The Gestalt model is an approach to understanding the organization of experience — how it is that we get from the chaotic, overwhelming world of stimulus and event to the kind of organized, usable, and relatively stable sequences and pictures that serve us in our essential survival and growth task of predicting and dealing with contingency, both present and future. The ability to do this flexibly and creatively, across a variable range of conditions, is our fundamental species survival characteristic, the capacity that first set our particular evolutionary line apart from the other great apes, and then led to our spreading over and dominating the globe (a domination which may yet come to an end, if we do not solve the kinds of social and intergroup problems that will be discussed in this essay).