Hi Erna,
My apologies for not being able to give a direct answer but for what it's worth this is what I understand of it thus far.
Close could mean your exactly right or it could mean that your getting warmer. From what I understand thus far the cassiopaeans do/cannot give direct answers. Being that they are STO, I think they are bound to a law of non-interference in terms of freewill. I believe Laura or Ark implied that they are the 10% inspiration that must be matched by 90% perspiration (meaning (I think) that they can help with giving some 'clues' but not direct answers and the rest has to be WORKED for, read/understood/discovered/mined.. to get the information). Of course I could be wrong and there's certainly plenty of room for growth so far as my understanding/knowledge.
On 'open' I'll try and give an example. Your driving down the freeway (major roadway for faster moving vehicle traffic) and you could make it to your destination, you could also potentially have an accident, the situation is open. Maybe that analogy sucks.. How about, nothing is fixed yet, there is the potential for this event (bad) or that event (good). It's open to all the forces that are capable of influencing whichever outcome, be they universal, solar system, political.. it's not yet written in stone, therefore it is open (?). That's probably a better analogy. Still this reply seems lacking somehow.
A place once pointed out to me for subjects I've little understanding on (definitions of some of the esoteric words like shocks, man 1,2,3- Gurdjieff etc..) can be found here as you may already know: http://glossary.cassiopaea.com/glossary.php
As a footnote I hope I didn't overstep my bounds, just FYI (For Your Information) Erna I'm not an editor.
Though this quote may not fit my analogy.. From Objectivity: http://glossary.cassiopaea.com/glossary.php?id=554
"Objectivity should not be confused with reductionism. Reductionism or determinism states that given complete information of a system's state, it is possible to make arbitrarily far reaching projections of the system's state into the past and future. There are many obstacles to strict determinism, starting from quantum uncertainty, probable non-local effects, no system being absolutely closed, possible effects of consciousness and observership and so forth. Partly relating to this, Godel has demonstrated that a system cannot be its own meta-system, i.e. contain complete knowledge of itself. This suggests that attaining objective knowledge of any universe from within it is an open-ended quest.
Salutations!