Why the name?

As I pondered a name for this blog, I was of course trying to find something catchy that would also describe something essential about the blog, or about myself (since the blog might and probably will change character over time (well, so will probably I (this whole parenthesis has been rendered relatively useless))).

And as I wondered about this, my thoughts went back to when I first became a Christian, which indeed was one of the Big Changes of my life, and the event which probably influenced my subsequent life in a greater way than any other event.

And I was trying to think of something related to that event - a catchphrase that could sum up what happened. And I thought of the feeling of seeing everything in a new perspective, and how it was impossible to see things in the way I used to, even if I tried. This phenomenon has several names, I believe, but one of them is "gestalt shift", and it was illustrated by Wittgenstein with the "duckrabbit" figure.

You can see both a duck and a rabbit in the picture, but you cannot see both at the exact same time (though you might be able to shift between them pretty quickly). In other words - the brain must interpret the sensual input in one way at a time.

It is not clear how or whether this simple example can be extrapolated to what happens when you have a life-changing event. But they have this in common: You can see the picture, big or small, in one way or another, but not both at the same time.

The difference between this example and my conversion is that I find it impossible to shift back. I cannot remember or understand how or what I thought about life before, just as I couldn't understand how Christians viewed the world before I became one myself.

My conversion was a sudden gestalt shift - it happened over the course of a week or so. But gestalt shifts can have varying lengths, of course. The way I think about science now that I am a Ph.D. student is very different from the way I thought as an undergrad. I also imagine having children is a huge gestalt shift, though I haven't experienced it first-hand. All of a sudden, your life revolves around someone else than yourself (though ideally, Christians should have experienced this feeling already...).

Anyway - I found "Gestalt Shift" to be a pretty catchy term and at the same time descriptive of my own history. So even if the character of this blog or my own character changes, the concept of a gestalt shift will always have a place in my life. And that's how the blog was named. The added bonus is that it could also refer to how the readers of this blog would be shifted gestaltically from reading it. Of course, one would have to be a megalomaniac to write a blog and expect it to have such an impact.

P.S. And of course, the account written above is only more or less true, chronologically speaking. In fact, the gestalt shift has been a fascinating concept to me for a long time, and when I created the blog I didn't ponder its name - I immediately knew what it was going to be. But the account above makes for better reading.