The Gestalt of Science and Self – 08.19.10

Student Question: Could you please expand on the gestalt diagram (see below) that was pictured in the book we’re reading in our Prema-culture class, Signs of Meaning in the Universe?

The issue “goes back to Gestalt Psychology. And the Gestaltists realized that our perception is always in the form of a foreground and a background,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “We tend to focus on the foreground, and the background drops out. . . . But whatever we choose as foreground is indeed a construct, and is culturally created—most of the objects that we perceive, we perceive because we have linguistic concepts that delineate those objects for us. And if we didn’t have such constructs embedded in language and cultural values, etc., we would see the world very differently because, in fact, everything is connected.”

“But then there is the next question of, well, ‘Who is perceiving both the foreground and the background?’ The perceiver is not on the paper; the perceiver is never an object. So there is a third level that is always beyond any understanding you have of reality, because the one who has that understanding does not appear in the reality; you are always beyond it. And so the self—when you begin to then incorporate it into your understanding of reality, whatever it is you understand of the self and add that in . . . there remains then another observer. . . . You will never be able to capture the self in any definition or construct or understanding. Because whatever you capture, that ‘you,’ is beyond.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.