A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind - by Gregory Bateson

Part I: Form and Pattern in Anthropology

The early days of anthropology were concerned chiefly with the business of description, and especially the early anthropologists were struck by outstanding bizarre features of the cultures which they studied. In their attempts to generalize, they were concerned chiefly to find identities or close similarities between phenomena in one place and phenomena in another. This is perhaps always the first step in a new science—the search, not for an abstract regularity, but for a concrete, episodic similarity between what occurs here and what occurs elsewhere; or between something which occurs now and something which occurs at some other time. Correspondingly, the theories of these early anthropologists were chiefly oriented to explaining such similarities, and naturally, since the similarities searched for were episodic, the type of theory which was devised was episodic or historical theory. Controversy raged, for example, between those who believed that resemblance between far-separated cultures ought to be accounted for in terms of similar evolutionary process and those others who believed that all such resemblance could only be accounted for by processes of cultural contact and diffusion.

For all anthropologists who regard personality as a variable which must be taken into account, the crucial technical problem is that of describing the personality. It is no use to recognize a variable until salt can be put upon its tail. The problem of handling a new variable, or rather such a complex of variables as is denoted by the word “personality,” at once forces us to try to find either numerical statements—dimensions which can be measured—in terms of which personality can be evaluated, or failing such a quantitative approach, we must develop adjectives which will describe personality. It is natural, therefore, that anthropology has turned to psychology, and especially to those schools of psychology which have tried to define or to discriminate different types of personality. The earliest work on these lines was done by Seligman (1931), who used the typology suggested by Jung, of “introvert” and “extravert” types of personality. Seligman attempted to describe cultures according to whether they produced, in the individuals, a more introvert or a more extravert personality structure.

Seligman’s work was very little followed up by other psychologists, and the next major attempt to describe culture in terms of personality types was made by Ruth Benedict (1934). Benedict was stimulated, not by Jung, but rather by the Dilthey and Spengler school of historians. She attempted to apply the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” dichotomy to the contrast between the Zuñi, a quiet Apollonian group in the Southwest pueblo, and two groups of violently Dionysian people, the Plains Indians and the Mexican Penitentes, with whom the Zuñi were in contact. It is significant that this technique of describing cultural contrast was most successful in Benedict’s hands when applied to cultures which were actually in contact. She was able to show, for example, that a very high valuation was placed upon various forms of dissociated excitement by the Plains Indians and the Penitentes. The Plains Indians achieve mystic experience when seeking for a vision either through drastic self-torture or self-repression; or they may achieve it by the use of drugs. Among the Zuñi all these things were either absent, or—more significantly—if present, were practiced in such a way that they no longer had any Dionysiac quality. Where the Plains Indians use peyote, a drug, for the achievement of a high degree of disassociation, the Zuñi, with the same drug, living close to the area where peyote is obtained, have never accepted the peyote cult as part of their religious practices, with the exception of one, small, deviant group. Similarly, the Zuñi have resisted alcohol, to which every other group of American Indians has, to some extent, succumbed. In general, where the Plains Indians seek for ecstasy, for the extremes of religious experience, the Zuni practice their religion with decorum and precision. Their dancing is exact, a following of a careful pattern; it is not ecstatic. Benedict was able to follow this contrast through the whole gamut of Zuñi and Plains Indian cultures, and to show that these cultures had consistently specialized in these particular forms of expression in all their fields and institutions.

Benedict does not follow Nietzsche in the finer details of his description of this typology. The sense in which she uses the terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” can best be conveyed in her words: “The Dionysian pursues them (the values of existence) through the ‘annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence’; he seeks to attain in his most valued moments escape from the boundaries imposed upon him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience. The desire of the Dionysian, in personal experience or in ritual, is to press through it toward a certain psychological state, to achieve excess. … The Apollonian distrusts all this, and has often very little idea of the nature of such experiences. He finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He ‘knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense.’ He keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not meddle with disruptive psychological states. In Nietzsche’s fine phrase, even in the exaltation of the dance he ‘remains what he is, and retains his civic name.’”

We are too liable to think that dominance-submission is bad for human dignity. Only at a very crude level is this true, and we would do better, I believe, to think of a whole series of themes—dominance-submission, exhibitionism-spectatorship, succoring-dependence, etc.—as pan-human elements in behavior which may be recombined to give the most various resulting products, some poisonous and some beneficial. In England, for example, in the parent-child relationship the parents are on the whole dominant, succoring, and exhibitionist, while the children practice submission, dependence, and spectatorship. But what is learned is the combination of these things, not each element separately, and if you put an Englishman in an exhibitionistic role—if, for example, he comes to America and gives lectures—his tone of voice will inevitably echo that early training in which dominance and exhibitionism were linked together on the same side of the picture. He will lecture as if it were for him to decide what is good for that audience.

In the corresponding American pattern, the parents show dominance (slightly), succoring, and spectatorship, while the children show submission, dependence, and exhibitionism. The exhibitionismspectatorship is reversed in its combination with the other themes, and indeed this reversal seems to be an essential component of American upbringing. In England the child’s dependence is drastically broken (in the upper and middle classes) by sending him to school; in America, the analogous psychological weaning is done by the parents themselves, who act as approving spectators whenever the child shows off independence or self-sufficiency.

Actually, there appears to be considerable confusion among other scientists, and among anthropologists themselves, about the nature of the data with which the cultural anthropologist works. Therefore, this matter must be made categorically clear. We too often think that the abstractions which we draw are a part of the data from which they are drawn and regard ourselves as studying “culture,” or “social organization,” or “diffusion,” or “religion,” or “sex.” The creatures which we study are talking mammals and, whether they be natives of New York or of New Guinea, their talk is filled with abstract terms. Thus, we easily fall into the fallacy of assigning a false concreteness to these same abstractions. It is, therefore, salutary, at times, to leave all these abstractions aside for the moment and look at the actual objective data from which all the abstractions are drawn.

There are, I believe, only three types of data in cultural anthropology:

1. An identified individual in such-and-such a recorded context said such-and-such, and was heard by the anthropologist. More than half of all our data take this form, and our main effort in fieldwork goes into the astonishingly difficult task of collecting such items. We do not always succeed, for various reasons. Sometimes, the individual is imperfectly identified. We may have insufficient information about his past experience and position in the kinship system and social organization. Still more often, we may have only an incomplete understanding of the context in which he spoke. But this remains our ideal type of datum.

2. An identified individual in such-and-such a recorded context was seen by the anthropologist to do so-and-so. Here again, the ideal record is not always complete. The identification of the individual and the recording of the context present the same difficulties as in (1), above. In addition, we face very serious technical difficulties when we attempt to record bodily movements. Even with photographic or cinematic techniques, this is almost impossible, and the record, when obtained, can only with very great difficulty be translated into a verbal form for analysis and publication.

3. Artifacts (tools, works of art, books, clothes, boats, weapons, etc.), made and/or used by such-and-such individuals in such-and-such contexts. These are, in general, the easiest data to collect, and the most difficult to interpret.

All science is an attempt to cover with explanatory devices—and thereby to obscure—the vast darkness of the subject. It is a game in which the scientist uses his explanatory principles according to certain rules to see if these principles can be stretched to cover the vast darkness. But the rules of the stretching are rigorous, and the purpose of the whole operation is really to discover what parts of the darkness still remain, uncovered by explanation. But this game has also a deeper, more philosophic purpose: to learn something about the very nature of explanation, to make clear some part of that most obscure matter—the process of knowing.

If “ethos,” “social structure,” “economics,” etc., are words in that language which describes how scientists arrange data, then these words cannot be used to “explain” phenomena, nor can there be any “ethological” or “economic” categories of phenomena. People can be influenced, of course, by economic theories or by economic fallacies—or by hunger—but they cannot possibly be influenced by “economics.” “Economics” is a class of explanations, not itself an explanation of anything.

Once the fallacy has been detected, the way is open for growth of an entirely new science—which has in fact already become basic to modern thought. This new science has as yet no satisfactory name. A part of it is included within what is now called communications theory, a part of it is in cybernetics, a part of it in mathematical logic. The whole is still unnamed and imperfectly envisioned. It is a new structuring of the balance between Nominalism and Realism, a new set of conceptual frames and problems, replacing the premises and problems set by Plato and Aristotle.

But in describing a given system, the scientist makes many choices, He chooses his words, and he decides which parts of the system he will describe first; he even decides into what parts he will divide the system in order to describe it. These decisions will affect the description as a whole in the sense that they will affect the map upon which the typological relations between the elementary messages of the description are represented. Two equally sufficient descriptions of the same system could conceivably be represented by utterly different mappings. In such a case, is there any criterion by which it would be possible for the scientist to choose one description and discard the other? Evidently an answer to this question would become available if scientists would use, as well as accept, the phenomena of logical typing. They are already scrupulous about the precise coding of their messages and insist upon singularity of referent for every symbol used. Ambiguity at this simpler level is abhorred and is avoided by rigorous rules for the translation of observation into description. But this rigor of coding could also be useful on a more abstract level. The typological relations between the messages of a description could also be used, subject to rules of coding, to represent relations within the system to be described.

When the scientist is at a loss to find an appropriate language for the description of change in some system which he is studying, he will do well to imagine a system one degree more complex and to borrow from the more complex system a language appropriate for his description of change in the simpler.

Culture contact seems to be one of the most difficult things to talk about that we attempt. As we talk about it here in this room and focus preponderantly upon cultural exchange and contact between various Oriental cultures and various Occidental cultures, we are actually dealing with our subject on two levels. That is, we are not quite in the position that we would be in if we were discussing contact between two New Guinea tribes, or even, I think, two Oriental nations, though my comparative knowledge of Oriental cultures isn’t good enough for me to say that. What we face is contact between a culture-contact culture and other cultures. Linguists have said that the English language has many of the characteristics of a pidgin or lingua franca, and the history of our civilization is that of multiple culture contact, of rapid change; and in a sense, what you Orientals are contacting is a civilization that is already to a very large extent molded by the phenomena of culture contact. This is worth taking a look at. What sort of phenomena do we expect? What are the characteristics? What happens? What’s it like?

Every time you get change in a complex ecosystem or culture, you are likely to get a fractionation in which only the ideas or those modes, etc., that can survive in both “before” and “after” conditions are likely to remain.

Culture contact is, first, a simplification. Especially a simplification of ideas. Dr. Yeh has talked about the adjectives that Chinese students apply to themselves and to Americans. To apply these adjectives at all is a perfectly fantastic and monstrous thing to do in human relations. Really! But we all do it. When do we do it? We do it in culture-contact situations, you see. Then the Chinese are patient, wise, shrewd, etc., etc., etc. What you get, perhaps even more extreme than an oversimplification of people by applying adjectives to them, is a quantification. What is above all understandable from one culture to another is quantity.

Man lives in a very strange world, with trees, and fishes, and oceans, and what not, and he has a sort of culture contact with this strange world and tries to understand it. The first thing he does is try to quantify it, you know, and that’s what science is about. Science is a piece of bastard culture contact studying between man and nature in which the complexities of nature get simplified as far as possible into measurements of one kind or another, preferably meter readings of little things in machines, and we count the storms, the raindrops, the frosts, the vegetation, how many inches high the turf is, and so on.

I now return to the two species of order—the actions and the contexts of action—which characterize the observable part of socialization, and I ask what clues to the understanding of this external order can be derived from my own internal experience of living. As I see it, the fundamental idea that there are separate “things” in the universe is a creation of and projection from our own psychology. From this creation, we go on to ascribe this same separateness to ideas, sequences of events, systems, and even persons. I therefore ask whether this particular psychological habit can be trusted as a clue to understanding the order or sorts of order that are (expectably) immanent in the socialization process; and the answer is not what naive positivism might lead us to suspect. The more complex entities—ideas, sequences, persons, and so on—seem to be suspiciously intangible and suspiciously devoid of limiting outlines, and we might therefore be led to suppose them illusory, creations only of the mind and, therefore, to be distrusted in scientific analysis.

But, precisely at this point, there is a paradoxical reversal: the socialization that we try to study is a mental process and therefore only the productions and processes of mind are relevant. The dissection of experience into ideas, sequences, and events may be “really” invalid but certainly the occidental mind really thinks in terms of such separations. If, therefore, we are to analyze processes of socialization we must examine and map these separations and, by this act of separating a group of phenomena, I commit myself to natural history. My aim is to study those separations (valid or not) that characterize the thought of those whom I study, of whom “I” am one.

Gradually the outlines of how to think about components of socialization or about any sort of mental change begin to appear. We are to concern ourselves with the psychologically “self-evident” and with a premise that the psychologically self-evident is divisible into components. This latter premise, is, itself, self-evident at the psychological level where the components appear to be (and therefore are) separable. But at a higher level of abstraction, where the mystics live, it is claimed that such separation is not only not self-evident, it is almost inconceivable. It is some traveler’s tale from the world of illusion or maya. The mystic may laugh at us but still the task of the anthropologist is to explore the world of illusion, perhaps with the eyes and ears of the mystic. To be “self-evident,” a proposition or premise must be out of reach and unexaminable: it must have defenses or roots at unconscious levels. Similarly, to be “self-evident,” a proposition or premise must be either self-validating or so general as to be but rarely contradicted by experience.

Part II: Form and Pathology in Relationship

The Theory of Games initiated by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and since elaborated by many others, is the most complex and elegant—perhaps also the most significant—theoretical advance that has yet been achieved in the whole field of behavioral science. In their great book Von Neumann and Morgenstern observe that the social sciences are in a stage of development equivalent to that of pre-Newtonian physics. They asserted that what these sciences lack is some conceptually simplified paradigm around which theory might crystallize. Newton’s artificially simplified concept, the free-falling body, was such a seminal idea in the field of physics. It was a myth, a fictitious ideal around which physical theory could take shape and, when the Theory of Games was first initiated, it appeared that the social sciences had no such artificial simplified concept. Personally I believe that the very book in which this comment was made will be found to contain something like this abstract and simplified paradigm which the social sciences need.

I observe, however, that current attempts to apply these models are usually based on naive premises regarding the biological nature of man and his place in the universe. These premises I propose to examine. The models—the so-called games—are constructed according to certain principles which have been chosen with great care and for profound reasons. If we are to use these models as explanatory devices in the business of describing any category of interactional phenomenon, it is necessary to understand these principles of simplification and the reasoning upon which the principles are based. Broadly, there are four groups of simplifying ideas:

1. The premise that the rules of the given game shall be stable within the limits of any given theorem about that game. This assumption prevents us from any loose use of the models which would regard them as analogous to any of those “games” whose character depends upon the emergence of new rules in the process of play. For example, such interactional processes or games as courtship, politics, psychotherapy, differ profoundly from Von Neumannian games in that an essential characteristic of the interaction is a process in which new rules and patterns of interaction are continually being evolved.

2. The premise that the problem-solving equipment of the players shall be similarly stable. Von Neumann’s phrasing of the matter is simply to posit that all players have from the start all the equipment necessary to solve all the problems which can be presented by the rules. This premise excludes from loose analogy all interactional phenomena which involve learning how to play or learning the rules of the game. Incidentally, it also excludes from the play of Von Neumannian games all detectable tricks. No player can hope that his opponent will make an error resulting from failure to consider some possibility of the situation.

3. The premise that the players act as if motivated by constant, monotone, and transitive preferences. They attempt to maximize some single quantity or variable, referred to as “utility.” This premise and indeed the whole of utility theory has been subject to much argument, probably because this is the bridge which connects the theory of games with the phenomena of economics. While, however, the “utility” of games theory and of theoretical economics has close analogies with money—or with whatever it is that money can buy— it is still not clear that utility or any concept like utility is a fundamental determinant of the behavior of any known organism. Similarly the utility premise excludes from consideration all appeals from one player to another which would attach value to the continuance of the game. “The game cannot go on unless you do such and such” or “I won’t play with you unless you do such and such.” No move is made in a games-theoretical game for the sake of keeping the game going; and by the same token, no player can act upon a desire to stop the game. To do either would be to act as if motivated by metautility, and it is precisely this possibility that is excluded by the simplified utility premise.

Games theory, then, is characterized by these simplifying assumptions which systematically exclude all possibilities which could only be described in some language having a metarelationship to the language of games theory. There shall be no talk about the evolution of the rules of the game. There shall be no talk about acquisition or loss of skill in play, and there shall be no metamotivation: neither value set upon the experience of play as such, nor value set upon changes in motivational structure. There shall, in fact, be no such changes.

There is, however, a fourth simplifying assumption quite different in nature from the other three. These three already may seem sufficiently unreal in that they totally depersonalize the players. The fourth assumption unexpectedly seems to personify the environment. In non-zero-sum games, the players are pitted against nature, from whom they may gain or to whom they may lose. And the fourth simplifying assumption is simply that this overall antagonist—the environment—shall be considered as another “player.” Indeed, what objection can there be to the premise that the environment is to be equated with the already depersonified participants in the “game”? The poets and religionists have often personified Nature more completely than this.

However, if Nature—or the environment—is to be simply the nth person in a non-zero-sum n−1 person game, she must conform to the rigor and symmetry of the theory as a whole. In a word, she must fit in with the other three simplifying assumptions: no evolution of rules; no learning to play; and complete determination of choices by a utility premise. Conversely, whatever meaning we attach to these simplifying assumptions when we apply them to the environment must, in fact, be the meaning attaching to them in our descriptions of the other players. We can critically investigate what we mean by “rules,” “learning,” and “utility” by asking what we would mean by these words in applying them to Nature, the nth player.

It does not immediately shock us to say that Nature never “learns” how to play and never changes the rules by which she plays. Let us therefore assume for the moment that we know roughly what these statements might mean and proceed at once to the more puzzling statement that nature or the environment makes choices which are governed by a simple utility premise. What, if anything, does this mean? What variable does Nature seek to maximize?

But we actually know something about Nature’s preferences: She prefers the probable to the improbable, and if she were guided only by this single preference, called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the universe would be simple—if rather dull. But she has clearly another preference: she prefers the stable to the unstable. This preference, also, by itself would lead to a dull universe. It is the combination of—the conflict between—these two preferences which leads to the highly complex and strangely unexpectable universe in which we live. There would be no surprises in a universe governed either by probability alone or by stability alone. Indeed, there would be no evolution and no organisms to be surprised in either of these universes. The whole fantastic, agitated “game” in which all the organisms and indeed all the particles of the universe are engaged depends upon this dual preference system which seems to be characteristic of Nature.

All that I am saying is that there are two frames of reference within which we may consider events. One of these frames allows for consideration of only the sequential aspects of time. The other makes allowance also for time in its durational aspects. The purely probabilistic statement can tell us about direction of change, e.g., toward entropy, but the statement which makes allowance for stability and duration will often contradict the statement which ignores this aspect. The classic instance of such a contradiction is in the field of evolution, and has fascinated men’s minds for many thousands of years. In terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we would expect the particles of matter to become more and more homogenized—as the milkman would say. And if this was so, pasteurization would never be necessary because nothing so complex as a bacterium could ever be evolved. But throughout biological evolution we see the innovation of complexity and differentiation, and this unexpected “progress” has, for the last hundred years, been explained by the theory of “natural selection.” A theory which invokes stability as an explanatory principle. Evolution, it is argued, is likely to occur in the direction of those organic forms which are most likely to endure or survive.

What I am suggesting is that the strategy for survival of a species or an ecological community can only be immediately governed by contingency but is continually being tested in terms of longer time spans, larger gestalten, and unpredictable changes which cannot be foreseen. Up to this point I have only been talking orthodox Darwinism. There is however a point to be added. Evidently, from what I have said already, the fight is not only to the strong or to the well adapted, it is also to the flexible. If we are to compute the probability of survival for a given organism which at this moment is prospering in a given environment, we must include in our computation some factor which shall represent the ability of that organism to survive under change and possibly adverse conditions. But we do not know what changes or what adverse difficulties the organism should be prepared for.

The creative, nonstatic characteristic of living things is precisely due to the capricious nature of their environment. And I use the word caprice advisedly. What seems to happen is that the longer an adaptive characteristic continues to have positive survival value, the more this characteristic becomes entrenched in the organization of the creature. I am not speaking of a crude inheritance of acquired characteristics, but of an analogy deeper than this between evolutionary process and individual learning. Perhaps I may make the matter clear by pointing out that the phenomenon of habit is economical. If repeated experience of a certain type of context shows that a certain type of response is regularly successful, this response becomes habitual, and there results an economy of mental process whereby the habitual response can be immediately produced without expenditure of effort upon those internal or external trials and errors which would be necessary if the situation were treated as unfamiliar. The phenomenon of habit is an economical shortcut to adaptation. It sets free for the solution of other problems those parts of the mind which are most flexible and are, if you like, the organs of adaptive behavior.

In the same sort of way there is evidently in the evolutionary process a progressive incorporation of adaptation. Experimentally, it appears that if the environment both causes the development of a given characteristic and is selective of those individuals which show this characteristic in most pronounced form, then there will be a tendency for this characteristic to appear in the genotype. We might say for example that the environment selects for the potentiality to produce this characteristic with minimum disturbance of adaptive function. As it is more economical to hand over a behavior pattern to habit, so also it appears to be more economical to hand over an acquired anatomical peculiarity to the deep-seated corpus of embryological instructions contained in the chromosomes.

When this has occurred the word capricious becomes appropriate to describe the sort of dirty trick that Nature plays upon the well-adapted organism. For many generations she has let this organism act on the assumption that some characteristic of hers could be relied upon. The organism has been led up the garden path until it has incorporated into its deeper structure those factors which produced the adaptation. And now, the characteristic of the environment undergoes change. This is, in a sense, most unfair. Nature encourages the organism to rely upon her and then shifts her tactics and says, “You see. You relied on me. Now look at you. You are a mess.” But in another sense, or looked at in a wider perspective, this unfairness is the recurrent condition for evolutionary creativity.

Now, if the picture I have drawn is anything like right, the theory of games as it stands is only applicable to organisms of whatever kind at those infinitesimal moments when conditions are static and evolution is stationary. Precisely because all organisms including man are in process of evolution, and because this process is never completed, organisms can never have the simplicity or single-mindedness of the player in a Von Neumannian game. They are never equipped to solve all the problems which the rules can present and will never, by learning, achieve this complete equipment. They do not live in a universe in which the rules of the game are constant and above all they can never be motivated by simple “utility,” of whatever sort.

If now we turn to what is known of the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of organisms, this is precisely what we find. Our a priori prediction is supported over and over again by the data. Over and over again we find organisms whose entire strategy will change from one period of time to another. In one phase the major preoccupation will be food, in another phase the animal may even cease to eat during a season of courtship or rutting. With the beginning of pregnancy the strategy may change again toward setting maximum value upon the next generation. And so on. Even among Protozoa there are shifts of this sort—periods of growth and fission, periods of sexual activity, periods of encystment, and so on. We know very little about what determines the sequence of these periods or their duration, or precipitates the change from one period to another.

In the years immediately following World War I, there occurred a significant change in the whole structuring of theory in the behavioral sciences. These were the years during which cybernetics, information theory, and the theory of games provided us with new and much more rigorous models for thinking about social and interpersonal processes. The rather crude concepts of equilibrium which we had developed before the war were replaced by the more rigorous and more flexible ideas associated with the words steady state, which will be used to refer to those equilibria which are maintained by homeostatic mechanisms.

Here it suffices to present two ideas connected with the concept steady state: (a) that progressive change in whatever direction must of necessity disrupt the status quo; and (b) that a system may contain homeostatic or feedback loops which will limit or redirect these otherwise disruptive processes.

All steady states, of course, are not desirable nor is all irreversible change undesirable. And if the discussion so far has come close to suggesting this, it is because the presentation is deliberately oversimplified by exclusion of the larger gestalten or contexts, and especially those which involve long epochs of time.

A philosophy of human relationships which to be viable needs the presence of its own confutation? The idea is not exactly new. We know, for example, that the philosophy of the police state can be maintained only in the presence of ostensible criminals and that such a state, if it lacks or cannot detect the real article, will focus attention upon innocent scapegoats. Sometimes even the myth of subversive attack may contribute to stabilizing such a philosophic system.

“Prisons are built with the stones of law and brothels with bricks of religion”—and so on. And it is significant that the sociological system—the police state—chosen here to exemplify those philosophies which are stable only in the presence of their own confutation, is in fact a system which promotes paranoid and other schizophrenic symptoms among its members. It is significant also that this philosophic system, in spite of its ruthlessness, insists upon a superficial benevolence and may even call itself a “Welfare State.”

Part III: Epistemology and Ecology

What is unique from context to context is going to have to be dealt with; what is general from context to context can be handed over to what for a moment we will call “habit.” Now it so happens that it is the more abstract features of the situation which tend to be more generally true; the more finely detailed things vary from instance to instance. We then get the rather curious phenomenon that the reasonably lazy mind will economize by sinking the more abstract characteristics of situations to essentially lower levels which are in general less conscious. So that when your patient comes into the therapy room with a more or less ready-built transference, he repeats what he has in fact done in childhood. He has sunk a number of rules for handling personal relationships which he learned in dealing with his parents and siblings, and when he comes into your consulting room, he operates in terms of that sunken material. This is more abstract than whether the person he is addressing has a beard or hasn’t got a beard; he adjusts to all the fine detail, and acts in an overall pattern derived from childhood. And what we get is a complex system of rather highly abstract generality, which it is exceedingly difficult for us to alter.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that evolution is a mental process is in its slowness, its fits and starts, its errors and stupidity. In a word, its conservatism. In a universe conceived by physics, there could be no stupidity, no conservatism, no tragedy, and no humor.

I was asked to give the Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1970, and in preparing what I would say I was led by the courtesies of the occasion to try to link my epistemological problems to what Korzybski had fought for. I asked a crucial question: What gets from the territory onto the map? The answer to this question was obvious. News of difference is what gets across, and nothing else. This very simple generalization resolves (at least for some time to come) the ancient problems of mind and matter. Mind always operates at one remove away from matter, always at one derivative (dx/dt) away from the “external” world. The primary data of experience are differences. From these data we construct our hypothetical (always hypothetical) ideas and pictures of that “external” world. “Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them,” as William Blake said long ago, and, except for chiaroscuro—which, too, is compound of differences—there is nothing inside the outlines except sameness, which differs from difference. A report of difference is the most elementary idea—the indivisible atom of thought. Those differences which are somehow not reported are not ideas. Bishop Berkeley would have been pleased.

As it took shape, this epistemology came to have five principal components.

1. It is suitable to use the words “mind” and “mental process” for what happens in systems which contain multiple parts, and what I shall call “mental processes” are in fact events in the organization and relationship among those parts. This means that notions which would attribute mentality to single atomies or parts of atomies—protons, electrons, and such— are, so far as I am concerned, unnecessary and irrelevant. This rubs out most of the theology of Teilhard de Chardin and of Samuel Butler from whom I have learned a great deal.

2. It is characteristic of mind and mental process that, in many of the steps which make up the circuitry of the mind, events are triggered not by force or impact, but by difference. Notice that difference of the sort I am concerned with is dimensionless. It is a ratio between two things—temperatures, weights, brightness, etc.— which have real dimensions in mass, length and time, or combinations of these. But the ratio between any pair is a measure from which the dimensionality is, so to speak, cancelled out to make a non-dimensional concept. The physicists call it “zero dimensions.” Since it has zero dimensions, difference, of course, carries no energy. It is of the realm of entropy and negentropy. Is also true that difference is not located in space. I have here a piece of yellow paper and a piece of white paper, but the difference “between” them is not in the yellow paper, nor is it in the white paper, nor is it in the space between them. It is, we might say, in the time between them. But that time is not a time belonging to the pieces of paper. It is our time—the time which we need to scan from one piece of paper to the other. In general, sense organs, especially the retina, accommodate to states and achieve their reports by scanning static differences. If I make a thick dot with chalk upon the blackboard, I cannot feel it if I merely place my finger tip vertically down upon it. But if I scan it by sense of touch, moving my finger across it, I feel it at once and can even judge its thickness. The retina similarly scans the visual field with micronystagmus. Without nystagmus it “sees” nothing.

3. Along with the fact of a dimensionless variable being triggered by difference goes the fact that systems which achieve mental process must be so constructed that energy is available ahead of the stimulus event at all those steps in the mental process where difference is the trigger. The muscle must have energy from its metabolism if it is to respond to the neural impulse; the nerve must have energy available from metabolism if it is to respond to the previous nerve or the end organ; and the end organ must have available metabolic energy if it is to respond to, say, a decrease in brightness. In general, apart from extremes of physical starvation or physico-chemical conditions which might prevent the degradation of potential energy in the cell, there is enough stored energy in the cell for it to do its thing. We deal not with an energy budget but with budgets of entropy, negentropy, available pathways and patterns. The fact of available energy makes possible the perception of non-existent events and phenomena, where these differ from possible realities. We can be aware of not receiving a letter, and the amoeba can become more active and go hunting when it is starving. At the same time, the isolation of the mind from “real” impacts and forces and its confinement in the more abstract, derivative world of difference is, no doubt, one of the circumstances which lead men to imagine a separation between mind and body. Difference is immanent in matter and in events.

4. The systems, which are minds, are characteristically circuits of cause and effect. They may be regenerative, i.e., subject to runaway, or they may be self-correcting, or they may oscillate, In all cases, we are concerned with cybernetic systems! But note that the word “cybernetics” has become seriously corrupted since it was put into circulation by Norbert Wiener, And Wiener himself is partly to blame for this corruption of the conception in that he associated “cybernetics” with “control.” I prefer to use the term “cybernetic” to describe complete circuiting systems. For me, the system is man-and-environment; to introduce the notion of “control” would draw a boundary between these two, to give a picture of man versus environment.

5. Systems which achieve mental process are commonly, when sufficiently complex, characterized by the hierarchies of logical types, which have been discussed above to some extent. In the formal construction of circuits, we shall expect that information (i.e., news of difference) about events in one circuit may be “fed back” to change some parameter within that circuit. It is the use of information about information that is characteristic of multiple-step hierarchies. In a more lineal paradigm, the hierarchies of naming and classification are similar. The ladders—name, name of the name, name of the name of the name; and item, class, class of classes, etc.—are familiar.

Finally there are two points which must be added to the above outline of an epistemology. These do not rate as necessary specifications of the proposed epistemology, but the reader may find that these points clear the way for an understanding of the system proposed. First, logic is a very poor model of the world of mental process. We used to ask whether computers could simulate all conceivable steps of logic, but it turns out that this was precisely a wrong question. The truth of the matter is that logic cannot simulate all the steps of causal systems operating in time. Logic breaks down when confronted with the paradoxes of abstraction—the Cretan liar or Russell’s more sophisticated version of this, the question whether the class of classes which are not members of themselves is a member of itself.

A second point which may help the reader to put this all together is the fact that a great deal of personal epistemology is concealed from consciousness. It is, so far as I know, inaccessible to consciousness, buried under the very process of conscious perception. When we say that we see, feel, taste, hear some external phenomenon or even some internal event—a pain or a muscular tension—our ordinary syntax for saying this is epistemologically confusing. What I see when I look at you is, in fact, my image of you; or you see your image of me. These images are, seemingly to us, projected out into the external world, but they are very far from being that about which we say “We see it.” To quote Korzybski again: “The map is not the territory,” and what I see is my map of a (partly hypothetical) territory out there: your face, your green shirt, etc.

Very few people seem to realize the enormous theoretical “power” of this distinction between what I “see” and what is out there. Most assume that, in fact, they see what they look at and they assume this because there is a total unconsciousness of the processes of perception. I may be conscious of an image of things out in that direction. But between those two moments or items of consciousness, I am conscious of nothing. My mental machinery provides me not with news of its processes, but with news of its products. Indeed, there is a certain common sense in a world so constructed that organisms shall not be bothered with news of processes and they shall be given the product only.

The unconscious epistemology—the how of using our senses—is a deeply concealed body of knowledge; and the concealment of that knowledge comes between the conscious understanding and the external world to make us sure of the reality of “self,” so that when unconscious premises of epistemology are disrupted by double bind experience, we feel that our safe illusions about “self” are shaken. How right the insight of the schizophrenic who writes the first person pronoun with a lower case “i.”

I have known two great mountains climbers, George Leigh Mallory, whose bones are somewhere on Everest, and Geoffrey Young, who was the first one-legged man to climb the North Face of the Matterhorn. Mallory did not answer our question. He is said to have said that he climbed Everest “because it is there.” He died on his second attempt. Young used to talk of the discipline of not listening to the body when it screams for relief. What is discipline? We talk of “taking pains” and the French, more aware than we of recursive and reflexive trains of phenomena, say, “…se donner la peine de…,” “…to give oneself the pain or trouble to…” Why does the Zen monk sit through hours of agony in the lotus position, his legs getting more and more paralyzed and his head getting more and more addled? And while he does this, why does he contemplate or wrestle with a koan, a traditional paradox, a sort of conceptual double bind? In this region there are answers which are certainly “beyond the double bind” and yet equally certainly the answers will be related to double bind theory. We can only speculate about components of these answers:

1. They will surely include reference to ideas of completion of tasks.

2. They will include reference to “self”—that half mythological entity whose apparent subjective reality somehow increases in situations of reflexive awareness.

3. We shall be talking about addictions to the feat of “cold turkey” defeat of all addictions of lower logical type.

4. We shall face some sort of positive addiction to the pains of facing double binds and conquering them.

5. We shall need a formal definition of practice. What is the musical performer doing between his public appearances? He, too, is engaging in behavior which (even if rewarded in the concert hall) is fundamentally related to double binds. It is a part of the long grind from quick superficial adaptation through automatism to the final skillful control of automatism.

Finally, let me try to give you an idea of what it felt like, or what sort of difference it made, for me to view the world in terms of the epistemology that I have described to you, instead of viewing it as I used to and as I believe most people always do. First of all, let me stress what happens when one becomes aware that there is much that is our own contribution to our own perception. Of course I am no more aware of the processes of my own perception than anybody else is. But I am aware that there are such processes, and this awareness means that when I look out through my eyes and see the redwoods or the yellow flowering acacia of California roadsides, I know that I am doing all sorts of things to my percept in order to make sense of that percept. Of course I always did this, and everybody does it. We work hard to make sense, according to our epistemology, of the world which we think we see.

But most people are not aware that they do this, and as you become aware that you are doing it, you become in a curious way much closer to the world around you. The word “objective” becomes, of course, quite quietly obsolete; and at the same time the word “subjective,” which normally confines “you” within your skin, disappears as well. It is, I think, the debunking of the objective that is the important change. The world is no longer “out there” in quite the same way that it used to seem to be. Without being fully conscious or thinking about it all the time, I still know all the time that my images— especially the visual, but also auditory, gustatory, pain, and fatigue—I know the images are “mine” and that I am responsible for these images in a quite peculiar way. It is as if they are all in some degree hallucinated, as indeed they partly are. The shower of impulses coming in over the optic nerve surely contains no picture. The picture is to be developed, to be created, by the intertwining of all these neural messages. And the brain that can do this must be pretty smart. It’s my brain. But everybody’s brain—any mammalian brain—can do it, I guess.

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle—for these, too, are images created in their respective modes— that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite. Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise “I make it all up.” But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external “reality.” (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events.

A smoke ring is, literally and etymologically, introverted. It is endlessly turning upon itself, a torus, a doughnut, spinning on the axis of the circular cylinder that is the doughnut. And this turning upon its own in-turned axis is what gives separable existence to the smoke ring. It is, after all, made of nothing but air marked with a little smoke. It is of the same substance as its “environment.” But it has duration and location and a certain degree of separation by virtue of its in-turned motion. In a sense the smoke ring stands as a very primitive, oversimplified paradigm for all recursive systems that contain the beginnings of self-reference, or, shall we say, selfhood. But if you ask me, “Do you feel like a smoke ring all the time?” of course my answer is no. Only at very brief moments, in flashes of awareness, am I that realistic. Most of the time I still see the world, feel it, the way I always did. Only at certain moments am I aware of my own introversion. But these are enlightening moments that demonstrate the irrelevance of intervening states.

Perhaps all exploration of the world of ideas is only a searching for a rediscovery, and perhaps it is such rediscovery of the latent that defines us as “human,” “conscious,” and “twice born.” But if this be so, then we all must sometimes hear St. Paul’s “voice” echoing down the ages : “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” I am suggesting to you that all the multiple insults, the double binds and invasions that we all experience in life, the impact (to use an inappropriate physical word) whereby experience corrupts our epistemology, challenging the core of our existence, and thereby seducing us into a false cult of the ego—what I am suggesting is that the process whereby double binds and other traumas teach us a false epistemology is already well advanced in most occidentals and perhaps most orientals, and that those whom we call “schizophrenics” are those in whom the endless kicking against the pricks has become intolerable.

Part IV: Health, Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Sacred

In the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis—and even anthropology—one thing more than any other makes progress difficult. It is this: that to embark upon a new area of investigation is not merely to begin looking at a new part of the universe external to the self. The universe of humanity does not have that objective character which has been a source of reassurance to the natural scientists since the days of Locke and Newton. Rather, for those who study human behavior and human mentality, the world takes on a Berkeleyan character. The trees in our wood are in some sense functions of our perception. The old Berkeleyan motto, esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived—leads on the one hand to such philosophical toys as the question, Is the tree there in the wood when I am not there to see it? But on the other hand it leads to a very profound and irresistible discovery that the laws and processes of our perception are a bridge which joins us inseparably to that which we perceive—a bridge which unites subject and object. This means that, for everybody who would work in the sciences of man, every new discovery and every new advance is an exploration of the self. When the investigator starts to probe unknown areas of the universe, the back end of the probe is always driven into his own vital parts.

There seems to be a sort of progress in awareness, through the stages of which every man—and especially every psychiatrist and every patient—must move, some persons progressing further through these stages than others. One starts by blaming the identified patient for his idiosyncrasies and symptoms. Then one discovers that these symptoms are a response to or an effect of-what others have done; and the blame shifts from the identified patient to the etiological figure. Then, one discovers perhaps that these figures feel a guilt for the pain which they have caused, and one realizes that when they claim this guilt they are identifying themselves with God. After all, they did not, in general, know what they were doing, and to claim guilt for their acts would be to claim omniscience. At this point one reaches a more general anger, that what happens to people should not happen to dogs, and that what people do to each other the lower animals could never devise. Beyond this, there is, I think, a stage which I can only dimly envisage, where pessimism and anger are replaced by something else—perhaps humility. And from this stage onward to whatever other stages there may be, there is loneliness.

That is as far as I can go in recounting the stages through which man progresses toward an image of God. What I am trying to express is the idea that Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a stage or two ahead of the rest of us in this progress. And naturally I do not have the power to express that which is beyond me. No one knows the end of that progress which starts from uniting the perceiver and the perceived—the subject and the object—into a single universe.

What is lacking is a Theory of Action within large complex systems, where the active agent is himself a part of and a product of the system, Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” might provide a first step in this direction. It seems also that great teachers and therapists avoid all direct at tempts to influence the action of others and, instead, try to provide the settings or contexts in which some (usually imperfectly specified) change may occur. I think, however, that we are not yet surely ready to tackle this gigantic problem of planned intervention.

At the first conference I held the group back from problems of action for several reasons: I believed that we had what the Bible calls “beams” in our own eyes—distortions of perception so gross that to attempt to remove “motes” from the eyes of our fellow men would be both presumptuous and dangerous. After all, we, too, are creatures of a civilization which certainly since the Renaissance and possibly for a much longer time has cherished such irrational principles as reductionism, the conceptual division between mind and body, and the belief that ends justify means. It was therefore probable that any plan of action which we might devise would itself be based upon these erroneous premises. Indeed, the very errors that we would set out to correct, e.g., the cultural errors of reductionism and mind/body separation, are themselves buttressed by homeostatic mechanisms. We were in agreement that to try to alter any variable in a homeostatic system without awareness of the supporting homeostasis must always be shortsighted and perhaps immoral; and yet, we would boldly go out to attack epistemological errors which are deeply rooted in our culture and supported by complex vested interest in all branches of that culture—in art, education, religion, commerce, science, and even in sport and international relations.

Moreover, there may be a whole order of explanation and determinism that is still unexplored. It is surely not an accident that the alpha animal of the group is commonly the most beautiful, even to human eyes, and that it is this animal that is the most decorated with hair and feathers and—among humans—with fancy costumes. To what extent is the “dominance” of the alpha animal determined and/or supported by aesthetic determinants? For lack of a better term I am calling this aesthetic determinism. It seems to me that, quite without an exhaustive analysis of the relevant cybernetic factors, some people are guided away from the courses of action which would generate ugliness—that there are people who have “green thumbs” in their dealing with other living systems. I am inclined to associate this phenomenon with some sort of aesthetic judgment, an awareness of criteria of elegance and of the combinations of process that will lead to elegance rather than ugliness.

As I see it, moral judgment is concerned with discriminating and identifying classes of cases; and this is especially true when the moral system is condensed into a legal code. The aesthetic, on the other hand, seems to be more intimately concerned with the relationships which obtain within each particular case. In spite of many attempts, the rules of aesthetic judgment have never been satisfactorily condensed. It may be, however, that the dichotomy between moral and aesthetic is a by-product of the premise of mind/body division or of the similar division between consciousness and the remainder of mind. Certainly occidental people expect to be more aware of and more articulate about moral judgments than about aesthetic. We say, “de gustibus non disputandum” as though the aesthetic were no suitable subject for doubt or scientific analysis. And yet we agree that some people, more skilled in these matters than others, are able to contrive objects or sounds which those others can agree are beautiful.

We know little of what makes some teachers, some political leaders, some gardeners, some psychotherapists, some animal trainers, and some aquarium keepers great. We say vaguely that these skills depend upon art rather than science. Perhaps there is scientific truth behind this metaphor. We know virtually nothing about the processes whereby a baseball pitcher computes his action or whereby a cat estimates her jump to catch a mouse. But it is certain that these computations are not done the way an engineer would do them: the cat and the pitcher do not use the differential calculus. Even, it would seem from Gertrude Hendrix’s paper last year that there is some sort of opposition between verbal understanding and that more total and nonverbal understanding which is necessary for transfer of learning.

We face perhaps what Sir Geoffrey Vickers has called an “ecology of ideas.” If it be true that certain people are specially gifted in the art of acting upon complex systems with homeostatic or ecological characteristics, and that these people do not operate by spelling out the interaction of all relevant variables, then these people must use some inner ecology of ideas as an analogic model. (By “ideas” I mean thoughts, premises, affects, perceptions of self, etc.) But if this skill is, in some sense, really an “art,” then it is possible that the inner “ecology of ideas” is a close synonym of what might also be called aesthetic sensibility.

The basic rule of systems theory is that, if you want to understand some phenomenon or appearance, you must consider that phenomenon within the context of all completed circuits which are relevant to it. The emphasis is on the concept of the completed communicational circuit and implicit in the theory is the expectation that all units containing completed circuits will show mental characteristics. The mind, in other words, is immanent in the circuitry. We are accustomed to thinking of the mind as somehow contained within the skin of an organism, but the circuitry is not contained within the skin. Consider the case of a man felling a tree with an ax. Each stroke of the ax must be corrected for the state of the cut face of the tree after each chip flies. In other words, the system which shows mental characteristics is the whole circuit from the tree to the man’s sense organs, through his brain to his muscles and the ax, and back to the tree. This is not the unit which psychologists are accustomed to considering but it is the unit which systems theory will force them to consider.

Very little thought will show that this change in relevance from thinking of man versus tree to thinking of man as part of a circuit which includes the tree will change our ideas of the nature of self, the nature of power, responsibility, and so on. It might even lead the human race to a sort of wisdom that would preclude the wanton destruction of our biological environment and preclude some of the very peculiar attitudes we exhibit toward patients, foreigners, minorities, our spouses, and our children—and even each other.

I shall argue that the very nature and purpose of art and poetry is to exemplify the creativity of mind and that this is the appropriate fundamental theorem for a science of aesthetics. In creativity, mind is brought together, and this integration is a close synonym of “beauty.”

Between us and “Things as they are” there is always a creative filter. Our organs of sense will admit nothing and report only what makes sense. “We,” like the general of a modern army, read only intelligence reports already doctored by agents who partly know what we want to read. And our outputs are similarly doctored by ourselves—the outputs must, forsooth, be harmonious. The “Blue Guitar,” the creative filter between us and the world, is always and inevitably there. This it is to be both creature and creator. This the poet knows much better than the biologist.

People have asked me, “What do you mean, ecology of mind?” Approximately what I mean is the various kinds of stuff that goes on in one’s head and in one’s behavior and in dealing with other people, and walking up and down mountains, and getting sick, and getting well. All that stuff interlocks, and in fact, constitutes a network which, in the local language, is called mandala. I’m more comfortable with the word “ecology”, but they’re very closely overlapping ideas. At the root, it is the notion that ideas are interdependent, interacting, that ideas live and die. The ideas that die do so because they don’t fit with the others. You’ve got the sort of complicated, living, struggling, cooperating tangle like what you’ll find on any mountainside with the trees, various plants and animals that live there—in fact, an ecology. Within that ecology, there are all sorts of main themes that one can dissect out and think about separately. There is always, of course, violence to the whole system if you think about the parts separately; but we’re going to do that if we want to think at all, because it’s too difficult to think about everything at once. So I thought I would try to unravel for you some of the ecology, something of the position and nature of the sacred in the ecological system.

The point is this—that in the various layerings of your mind, or at least in the computer part of your mind (the part in your head), there are various layers of operation. There is ordinary “prose” consciousness—present indicative-type consciousness. That is what you perceive to be true in the sense that you perceive it, i.e., the cat is on the mat if you see the cat on the mat. That’s the sort of normal waking state that most of us have. In that normal waking state, you are quite able to say that this thing that you perceive can also be a symbol— for example, a stop sign does not actually stop an automobile, but it is a symbol or message that tells people to stop the automobile. You can draw all sorts of distinctions in that normal everyday “prose” space in your mind. On the other hand, in that part of your mind that dreams, you cannot draw these distinctions. The dream comes to you with no label which says that it’s a symbol, a metaphor, a parable. It is an experience that you really have as you dream it; and except in those funny marginal half-asleep states, it’s not even something labeled as a dream. That sort of a label is not something which that part of the mind can deal with, or accept.

So now if we go back to the proposition about the bread and wine, we find that to the left hemisphere of the brain, it is perfectly sensible to say that the bread “stands for” the body or is a symbol for the body. To the right hemisphere, the side that dreams, this means nothing at all. To the right hemisphere, the bread is the body, or it’s irrelevant. In the right side of the brain, there are no “as if’s,” metaphors are not labelled “metaphors.” They’re not turned into similes. This is a good part of the problem with schizophrenic people with whom I dealt for a long time. They are more Catholic than the Catholics, so to speak. They feel rather strongly that the metaphoric is the absolute. All right, so there was a religious war—a struggle—between these two sides in the fifteenth century, about the interrelationship of ideas.

Now, it is my suspicion that the richest use of the word “sacred” is that use which will say that what matters is the combination of the two, getting the two together. And that any fracturing of the two is, shall we say, anti-sacred. In which case, the Roman Catholics and the Protestants of the fifteenth century were equally anti-sacred in their battles. The bread both is and stands for the body.

Now, one of the very curious things about the sacred is that it usually does not make sense to the left hemisphere, prose type of thinking. This then can be disastrously exploited in two different ways. It’s a double exploitation problem. Because it doesn’t make any prose sense, the material of dream and poetry has to be more or less secret from the prose part of the mind. It’s this secrecy, this obscuration, that the Protestant thinks is wrong, and a psychoanalyst, I suppose, wouldn’t approve of it either. But that secrecy, you see, is a protecting of parts of the whole process or mechanism, to see that the parts don’t neutralize each other. But because there is this partial screen between the two parts—the prose and the poetical or dream—because there is this barrier, it is possible to use one side to play with people’s emotions, to influence them—for political purposes, for commercial purposes, and so on.

And there’s this other strange business with the sacred, and that is that it’s always a coin with two sides. The original Latin word “sacer,” from which we get our word, means both “so holy and pure” as to be sacred, and “so unholy and impure” as to be sacred. It’s as if there’s a scale—on the extreme pure end we have sacredness, then it swings down in the middle to the secular, the normal, the everyday, and then at the other end we again find the word “sacer” applied to the most impure, the most horrible. So you get a notion of magical power implied at either end of the scale, while the middle is prose, the normal, the uninteresting, and the secular.

What I want to say, quite simply, is that what goes on inside is much the same as what goes on outside. And I say this not from anything like a Buddhist position, but just from the position of an ordinary working stiff engaged in occidental sciences. Norbert Wiener, the inventor of the word cybernetics and many other things, had a habit, when he was puzzled about some theoretical problem, of sitting in front of a curtain on which the wind was blowing, so that there were movements in the curtain which would fill his eye, so to speak. This would keep his brain in a similar sort of movement, and on top of that movement he liked to do his thinking. His feeling was that if the brain was in itself still, the mere addition of problems and data and so forth to it wasn’t much use. What was useful was to pour data, ideas, problems, etc., onto a brain which was already, in some sense, in motion. And I would like to make this a sort of central keynote for the things I want to say, both about what’s in here and what’s out there.

That is, what is it in what’s out there which is somehow a reflection of what’s in here, such that if you get stuck on what’s in here, you can in some degree correct it by dedicating yourself to looking at what’s out there—among the animals and the plants and the stars and the weather? You see, there are other remedies besides meditating, and one of them is to look at the living world—a thing which very few people do. And when they do do it, they have very few words to say why they did it. There are a lot of people who find that a walk in the woods is somehow good for their livers or their spiritual livers—and don’t quite know why, I suppose. And that’s the problem I want to suggest to you is worth thinking about, and to suggest to you that thinking about it is related to thinking about why Norbert Wiener was able to think better about theoretical problems when looking at curtains which were being blown in the wind.

Roughly, it looks as though we live in three interlocking, interwoven worlds. One of those isn’t of very much use to us but needs to be defined for purposes of being clear. It is the world which the Gnostics and Jung called the Pleroma, which we might think of approximately as the world of billiard-ball physics. This is a world in which things are not alive. They’re billiard balls, they’re stones, they’re astronomical objects, and so forth, and they respond to forces and energy exercised upon them. One billiard ball hits another, and the second one responds with energy derived from the first. Or they live in fields of “force” and move subject to gravity and such things. That’s why it’s a world. And if you want to know what happens, you examine the quantity of how hard a ball is pushed or hit, and its response is a simple function of how hard it was hit or pulled or pushed.

But the world of living things is different. Living things respond to the fact of being hit. There are facts as distinct from forces. There are ideas. And these facts are essentially nonphysical. What you respond to, what you can see, is difference. You can see that this is different from that. We say the difference is that one is black and the other is white. We might ask where the difference lies. It obviously does not lie in the white. It does not lie in the black. It does not lie in the space between them. It possibly lies in the time between them, because really the way you see this is by rubbing the whole thing with your retina and detecting a bump, a difference—the difference becoming a bump, and a bump being an event in time. By converting differences which may be static into a bump in time, you know there’s a difference. Or you do this by their being already moving out there, which is what a frog sees, or a lizard sees.

This is the other side of the same story from which we started. Just as Norbert Wiener liked to have his mind stirred by a curtain in order that he could think about something, so the lizard and the moth are in an impossible static freeze until the system starts to move. It’s the same business. And this general statement is true for the two other worlds that I want to talk about.

Let’s put aside for the moment the first world, the world of physical forces, and deal with the other two worlds: one, the world of thought and learning, and the other, the world of evolution. And the first thing to say about these two is that they are very much alike. They are so alike that people keep wanting to play the one on the other. Even before Darwin, Paley was defending the world from the theory of evolution by saying: Look at your watch. If you look at your watch you will see at once that it was made to tell the time. It has some sort of “purpose” built into its nature, into its structure. And you know how that happened. A watchmaker, being a thinking creature, built the purpose into it. So now look at the dragonflies, coconut palms, and what have you, around in nature. Observe that they, too, have purpose. And if watchmakers made watches to have purpose, and if pigs and coconut palms have purpose built into them, then there must be an external supernatural that built purpose into the pigs and coconut palms. This was the argument. And notice that this argument is an argument from one world of mental activity—the human thing “up here” (well, more than just up here, because it’s in here, too, and it’s out there where I can see you, and so on). The outside things, the horses and the goats and the hinds on the hillside, are, as I say, in their relations very much a reflection of the way this thing up here works.

We tend, in our technology, to limit as closely as we can the adaptation of our machines to the world and of ourselves to the machines; and we sort of focus in like mongooses on single-purpose activity and think, quite wrongly, that that is what it is to be alive—to be able to pursue a single identified purpose. Oh no. What it is to be alive is to be able to handle highly multiple purposes and to be able to handle them by virtue of highly complex movement in the receiving end, in the head maybe, or wherever it is. In order to solve complex problems of mathematics or engineering, Wiener fed himself with waves on a curtain, or movement in water, or various things—to keep his brain unspecified, unspecialized, into which new information could come and evoke previously unknown answers.

Thus the unit of what’s called evolution out there, is really not this species or that species. It is an entire interlocking business of species. And curiously enough the whole progress, so-called, of evolution is stimulated by the need to stay put. The grass changes and the horse changes, and the grass changes and the horse changes, and they change in such a way that the relationship between them may stay constant. And evolution essentially is a vast operation of interlocking changes, every particular change being an effort to make change unnecessary, to keep something constant. One of the big mistakes made in mid-nineteenth-century biology was the notion that natural selection is a force for change. It’s not. Natural selection is a force for staying put, for going on with the same dance that you were in before, not for inventing new dances. Not for staying still, you know; nobody can do that. If you want to stay still, you get caught like Job, as you may say with your pants down, and everything goes wrong. What you’ve got to do is to change in such a way that the system of changing has a certain steadiness, a certain balance, equilibrium … maybe a very complicated one. There is no reason why a dance should be limited. It can be enormously complex.

And that’s the dance outside. The dance inside is very much the same. The dance inside has another characteristic which is interesting. First of all, it’s not a dance of pigs and coconut palms. You don’t have any pigs and coconut palms inside your heads. Or machines or money or whatever it is you are interested in. All those are not in your heads. There are only ideas of those things in your heads. And ideas, as we already noted, are fundamentally of the nature of difference and are mythical. They are not located in space or time. Immanuel Kant got that one straight. Ideas are not like sticks and stones. They have a curious relationship to each other. You can have ideas about ideas. You cannot have stones about stones. In fact the word “about” has no meaning at all in the physical universe. “About” is a word which only can mean something in the world of ideas. It’s a relationship that doesn’t exist in the Pleroma, in the physical universe. And because you have ideas about ideas in your head, you can get into an awful mess. I think this is one of the reasons why people meditate, is somehow to let settle or let unravel the incredible tangles which arise out of the fact that you can have ideas about ideas.

The business of thinking, the business of learning, becomes very much like the business of evolution when you realize that it is all the time partly experimental—feeling, grasping, exploring (exploring is perhaps the word). It’s called trial and error (it should be called success and error, shouldn’t it?) among which you then find your way. What is difficult is for you to stand where I am, and for me to stand where you are, and to look at Gregory Bateson here, Gregory Bateson vis-à-vis a lot of organisms out there listening, feeling their way by trial and error in the things that I’m saying, while I’m feeling my way by trial and error in the saying of those things. Looking at it from this crow’s-eye perspective, I can now see a dance, so to speak, of ideas progressing, feeling their way, weaving, involving both you people and me in a sort of ongoing process comparable, if you like, with the problem of the horse and the grass, in which both horse and grass are evolving along together to make a constancy, to make a sort of a balance, a sort of a steady state (the technical term) in which we can operate.

If you could see what is happening in all my nerve fibers and all my inputs and all my outputs, then it wouldn’t be very sensible to draw a line around me and say he is limited there. There is a mass of pathways for messages and information to travel on in this room. If you want to make a diagram of the room, that’s what it would look like. And here’s a chip of it: this piece is Gregory Bateson. And the pathways cross something which is my skin maybe, but the skin is not itself a pathway. They go through the skin. The skin is a pickup affair. It’s not the blind man’s stick. It’s the end of the blind man’s stick, not the stick. The stick is the pathway it goes along. Where does the blind man begin? Can we cut him off halfway up the stick? But you’re cutting the line of communication when you cut there. The rule for any sort of systems theory is to draw around the lines of communication, so far as you can. Of course, there aren’t any isolated systems, really.

So that we arrive, as we push this, at a world which is very unlike the world represented by ordinary language, at a world which is essentially double in its structure. There is something called learning, at a rather small level of organization. (I don’t say simple, but small.) There is something called evolution, at a much larger gestalt level. There is a funny sort of imperfect coupling between these two levels. We are mainly at the small learning level, but still creatures of the much larger level. This is a curious sort of paradoxical world to live in, in which we do our best. It’s sometimes, you know, a joke—because jokes essentially are between two gestalt levels, two levels of configuration, and when they twist on each other we laugh, or cry, or make art or religion, or go schizophrenic. Now what are we going to do? There isn’t, of course, a question of doing, really.

There are sorts of movement, I suppose, and one of the most interesting sorts is that movement which you achieve through the discovery that you are torn between these two levels of worlds. This is grotesquely confusing, grotesquely unfair. (I think the sensation is of unfairness.) And out of that unfairness comes, I believe, some sort of a wisdom on the other side. This is the thing that R. D. Laing has been saying. I’ve said it from time to time. And various sorts of people in various religions have said it. That through that double, twisted … what we called a double bind some years ago, there is (if you can keep the things confronting each other somehow, without backing out or getting caught by the state mental hospital system) another stage of wisdom (I don’t know about a final one—that would be another question) on the other side. I can’t talk about that because I don’t know about it. But I think that there is now beginning to be, in fairly hard-science terms, a base for beginning to think about some of those problems.

From the moment I saw that the word “stable” refers only to states, not to the cat, not to me, and not to the object—from the moment when I discovered that “it” was an error, I was living in a world of ideas, very important ideas and elegant ideas. To live in a world of ideas is to be alive. I don’t really think a water jug lives in a world of ideas, it doesn’t have the necessary circuits. It doesn’t have experience, it doesn’t have information. So here we are floating in a world which consists of nothing but change, even though we talk as if there was a static element in the world, as though it was possible to say this shirt is green, that one striped or blue. But all I can really say, as I explore the world in front of me by rubbing my retina against it, is that all I get is reports on where things feel different. And so we live. And within that we say that things are beautiful, things are ugly, we have pain, some food tastes better than others, we’re tired, we’re bored, we get angry—all sorts of shenanigans. And I think probably the next thing to suggest to you is that that world of news can in a very curious way either destroy or enrich you.

As far as I know, all prelinguistic animals only know about relationships. That is, when they talk, the cat’s meow when you come home from work is not “I’m hungry.” It is “Mama.” It’s a statement of the relationship between cats and you. The sound which the cat makes is in general a filial sound—the sound of a child to a parent. It identifies the relationship between you and the cat, and upon the identification of that relationship, you are supposed to go to the icebox and get out whatever you generally get for your child, the cat. And this goes for almost all of animal communication. It’s noises or gestures or bodily movement which suggests a certain sort of relationship, and upon that suggestion of the relationship, the other organism is supposed to act.

Now you are not so very far from the cats and dogs. You are near enough to them so you care more about your relationships than about any other single thing in the world. You may have put various sorts of shields and protection on them. We all do. But still under all that protection that’s where you live, that’s where love and hate and self-respect and pride and shame and a thousand things of that nature all are—in what is between you and other people, and your clues to all this all the time are the sort of thing I’m talking about.

When the word “stable” came loose this was a great opening up for me of a whole realm of thinking and re-examination of other aspects and ways of weaving life together. I think these moments are the things they call satori, mindless satori of one kind or another, the moment of resolution of a koan, that sort of thing. And I think that the place to put these moments, as a sort of final level to our classification of change, is on top of the ladder of the whole scale of changes, the whole structure of organization into which one puts one’s ideas, sense data and all the rest of it—one’s experiences of dealing with one’s friends, as well as what the sunsets look like in the trees. There is a possibility of change in the system of all these built-up structures.

We are still far from identifying the logical types and modes of the message material generated in the right and left hemispheres respectively, but it seems that, with exceptions of various kinds, the right hemisphere is the source of what used to be called “primary process” thinking—sequences other than the indicative, the logical, and the “true-or-false.” The left brain material can be qualified by “perhaps,” “it’s as if…,” “I guess,” “I wish,” “I see,” “I heard that,” and so on. And such qualification saves the material from the false concreteness which indicative messages will always propose, and which the undisciplined left hemisphere commonly prefers. “It’s six o’clock” seems less ambiguous than “Time and the bell have buried the day.” But do not be deceived into thinking that T.S. Eliot’s line means “the pubs are now opening.” The metaphors of the right brain are not and cannot be qualified— do not need qualification. Try it: “It is as if the day were buried by time and the bell,” or “I guess time and the bell somehow together buried the day,” or “which day did they bury?”

But what does it mean? That, you see, is the thaumaturgist’s question, which invites the vulgarity of the fundamentalist. If you spell the question out, it means: “How shall we say the same thing in the language of the left brain?” And the correct answer is simply, “Don’t try. It cannot be done.” The left brain can not achieve that particular qualification of its own utterance which is inherent, and therefore not further needed, in all right brain productions. It is the folly of the deaf linguist to believe that translation is commonly possible. And when attempted, translation from the right to the left is teratogenic, a creating of monsters. My anthropological colleagues have done their share of this. They assert, against all aesthetic sense, that the paleolithic frescoes were magical devices to enable the hunters to kill the beasts.

Perhaps the people who leave their bodies could stay with their bodies if they once could grasp the fundamental truth that religion is unifying and ancient, where magic is divisive, degenerate, and late. Rituals first affirmed man’s unity with weather, landscape, beast and fellow man. Only later did the rituals come to mean appetitive control of this and that. The Body/Mind dualism is appetitive. Were those beautiful reindeer and bison—so alive, so precise in posture and movement—were they perhaps some atonement (at-ONEment) for the killing? Be all that as it may, it is still so that to be fully present in the present, here and now, and of the Body, is strangely difficult. Sometimes, I am told, a koan will help us in this “occupation for the saint.”

There is a proverb that those who live in glass houses—and especially those who share glass houses—should hesitate to throw stones at each other; and I think it is appropriate to remind every occidental reader of this essay that he lives in the same glass house with the medical profession, along with the Christian religion, the Industrial Revolution, and the educational system of which the others are products. In other words, we all share in a tangle of presuppositions many of which have ancient origins. As I see it, our troubles have their roots in this tangle of presuppositions many of which are nonsense. Rather than point the finger of blame at one or another of the parts of our whole system—the wicked doctors, the wicked industrialists, the wicked professors—we should take a look at the foundations and nature of the system itself.

It makes but little sense to accuse the doctors of not using holistic spectacles when they look at their patients, if we shirk the holistic vision at the very moment of our accusation. Under the holistic lens, our criticism of the doctors becomes clearly an ignoring of the total system within which we and the doctors have our existence, and that system includes the whole of our contemporary civilization. It would not be “holistic” to concentrate all our attention upon the symptoms of something wrong and, at the same time, to accuse the doctors of seeing only symptoms.

I ask then what is it—what sort of habit of mind is it—that leads to paying too much attention to symptoms and too little to system? And I ask this question knowing surely that I have two places in which to look for an answer. One of these is in the natural history of medical institutions, doctors and patients, and the other is in the remainder of the civilization. Can we recognize “symptomophobia” in our universities, our churches, our economic institutions, and our family relations?

At the social level, what happens is simple: Somebody gets paid to make the pathological trend more comfortable. We treat the symptoms— we make more roads for the more cars, and we make more and faster cars for the restless people; and when people (very properly) die of overeating or pollution, we try to strengthen their stomachs or their lungs. (Insurance companies hate death.) For overpopulation, we build more houses. And so on. That is the paradigm: Treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology. But, it’s a little worse than that: We even look into the future and try to see the symptoms and discomforts coming. We predict the jamming of traffic on the highways and invite bids for government contracts to enlarge the roads for cars that do not yet exist. In this way, millions of dollars get committed to the hypotheses of future increase in pathology. So, the doctor who concentrates upon the symptoms runs the risk of protecting or fostering the pathology of which the symptoms are parts.

So—what about pain? There are several answers to the problem of pain, several strategies for dealing with it:

1. Get a local anaesthetic and get rid of it; or, more radically, cut the sensory nerve serving the painful part. But these methods of symptomatic treatment make sense—if at all—only if the message of the pain is being heard and attended to.

2. Grin and bear it. Again, this course only makes sense after the message has been assimilated.

3. Attend to—and perhaps treat—the systemic context in which the pain was generated, i.e., act upon the message of the pain.

I have often wondered why pain is so persistent—why does it go on after its existence has been noted? I think the answer is that the message of pain changes as the pain persists. A new pain simply calls attention to the part which hurts, and if this were the only message of pain, the owner of the pain would simply be influenced by the pain in the direction of curing only the symptom. But pain can go on and on— and then the message changes. The owner is forced (or should be forced) to examine and perhaps treat larger areas of relevance. He should be driven from symptom consciousness to attend to the larger system. But the problem is still how to jump from thinking about the part to thinking about the whole.

In biology there are no values which have the characteristic that if something is good, then more of that something will be better. Economists seem to think that this is true of money but, if they are right, money is thereby shown to be certainly unbiological and perhaps antibiological. For the rest, good things come in optima, not maxima. For every desirable substance or experience there is an optimum amount such that more than the optimum is toxic. This is obviously true of such good things as oxygen, calcium, food, entertainment, clothes, psychotherapy, rage, and perhaps even love. All become toxic when consumed in excessive quantities.

Any part of any biological whole must stay in proportionate size; if it becomes bigger, the part must always become a threat or a danger to the whole. So it begins to look as if the difficulty may be related to the almost unimaginable change of sign. It is easy to see that if there are too many automobiles, a lot more roads will make matters worse. It is not so easy to see that more automobiles might make people see the larger gestalt more clearly.

I am suggesting, you see, that we and the doctors are not merely hooked on the habit of overattention to symptoms, we are also hooked on the habit of thinking in material terms. We all think that pharmacology and the science of traffic limitation are quantitative sciences; that if much is bad, then a little more will be worse. But, in truth, this is often not so. We live, rather, in a world of pattern and communication, a world of ideas, and in that world all theories of dosage are partly upside down. In the purely material world there could be no irony, and a monstrous lack of humor of all kinds. But in the world of patterns and ideas, irony is everywhere; and by irony you may (perhaps) reach that small enlightenment which is a moment of seeing the larger gestalt.

The trouble with consciousness is that in the nature of the case it focuses in. It is as something that they call the “screen of consciousness,” and this to me is almost a mechanical analogy. We receive the products of our mental activities, the images, but the creation of those images is beyond us. It is an extraordinary and miraculous process. It is a beautiful process. But what in the end I am conscious of is a subtraction from the totality and the totality cannot be reported to consciousness. The more you have to report to consciousness the more machinery it requires to operate the whole thing and soon the head gets bigger than the body and then the head has the problem of reporting on itself and it has to get bigger than itself. Consciousness is always going to be selective. When you get the other two, the sacred and the aesthetic, which are very closely related, you are partly standing off to see a whole. Consciousness is tending to focus in whereas notions like the sacred and the beautiful tend to be always looking for the larger, the whole. That is why I distrust consciousness as a prime guide.

Q: Would it be correct to suggest that the aesthetic is this unifying glimpse that makes us aware of the unity of things which is not consciousness?

GB: That is right; that is what I am getting at. That flash which appears in consciousness as a disturbance of consciousness is the thing that I am talking about.

Q: Are you telling us that in making everything clear, logical and connected in a linear way we have lost a part of our being which is the sacramental?

GB: Not quite. We have lost a wholeness of being which would include “that” and the “other” side together. I don’t want to say that the fantasy brain, the primary process brain, is the sacramental. I think the sacramental is being damaged all the time. The damage is the taking apart. The sacredness is the coming together. The sacred is the hook up, the total hook up and not the product of the split.

Q: When you describe the “spark,” you are talking about more than the state of the relationships between relationships.

GB: It is like trying to track an afterimage. You stare at the light and you look away and you see an after image and you follow it and it keeps running away from you and you try to catch it. I experience something—for lack of a word, I call it a spark. There is a whole series of things which will give you a flash. We could do a comparative study of a dozen different sorts of flash to make a language for describing flashes, which would be a very useful language. There are a lot of them. I don’t know what sort of a child I was. Now I am in my seventies and a lot of things in the last five or ten years have been happening— not changes but sudden discoveries. You know, one went off into the hills to find a donkey and, at the age of seventy, one discovered one had been riding on one for sixty years. I think what one did was in some way to give oneself permission to discover that one is riding on the donkey. That giving oneself permission is very close to the sort of things we are talking about. That things like art and things like poetry and rhythmic prayer or whatever are not in a way discoveries, or rather, they are discoveries in the literal etymological sense of the word. They are uncoveries of that which one knew before. Then sacredness has something to do with this covering and uncovering deeper components.

You should be counting not the things which are related, but the relationships; not the relata, but the relationships. How many branchings did it take to make a hand? Not how many fingers were a result of those branchings. Look at your hand now. I don’t know whether you can do it in such a public place as this, in such an unquiet place as this. I recommend you take your hand home and take a look at it when you get there— very quietly, almost as part of meditation. And try to catch the difference between seeing it as a base for five parts and seeing it as constructed of a tangle of relationships. Not a tangle, a pattern of the interlocking of relationships which were the determinants of its growth. And if you can really manage to see the hand in terms of the epistemology that I am offering you, I think you will find that your hand is suddenly much more recognizably beautiful as a product of relationship than as a composition of countable parts. In other words, I am suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceiving, and, second, that if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be like to look at the world with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with concepts which the biologists don’t look at at all. You will meet with beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world that you as a living creature live in.

It’s not a new idea that living things have immanent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live.

We face a paradox in that I cannot tell you how to educate the young, or yourselves, in terms of the epistemology which I have offered you except you first embrace that epistemology. The answers must already be in your head and in your rules of perception. You must know the answer to your question before I can give it to you. I wish that every teacher, schoolmaster, parent, and older sibling could hear the thunderous voice out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding? … Dost thou know when the hinds bring forth? … Where wast thou when I set up the pillars of the earth?” I mean the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, and fortieth chapters of the Book of Job. The pietistic silly old man thought he was pretty good and thought God was just like him, but finally he was enlightened by an enormous lesson, a thunderous lesson in natural history and in the beauty of the natural world.

Of course natural history can be taught as a dead subject. I know that, but I believe also that perhaps the monstrous atomistic pathology at the individual level, at the family level, at the national level and the international level—the pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live—can only in the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature which make up the beauty of nature.