A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson Gregory)(Paperback)

Gregory Bateson died in 1980, but his work grows more and more relevant each year. In his wide-ranging, penetrating thought he illuminated many dimensions of human interaction and of our connection to the wider biological world. One of the questions that runs through this book is “how to describe a living system without killing it?” This starts early with Bateson’s anthropological work on culture, and runs through into ecology, identity, change, evolution and learning. How to talk about these things – and organisms that are experiencing them – without resorting to typologies?The sacred and its relationship to a description of ecology is foremost. As are the puzzles of being an individual in culture in a whole vast collection of biological relationships and cultural idea-relationships – and how to bring all of those into the field of ecology. The answer to the question “what is the world?” is “it’s what I perceive it to be.” And the question of what I perceive is only going to begin to have some looseness in it, when the question is asked: “Are you perceiving the world, or are you perceiving your perception?” Perhaps this question is the beginning of the possibility of loosening the matrix. When Bateson talks about coevolution – the way that the grass changes when the horse changes, and the horse changes as the grass changes, along with multiple other organisms – there is cha
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