Page 14 - Becoming Aware_Neat
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of day in Germany, round about the beginning
of the last century. By the 1920’s it had
coalesced into a radical new school of
psychology that went by the name of Gestalt:
a German word that can best be translated
into the English ‘configuration’. The gestalts
that go to make up our personal reality don’t
necessarily have a lot to do with the purely
physical properties of the presenting world at
any given moment. Our world-view exists only
as a series of events, as happenings between
ourselves and the world-flux that both
surrounds and permeates our substance. Each
perceived image is actually a personal
selection, an individual gestalt, from the
infinite permutations of possibility that are
inherent in that flux. In extreme cases, when
this repressed material from the past can take
over and completely replace the physical
presenting field, it produces what is known as
an hallucination. But as was pointed out as
early as 1890, by the psychologist William