It's all about perspective

The mind wants unity. It wants structure, order, and wholeness. But nature and life often overload the system with sometimes purely random details. Nature hates a vacuum, but the mind hates ambiguity, and thus the battle is waged.

According to gestalt psychology, the mind (especially the perceptual system) will naturally arrange information to make sense of the input. This need to organize according to basic heuristics can, according to gestaltists, explain why people see either a vase or two faces in the picture to the left (but never both concurrently) or why we have the impression that the moon is following us or why the trees in the distance seem to be still, as we race pass in a train. As is so often said, perspective is everything.

There are five basic laws for gestalt perception:

1. The Law of Similarity: Things that look alike are grouped alike.
2. The Law of Prananz: The mind prefers the simplest representation, also known as the foreground/background distinction.
   
3. The Law of Proximity: Things that are close together are grouped together.
   
4. The Law of Continuity: The mind prefers things to move in smooth, constant directions.
5. The Law of Closure: Objects that are grouped together become one unit.

True to the 4th law, the mind extends this pattern of organization to more than just visual stimuli. All input is organized, compartmentalized, explained, and thank heavens it is! When there is pure chaos, there can be no progress. Progress presupposes direction, which entails a path, and both of these necessitate some organization, even if it is contrived.

The effects of gestalt are found not only in our perception of pictures or distant trees but also in our perception of one another. When thinking about some of the current conflicts, it's hard for me not to think of the gestalt and wonder how our perspectives may be seriously skewed, how we've spent so long seeing vases, that we have forgotten that there are also faces (law 2), how we've spent so long assuming all things and people who look alike are alike and should be treated alike (laws 1, 3, and 5), how we assume that, just because things are a certain way today, they have always been as such and always will be as such (law 4).

It may be human nature to use gestalt perception as a way to structure and comprehend our world, but it is also human nature to fight our human nature and challenge our assumptions about our world. In thinking about the current conflict in Israel/Palestine, we should we wary of our gestaltist nature. It is not true that the Middle East has always been or must always be a place of tragedy and religious/national intolerance. It is not true that all Israelis or Palestinians think or feel the same or should be lumped together. It is not true that only one side is blameless or at fault ubiquitously. Just as there is a vase, so are there faces. Just as there is true pain, so is there equal possibilities.


While I feel odd saying it's just a matter of perception, in someways it is just a matter of perception. We must never forget that both truths are equally as present and equally a valid and that it is our current perspective that leads to the illusion of all-or-nothingness. We have stared so long at the situation with the perspective of "Who started it?" and "Who's terrorizing whom?" that we've forgotten that we have the ability to change our perspective to "Who is going to end this?" and "Who is going to heal whom?"

Although we may have to go cross-eyed for awhile, and although we may get a bit of a headache, we can change the context and can change the meaning. It may take a bit of effort, but we can see the forgotten possibility. And we can choose to make the image we have of each other and questions we ask of each other the ones that are most likely to bring us peace. We can choose to move from seeing only death to seeing beauty instead.