles and/or waveforms (see Very Scintillating).  All sentient beings are entities which integrate these particles and waveforms to give the illusion of existence - this is the essential consciousness function.  It's much like the artificially created user interface on this computer - I get an illusion of colors, words, etc. on the screen that are organized from a stream of digital ones and zeros. Exactly the same with our consciousness and existence - our human "operating system" integrates a multi-faceted stream of particles and waveforms give the illusion of sound, sight, heat, cold, ego, and so forth.  I'm listening to the radio at the moment, and my mind is integrating the rapidly varying sound waves to give the illusion of talk and music.  Similarly with all my other senses, not to mention my ego artifact.

A person's temporal aperture is the individual collection of cognizable streams.  The radio, the floor, my chair, the radio music, etc. are all easily cognized objects as they are well within my Temporal Aperture as described in earlier pages.

The interesting cases lie at the fringes of that temporal aperture - barely understandable ideas, fleeting insights, and so forth. Rather than blatantly easy, obvious streams, these are regions where cognization becomes difficult - areas outside the 3-dimensional comfort zone of our everyday existence. The stream of "data" is not so contiguous but present as transient bursts since the consciousness cannot grab and hold on to the incomplete ephemeral streams at the edge of awareness.  Everyone alive has at least a vague notion of incoming barely cognizable sensations, percepts, and concepts. An analogy may lie in taking a laptop computer to the edge of a wireless hot spot range.  The data rate slows way down as the organizable data stream is broken up with unrelated noise.  The laptop "cognizes" only bursts of data in that case and not a clean continuous stream.  Same with our consciousness.

In martial arts, Open Mystics are persons with such a skilled focus that they can physically catch an arrow in flight.  In the Temporal Aperture discussion realm, an Open Mystic is one who makes an active conscious fetish out of catching fleeting notions of all types at the edge of consciousness.

The Open Mystic martial artist is in some danger since a mistake could mean physical collision and maybe penetration by the arrow in flight.  Similarly, as was discussed in earlier pages also, the Open Mystic in our Temporal Aperture context runs the risk of mis-interpreting the fleeting ephemera passing through their awareness.  It is important to practice testing these arrow catches in trivial cases to be sure they have been properly cognized.  The laptop example mentioned above has error correcting algorithms to assure that the final data stream product is accurate if slow.  The laptop will not be altered by the experience of operating near its wireless range, but the human consciousness would gradually learn how to deal with operating at its edge as long as good error correction is applied by the person who possessed that consciousness. Such a practice would lead to Temporal Aperture surround growth.