Gestalts: Unwrapping The Package
by Kimberly Snow
The other night I sat on the bed with my four-month-old daughter, reading her a little soft fabric book that was given to her by her aunt. It was a book on basic shapes. There was a star. A crescent. A square and a rectangle. An oval and a diamond. And of course, the triangle. An object accompanied each shape. For the diamond there was a kite, for the crescent, a moon, and so on. But it was not until I reached the page with the triangle that something struck a chord inside. The object chosen to represent the triangle was the sail on a small boat.
I recalled what I had learned of basic gestalts from remote viewing. When you Technical Remote View, you work from the general to the specific. The first stage is the production of the ideogram. The ideogram is not only the most enigmatic element of TRV, it is also the most essential. At the start of each session, the viewer spontaneously produces an ideogram, which is the viewer's autonomic physical response to the target. The target's signal line is felt by the body as an impulse in the autonomic nervous system and then transmitted into the ideogram, as a mark on paper, and the data then streams out of viewer. Rene Warcollier, a French chemical engineer who experimented during the early part of the twentieth century with telepathy and psychically derived data discovered that the scribbles produced at the impulse of perceiving a target contains all of the basic elements of the target itself. This was before the term Remote Viewing was ever heard of.
When the viewer produces the ideogram, he has received the package of information. Using TRV protocol, this package will then be unraveled, allowing him to perceive the data and objectify the information on paper. The ideogram often represents the general gestalt of the target or site in its most basic form, which then allows the viewer to lock on to a theoretical signal line and decode and decompress accurate data.
A gestalt (the elements of which are contained within the ideogram) is a German word for "form", and is a psychological term defined as a "perceived organized whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." The word had its origin in Gestalt Psychology, which began as a 20th-century school of psychology that was the basic foundation for our current theoretical studies of perception. The theory of the gestalt began near the end of the 19th century as a reaction against the scientific schools of psychological studies at the time that ignored the value of greater form and meaning in lieu of picking apart the psychological process into their more detailed atomistic levels.
In 1912 a man named Max Werthehimer published a paper in which he cited a study that he and some of his colleagues had done which was based on an experiment they performed called phi-phenomenon. This experiment consisted of many visual stationary objects which, when shown in extreme rapid progression, gave the viewer the illusion of motion (The best example of this is the way motion pictures work). It became evident that the mind does not always register what it perceives in piecemeal fashion, but rather takes in all parts as one field that contains the many parts. This experiment later became what is known as the law of Pragmanz.
While the above history should be taken in context with the subject of psychology, the comparison and use in remote viewing is similar in theory. In remote viewing, the gestalt is a sum of all of the elements that will be present at the target. For example, a wavy horizontal line is a water gestalt, and it would be the first gestalt you would get if the target were an ocean, a river, or a lake. The ideogram, or package, that is first delivered to a remote viewer would contain that wavy line, or gestalt. In the first stage of the Technical Remote Viewing process, the target signal arrives to the viewer as a complete package, or gestalt, containing all the elements and parts of the target itself. In the process of producing and decoding the ideogram, we are gaining some degree of initial 'experience' about the remote site. Like slowing down a film in a projector, eventually you see more and more of the individual frames which make up the complete picture, until at last when the TRV session is finished, you have many single broken down elements of the initial gestalt (in other words, details about the target). To an unwitting observer, the production of an 'ideogram' might seem primitive and pointless. But it remains the foundation of TRV.
But where do these gestalts come from? Are they universal? Based on Jung's theory of a collective unconscious, there are gestalts and archetypes (an original model or type after which other similar things are patterned) which exist in a collective that we tap into on a daily basis for our fundamental understanding. Jung writes in "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious":
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.When one is Technical Remote Viewing one is tapping into that collective unconscious, or Matrix, and the gestalts contained there are universal. During the many years of research on remote viewing at SRI and in the military remote viewing unit, it was discovered that there were basic gestalts that were consistently produced when beginning a remote viewing session. Later, during further refinement of Technical Remote Viewing by PSI TECH, more universal gestalts were discovered. Some of the basics include a circle or loop for a lifeform, for example. A horizontal line for land. A wavy line as mentioned previously for water or liquid. For a mountain, the gestalt is an inverted V, or a diagonal line up to a peak, followed by a diagonal line back down. In the case of the mountain gestalt, however, it was found that that particular gestalt was a universal representation of two forms in the collective: A mountain, and a boat.
Finding the gestalt on the sailboat in my child's soft book struck home to me just how common gestalts are, and how universal, which strengthened my belief in the theory of a collective unconscious. In showing my baby the triangle on the sail of a boat, I introduced her to the basic gestalt package, a representation of a very complex and detailed world that she will later be able to unravel like a child with a Christmas box, unwrapping one of our most precious gifts: the human experience. It is this same anticipation that I experience when, as I begin my TRV session, the fundamental gestalt springs forth from the Matrix. The target package is delivered, just waiting to be unwrapped.
