Quote Originally Posted by LeaningKarst View Post
Hi Summerlander,

I hope you receive email notifications of responses to threads you’ve posted in so that you read my previous message here, which was deleted for quoting your (deleted) message. But if not – I’m sorry to hear that you won’t be returning to the forum but will respond to your points here on this thread just the same as I would have otherwise. And since I don’t seem to be able to PM you, I’ll just say here that I hope you find equally interesting conversations to participate in elsewhere. But I would recommend against ad hom language in the future, even if it’s in response to strawmanning or other fallacies.

Life has gotten unexpectedly busy since I decided to start this thread, but I still hope to be able to continue it once things have settled down a bit. I think I’ve just about reached the point where it makes sense to start branching out from the central concepts of Gestalt theory and to address more specialized ones, so I’ll go ahead and wait a little longer before addressing your points on hedonism vs. puritanism, willpower, how this might relate with Dzogchen and rigpa, and so on. My next post will at least partially address your points on schemas, though – or at least it would have if, on closer inspection, the topic hadn’t turned out to be complex enough to warrant a post of its own. But I will say now that while it’s easiest to understand gestalts and their role in organizing perception through considering visual perception, Perls considers them to be a much broader phenomenon. And my own reading of Perls’ book suggests that schemas should actually be considered as a kind of second-degree gestalt instead of something distinct from them – or, to put it in a different way, a habit of perceiving certain gestalts (i.e., figure/ground configurations) that, once developed, is then deployed to organize subsequent perceptions, making them more likely to appear in a similar configuration whether or not such an organization is appropriate for any particular instance. But I want to do some more reading before committing myself to that interpretation.

Speaking of which, I will say here that, yes, you’re absolutely correct that it should be Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. I always get the name of that book wrong, and I’d actually meant to go back and fix it at some point. Oh, well.
I finally got to read it, my friend, thank you, it wasn't in vain. 🙂