Transformations: Transpersonal Gestalt Primer Intro
T R A N S F O R M A T I O N S:
A Transpersonal Gestalt Primer
by
Edwin H. Elkin, Ph.D. Founding Member, Gestalt Institute of Washington, DC
Transpersonal Gestalt Prayer
Dedicated to Fritz Perls, MD and Ram Dass
I DO YOUR THING AND YOU DO MY THING.
I am in this world to help you give up your expectations
And you are in this world to help me give up mine.
For You ARE Me and I AM You.
If by chance we find each other, all is beautiful,
If not, all is still beautiful.
NAMASTE
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ED ELKIN, Ph.D. is an internationally known Gestalt Therapist and Trainer, working in the Human Potential field since 1970. He founded Transpersonal Gestalt as an explicitly spiritual variation on
Traditional Gestalt, epitomized by the “traditional” Gestalt Prayer:
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
Because I am I and You are You.
If by chance we find each other, all is beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
As a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Dr. Elkin was given the name,
Swami Anand Dinkar which means “blissful bringer of the new day” He was also a founding
member of the Bodhisattva Arts Transformational Theater Company, created by Pennel Rock, Ph.D.
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PREFACE:
This booklet is a personal statement of some transformations in thinking, writing, and living that I experienced since my earliest transpersonal awakening during the running of the bulls in Pamplona,
Spain in the summer of 1962. The booklet is intended to introduce the reader to the background and content of TRANSPERSONAL GESTALT. As the first public expression of Transpersonal Gestalt, it has become my primer. In sharing it, perhaps it will become the reader’s as well.
In 1969, studying and training at Fritz Perls’ Gestalt community or kibbutz at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island in Canada, I seriously took Fritz’s advice to do my own thing and not his.
Having just experienced an intense seminar with Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert, Ph.D.) which
renewed my interest in the transpersonal, I sensed an incompleteness in a “traditional” Gestalt approach which emphasized independence and separateness, epitomized by “I do my thing and you do your thing”.
To complete MY gestalt, there had to be some recognition of interdependence and sharing, encompassing the place within each of us where it is also true that “I do your thing, and you do mine”
To manifest these ideas. I created a Transpersonal version of Perls’ often quoted Gestalt Prayer.
By shifting the emphasis from “I AM I AND YOU ARE YOU” to “I AM YOU AND YOU ARE ME”
Transpersonal Gestalt was born.
As Gestalt training encourages experimentation and discovery, this Primer is an experiment in form
whose full flowering remains to be discovered. It is a seedling collage of the author’s perceptions of Transpersonal Gestalt, juxtaposing prose and poetry, reason and intuition, and the author’s writings
supplemented by brief contributions from other “kindred spirits”.
Like a multi-faceted jewel that can be regarded from several viewpoints, differing in style and format,
the booklet reflects my own journey into the Transpersonal and exemplifies the most basic Gestalt maxim that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.
Chapers 1, 2 and 3 present respectively, some of the philosophy, theory and practice of Transpersonal Gestalt.
Chapter 1. GESTALT AS A YOGA FOR THE WEST was written and read for a large international
audience at the First World Scientific Yoga Conference in New Delhi, India in December 1970.
It represents my thinking a year after leaving Canada, and formulates the view of Gestalt as a form of
Yoga , or union of man with his universe.
Chapter 2, Towards a theory of Transpersonal Gestalt was written in 1973 and elaborates some of the key differences between transpersonal and traditional approaches to Gestalt, as I gained experience in working with individuals and groups.
Chapt. 3: A Transpersonal Gestalt Microlab, is a “present centered” version of the workshop I offered
at the Eastern Regional Meetings of the the Association for Humanistic Psychology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in April 1974. This “case study” dramatizes how transpersonal experiences may be induced in a group setting, blending techniques of guided fantasy, encounter and theater games with those of traditional Gestalt.
Chapter 4: Kindred Spirits, includes six selections by others whose message conveys other aspects of the Transpersonal Gestalt Gestalt.
Included are “Gestalt Be/Attitudes” by Jean Lanier, “Who Am I?” by Sidney Lanier,
an excerpt form Lord of Light by Roger Zelazney, “I am a limerick” by Swami Anand Dinkar,
“Esperanza” an excerpt from the Mother by Maxim Gorky, and “For Love of Space” by Jerry Glenn.
The last is a futurist parable which ends the booklet with a vision o synergy between love and technology.
Ram Dass and Perls are clearly acknowledged as the mentors who led me to create Transpersonal Gestalt. Alan Watts, however, provided the most succinct image of what Transpersonal Gestalt is about by suggesting that we see ourselves as unique waves emerging from a common sea.
Expanding on this insight, I realized that if we focus on the waves, we can appreciate our differences; when we focus on the sea, we can appreciate our common source.
AS WAVES EMERGE FROM THE SEAS,
AS LEAVES EMERGE FROM THE TREES,
JUST SO, YOU AND I, EMERGE FROM THIS UNIVERSE
APPARENTLY SEPARATE BEINGS.
Yet if we dive beneath the surface,
Bright truth shines like morning sun.
Behind our strangely wondrous differences.
We Truly All Are One .
To each reader I offer the traditional Indian salutation, “NAMASTE” which means:
I salute the Buddha, the Christ, the White Light within you.
I honor the place in you, where behind our individual differences, we are the same.
DEDICATED TO THE ONENESS AMONG US……
Ed Elkin
Washington, DC
October 1979
