From existentialism, Gestalt therapy drew these notions:

ACTUAL EXPERIENCE is above the abstractions.
Priority of what is lived.
Meditate to act.

Each human experience is SINGULAR and UNALIENABLE.
Each existence is ORIGINAL.

Each person is responsible for his existential project. This gives sense to his life and so creates his relative FREEDOM each day.

Besides its contacts with phenomenology and existentialism, Gestalt Therapy has a close connection with currents of oriental thought. Perls, who had had some contact with Zen Buddhism, intensified it during his residence in Esalen. There he same into contact with Alan Watts, perhaps the main Tao exponent in the West (author of The Way of the Tao, among others) With Gia-Fu-Feng, who had just arrived from China, he came to know the essence of Tai Chi.

"Gestalt insists on the non-search, not on the find, on attention to the here-and-now and a healthy attitude in it. Besides, the Zen rests on the cult of attention and the acknowledgement of the perfection of the mind in natural state. Gestalt is a crypt Buddhism and a crypt Taoism. Taoism talks about the Tao of things and the Tao of individuals. This refers to a wise and deep spontaneity beyond the ego's conscious will. This is no different from the Gestalt ideal".

Contemporary physics has revolutionised concepts about matter space, time, cause, effect. Picking up traditional oriental mystics' ideas, quantum scientists demonstrate that man is not a part from any of nature's phenomena.

In traditional science, man is an observer. In the new holistic vision (which includes Gestalt) man is a participant and is committed.

A number of contemporary scientists base their theories on this vision: Fritjof Capra, Hubert Reeves, Jean Charon, Mitsuo Ishikawa, Olivier Costa de Beauregard, etc. We owe them the link between the Orient's millenary thought and the Occident's new paradigms. They start from a profound study of the Tao Te Ching, the book written by Lao Tsu in the fifth century BC. Known as the "Book of Life", it covers-through metaphors-the laws of nature and, above all, proposes non intervention in the course of things.

Tao maintains two essential and unavoidable principles:

The Yin (feminine) comprehends the beauty, the sweetness, the smoothness, the earth, the moon, the soft, etc. It is stability. The Yang (masculine) includes the force, the penetration, the sky, the sun, the hard, the harsh, etc. It is movement.

The acknowledgement and integration of the opposite polarities is, precisely one of Gestalt therapy's main issues. Other questions Gestalt borrows from Taoism are:

EMPHASIZING SPONTANEITY, WHAT COMES UP.

APPRECIATING THE BODY AS THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRIT�

CONCENTRATING HERE AND NOW.

ELIMINATING PSEUDO MORALIST'S INTERJECTIONS LIKE 'YOU MUST

STRESSING THAT ALL CHANGE STARTS BY ACCEPTING WHAT YOU ARE

EMPHASIZING THE CONTINUUM OF CONSCIENCE 'THE GESTALTS OPEN AND CLOSE PERMANENTLY