An Ecology of Mind (2010) - full transcript

If you happen to wear
a white lab coat

or have an office
with a nice couch,

we could have a very long talk
about how my father,

scientist, anthropologist,
psychologist, cyberneticist,

has affected my approach to life

But that may or may not be interesting

So I'd like to look at the question
from another angle

I have his forehead
and his long legs

In keeping with the genetic similarities
I Inherited from him,

I'm Inviting you
to do the thing he did best,

which Is to look at the thing,
be It an earthworm, a number sequence,



a tree, a formal definition
of addiction, anything at all,

from another angle

The thing was never the thing
The map was not the territory

And whatever It was,
It could be turned slightly

and re-examined, seemingly Infinitely

Like a Rubik's Cube,

only one In which there might be
several right answers and patterns,

he would twist one bit
and re-evaluate the rules from there,

and then again, to be sure he didn't get
stuck down a singular line of thinking

This Is a film about
how Gregory Bateson thought

He was always learning.

From everyone
and everything around him.

From the dog. from the fish tank.

from the scientists who came to visit.



from poetry. from artwork.

from me.

And. as a child. I learned from him.

that learning never stops.

It is

more than fashionable. it is
inculcated by our great universities

who believe there is such a thing as
psychology which differs from sociology.

and such a thing as anthropology
which differs from both.

and such a thing as
aesthetics or art criticism

which is different from both.
all three. all four. whatever.

And that the world is made
of separable items of knowledge.

in which. if you were a student.
you could be examined

by a series
of disconnected questions.

called true or false

quizzes. quiz-bits. as you might say.

And the first point
I want to get over to you

is that the world
is not like that at all.

Or. let us be more polite:

The world in which I live
is not like that at all.

And as to you. it's your business
to live in whatever world you want to.

Gregory Bateson challenged us

to rethink or to stand back

and try to perceive
in a different way.

To see how reality is operating.

How does biology work?
How do we work?

How does even our own thinking
get determined by larger ideas?

When finally one of his ideas

went "kathunk"
and fell into place.

the waves.
like a tale-flopping whale.

were enormous and just echoed out into

all these different disciplines.

So his inspirational quality
was really quite extraordinary.

That he worked
in so many disciplines

is a consequence
of his way of thinking.

He was not interested
in specializing

in a narrow field:
he was interested in larger patterns.

He was interested in
how things are connected.

And especially.
how living things are connected.

From biology at the beginning.

into anthropology.

into systems of ideas.
pathologies of systems of ideas.

and then to systems of ideas which are

how we all try to live together.

And "we all" includes the animals
and the plants. as well as you and me.

Looking at just how reality

unfolds and how it all works.

And when you take a little piece of it.
then you just look at that little piece

and you come up with a lot of erroneous
interpretations of what's going on.

I've always thought that way.

The relation
between me and that book

or the book and the table

is still a microcosm
of the relationship between

man and God or God and the Devil
or what have you.

That the big and the small relations
are all the same thing.

For study purposes you have to work
with small ones sometimes.

And then people blame you
for working with small ones.

Then you work with big ones.
and they blame you for being a mystic.

It's all the same business.

It was as though he could zoom in
on the very intimate

and personal dynamics
of a single conversation.

And zoom out

and be able to hold in focus
a much larger context.

As a child, I used to sit
on the floor next to him,

drawing pictures and listening
while he gave lectures

Even then It seemed to me
that he was peering through a trap door

at the Inner workings of life

Krishnamurti said something like

"You might think,
you're thinking your own thoughts

You're not You're thinking
your culture’s thoughts"

And Gregory said

What does It even mean
to change the way we think?

I guess I've been reading
too much Alice [in Wonderland].

You remember
when they come out

from swimming in Alice's tears.

she and all the animals?

She tries to dry them
by reading them history.

which she thinks
is the driest material she can produce.

And she reaches the sentence:
"The archbishop found it advisable".

The duck said: "Found what advisable"?

"It." said Alice.

"It. to me." said the duck.
"is usually a frog or a worm".

Gregory observed.
as we have by now:

that human beings
behave in ways

that are destructive

of natural ecological systems.

And he asked the question:

"What is there
about our way of perceiving

that makes us not see
the delicate interdependencies

in an ecological system

that give it its integrity"?

We don't see them.
and therefore we break them.

The story basically was

in the late
15th century.

Some busy entomologist

was looking around

in the very high beams
over the high hall

at New College. Oxford. and noticed

that something needed to be done.

The big question was
where to find oak timbers

40 feet long. two feet by two feet
anywhere in modern England.

It turned out that in the college lands
there were some very large oak trees.

It was reported there was a forester
who came and said:

"We was wondering when you'd be asking.
We kept those trees for the oak beams

of the College because beams
do wear out after a few hundred years

and we wanted to have
some new ones on hand".

And Gregory said:
"That's the way to run a culture".

What Is Important
Is how he approached everything

How does It work? What works with It?

What are Its relationships?
How does It Interact?

How does It learn?
And, of course, how does It think?

Poring through his work
I'm continually reminded at each step

that an ecology of mind
Is a slippery and rigorous friend

You have probably been taught

that you have five fingers.

That is on the whole incorrect.

That is the way
language subdivides things into things.

Probably the biological truth

is that in the growth of this thing
in your embryology.

which you scarcely remember.

what was important was not "five."

but four relations
between pairs of fingers.

We're always in relation to something.

And that being in relation was a real
critical aspect of Gregory's thought.

One of my favorite
examples is actually

to pick a molecule in the body.

As it's much simpler
than a thought.

Something like
the blood molecule hemoglobin.

We could know everything about the atoms
that make up hemoglobin.

even where they came from
in the formation of the universe.

We could know the structure of it.

know it's interactions with all kinds
of other substances in the world.

To know everything we could
about the physics and chemistry

and history of the hemoglobin
in terms of

where the atoms and molecules came from.

we would still not know
the essential thing.

We would not know
that it's in relationship to oxygen

and in relationship to the way
oxygen helps bodies process energy.

It's in that kind of funny sense

about oxygen and about life and about

metabolism. getting energy.

What's surprising about it is

that probably we could go to
another planet in the galaxy somewhere.

where we found life-like animal life

that used oxygen because
it's such a wonderful source of energy.

it's such a powerfully bonding atom.

And probably something like hemoglobin
would be flowing through their veins.

But it would be nothing like hemoglobin
in any of its details.

Probably not even a protein
that we would recognize.

But it would do the same thing.

The function of hemoglobin is what
we're talking about when we say that.

The function of hemoglobin
is not what it is.

but it's what it's in relationship to.

You live in a world
that's only made of relationships.

When you think
you can talk about the table.

and you say it's hard.

all you are saying is
that in a conflict.

in a confrontation
between the table and your hand.

your hand had to stop moving
at a certain point.

the table won.

If the table were soft.
your hand would have won.

But you're talking about something
between the two of them.

I once spent hundreds
of hours looking

at a film of a family
therapy session.

There was a mother and a father and
the child who was the identified patient

and the psychotherapist.

And that child
was of bizarre behavior. disruptive.

And I thought: That child
is making his parents miserable.

What an awful thing!

And then after I'd watched it
another hundred times. I thought:

It's that mother
that's making the child behave that way.

Another hundred times and I thought:

That father is sitting there.
you think he's not doing anything.

he is the one causing all the trouble.

Then eventually I thought. you know.
l think it might be the psychotherapist.

The point being that the pathology

was not in the child or the mother
or the father or the therapist.

it was in the system.

It was in the pattern
of the relationship between them.

And I was trying
to attach it to an individual.

which is the way we are trained
to think about causation.

What happens is

that when you breach
a holistic structure.

and you say ...

or do it without saying it.

when you say:

I am only going to attend
to this end of the relationship.

I am going to study
the role of the doctor.

R-O-L-E.

Now. a role
is a half-assed relationship. you know.

It's one end of a relationship.

And you cannot study
one end of a relationship

and make any sense.
What you will make is disaster.

HIs father, WillIam Bateson,
was a bIoIogIst and a geneticIst

And In fact, WillIam Bateson
coIned the term "genetics"

He was a formidabIe Intellect
and was, as Gregory put It,

ready for the Ideas of the 20th century
In the eIghteen hundreds

He read Blake and Shakespeare
to his boys at the breakfast tabIe

and sought through his piants and
his studIes for the genIus of nature

It may be surprIsing that the heavy
doses of scIence the Bateson's took on

were Inspired by the arts

They saw the arts as extensIons
of the masterpiece that nature Is

He studied life wherever he could.

whether it was the play of dolphins

or the dance ceremonies
of a Balinese tribe.

or the growth of a shell or a crab.

whether it was the behavior

of an alcoholic or schizophrenic.

All those fields interested him a lot

because they are various manifestations
of life that he studied.

ln 1524 I was in Galapagos.

and failed almost completely to find out
what a zoologist would do in the field.

I was clear
l didn't want to live in a lab.

I was clear that I didn't know
what field zoology meant.

and nobody else did.

I looked around and in a year
and a half I was on my way to New Guinea

as an anthropologist.
There was no training you could give.

no anthropology
to train anybody in then.

In New GuInea Gregory met
renowned anthropoIogIst Margaret Mead

We began to get an idea.

"We" was then me and Margaret Mead.
were were married.

We began to get an idea of.

I suppose. the affective systems.
The emotional systems of a culture.

What's now I think called
"value systems".

It was pioneering work in several ways.

During that field trip
to Bali and New Guinea.

Gregory was the one
taking the photographs.

And he took photographs
and he took movies.

Always in the past.

for instance
when Margaret went to Samoa.

she took a brownie box camera

and she probably took 50 photographs.

When Margaret and
Gregory went to the field

they really wanted to document behavior
in a brand new way.

Gregory took 50.000 photographs.

During WorId War II,
the OSS, the precursor to the CIA,

engaged Gregory to use
his knowiedge of patterns and cuIture

to manIpuIate Intercepted messages

and dIsrupt communIcatIon
within the AxIs Powers

They used his abillties antIthetically
to everything he-d worked toward,

and It broke his heart

It was not untll after the war that

Gregory was revived by the remarkabIe
events of the Macy Conferences,

where a whoIe new kInd of conversatIon
between scIentIsts and artIsts occurred

And cybernetics was born

He is one of the founders of
this whole school of systems thinking.

together with Norbert Wiener
and Margaret Mead

and John von Neumann
and a lot of other scientists.

It was delightful.
Because there was

a sense of a bunch of personalities

who had a new tool in common.

And they were coming
from all sorts of disciplines.

One of the great attractions was that
here the interdisciplinary approach

really was real and really paid off.

How could you imagine them

in the same room
having a conversation?

I think probably a lot of arguments.

What came of that group
was the trunk of the tree that became

computers
and the internet and everything else.

Cybernetics was

a science developed

to describe processes
taking place in complex systems.

lnteractions.

Organization.

Communication. Control.
What's happening?

How are the different parts of a system
connecting to each other?

And it is partly the realization
that you have a system.

and when you poke it here.
instead of something happening there.

it happens that way.

Or in some
barely recognizable dimension.

That's because
it's a very complex system.

which has feedbacks
and all these things in it.

But the complexity
is going to continually baffle you.

until you just really engage
with cybernetic understanding.

Gregory's thought process can take
a moment to become accustomed to

Your eyes have to adjust
to the alignment he maIntaIned

In which the context
of the naturaI worId Is pulled outwards,

so that Its Inhabitants,

IncIuding creatures, oceans,
forests and urban Infrastructures,

are like musIcIans In a jazz group,

Improvising together

I've been bothered a little bit
the last few days

by people who say. what do you mean.
"Ecology of Mind"?

And approximately what I mean

is that the various sorts of stuff
that goes on in one's head

and in one's behavior
and dealing with other people

and walking up and down mountains.
getting sick. getting well and all that.

that all that stuff

interlocks

and. in fact.

constitutes a network.

And you've got the sort of complicated.

living.

partly struggling.
partly cooperating tangle

that you'll find on the side
of any of these mountains

with the trees and various plants
and animals that live there.

in fact an ecology.

Ideas are adjusting to each other,

to stImull from the outsIde

and InfinIte other messages

Gregory's concept of mind was that It Is
much more than the braIn In your head

It's the tree root
that grows around a rock,

or the way rIver otters piay

The notion that

an animal. really. should be thought of
as a tangle of ideas.

which have to live together in him.
more or less.

an evolutionary principal which is then

the evolution of ideas.
not the evolution of animals.

Where the units of evolution
are essentially ideas.

Where anatomy
is a body of ideas.

Where the bilateral symmetry.
the two sides of a body. is an idea

on which other ideas
have to be built.

For example. that the horse

and the tundra. the grassy plains.
are interlocked.

It's an evolution

in which the grass needs the horse
as much as the horse needs the grass.

And if you want grass.

if you want what's called a "lawn"
in the suburbs.

you will first of all go
and buy a mower.

which will be the teeth of the horse.

to cut that grass with.

You will then go
and you'll buy a roller.

And the roller crushes the grass down

and makes it make turf.

And finally you will end up
going and buying a sack of manure.

because you have to be at least
the other half of the horse. too.

He hoped to Ieave a bIg framework

Into which the specIalists
could piace theIr findings,

to be examined within the context of
the mass tangIe of InterreIatIonships,

that each tree, each person,
each system In our worId embodIes

Context was the key

Epistemology.

a million-dollar word.

Most people treat it
as how we know what we know.

a study of how knowledge comes to be.

how it's produced in our brains.

how we acquire it.
what kind of a thing it is.

And it's probably best understood as

"in contrast to how things just are".

Knowledge about things is not a thing.

Gregory was quite clear about that.

He naturally asked himself:

What is it to know?
How do we know?

And so he got into epistemology.

And he saw it as a part
of natural science.

part of biology or natural history.

He didn't see it
as an abstract. philosophical field.

I would like you to assume that
that's been drawn more carefully.

that these angles are
what they should be

and those are what they should be.

And I want you to think for a moment.

how you will describe that
to some other person.

First of all. there is a small minority

who say. it looks like a boot.

These are the analogic picture-thinkers.

But of course there isn't any boot.

and to describe the boot it looks like
would be as laborious

as to say. it looks like a boot.

Then there are the people

who break it into parts.

And they will say. it's a hexagon.

But it isn't a hexagon.

And a rectangle which isn't a rectangle.

And by describing
what it nearly is but isn't quite.

they get a sort of description out.

And the division. of course. into parts
is purely arbitrary.

They could have sliced it
any way they wanted.

And of course it would be interesting
if they had sliced it like that.

But inconvenient.

And the point I'm getting at is

that the division of things into parts

tends to be a device of convenience.

And that's all.

Gregory liked to quote Blake in saying:

"Wise men see outlines.
and therefore they draw them".

And when he takes the chalk
and draws the line across

what I see as a boot.

he illustrates for us the arbitrariness

of the kind of separations
that are created by defining things.

So that when we define something
as separate from something else.

we create limits

to our ability

to see the interrelationships
and their dynamics.

So that is why Gregory also liked
to quote Blake in saying:

"Madmen see outlines.
and therefore they draw them".

And then there are the people
who are the real scientists.

And they see ...

l didn't draw this one very well ...

that there is an imaginary line.

which if it were drawn properly.

defines various limits.

These are the scientists.

They look for a relation.

which isn't really there.

in terms of which
they will describe this thing.

Now what's reality?

These people are not in disagreement

about the figure.

Nobody ever mentions that it's
a figure done in chalk on a blackboard.

That it's made
of this funny white stuff.

I've never had one mention that.

I think only a psychotic would do that.

They're the ones who say
the ink blot looks like a blot of ink.

This is very sick.

On the whole.
we can get a certain amount of agreement

about what's really there.

But we cannot get an agreement

about ways of describing it.

And we use in the description
a whole mass of concepts

of intervening variables
and mentionables

to get our stuff across.

We have been traIned
to think In ways we hardly notice

ReligIon, educatIon and cuIture

all filter and frame our perceptIon

If I'm of the belief.
For instance.

that there really is some object.

that there really is objectivity.

That actually would mean
that that coffee cup on the table

is being rendered identically
in your head as mine.

And we know now. even with FMRls.
that this is just not the case.

For us to believe
it's really the same thing

and for us to argue is pointless.

It's absolutely pointless.

The way you make sense
of that coffee cup

and the way I make sense
of that coffee cup is different.

But it's still a coffee cup.

And I think that we'd have
a little more peaceful earth

if we had that perspective
that I would respect the fact.

that you have a different sense-making
of that coffee cup than mine.

In fact. I would want to learn about it.
And we'd do that through conversation.

He often used the
"dIfference that makes a dIfference"

The dIfference that makes a dIfference

Is a way In which to define something
In terms of Its reIatIonships

using contrast and context,

Instead of IsoIating It with a name

The difference between this and this

is not. of course. in this.

It's not in that.

It's not in the space between them.
I can't pinch it.

And where is it?

And the difference in this and this
is not moved

when I move this one.

If the world is made of relationships.

how can we describe

one thing from another?

And that was a question
Gregory was focusing on.

And why he used the
"difference that makes a difference"

as a way of describing contrast

and creating a process

of defining
the relationships between things.

It's a tool that leads us
to look for things in a different way.

Instead of looking at the substance
of it. looking at the parts and saying:

What made this part?
What made that part?

And where did the design plan come from
that makes those parts work together?

One sees in the pattern
of their similarities and differences

a whole separate kind
of patterning process.

And I think that was characteristic of
his way of looking through the surface

to some deeper dimension.

Gregory Bateson's
ideas in his articles

in different areas
are giving clues to

how to take the elevator
up one flight

and get on a meta-level where you get
enormous leverage in your understanding.

Mathematics is one method

and other social patterns are another.

And just the ability

to recognize the same pattern when
you see it in two different contexts.

Even the Ianguage we speak

pushes our minds Into particuIar ways
of IdentIfying and defining our worId

Adjusting our Iens In order to see
what might be hoIding systems together

Is a radIcaI step toward threading
the worId back together from the InsIde

The question what the ideas are that
govern how we think about the world.

That those ideas. again.
become linked up with

how we live in the world.
what sort of damage we do to it.

what sort of pollution.
exploitation. etcetera. we engage in.

Gregory and his colleagues
coIned the term "doubIe bInd"

The doubIe bInd descrIbes
a pattern that-s like a Catch 22,

an experIence In which there seems
no soIutIon for escape

The story Gregory used sometImes
to expiaIn the doubIe bInd

was about the gnat In
"Through the Looking GIass"

And the gnat is a still. small voice.
explaining

the insects of " Through the Looking
Glass Land" to Alice:

"We don't have butterflies.
we have bread-and-butterflies".

And the bread-and-butterfly

has wings
of very thin slices of bread and butter

and the head made of a lump of sugar.

Alice says: "What does it live on"?

The gnat says:
"Weak tea with cream in it".

Alice saw a difficulty.

So she said:
"What happens if he can't find any"?

The gnat says: "lt dies".

Alice says:
"That must happen rather often".

The gnat says: "lt always happens".

The double bind in which
the bread-and-butterfly finds himself.

namely that if he gets his food.
his head dissolves in it.

so his only hope for survival is not
to find any food. but then he starves.

And this is a formal double-bind
of the simplest kind.

l was told that ulcers

were things that you got
when you worried.

So immediately.
l was kind of a weird guy as a kid.

I thought: Oh. my god. what the heck

will I do
if I start to worry about ulcers?

We are in a double bind in the sense

that we have growing inequality.

The answer by the political leadership

is to grow economy faster.

But as we grow the economy faster.
it seems to exacerbate the inequality.

and it's also having tremendous impacts

on global climate
and on the environment.

So the answer is more.

And yet. clearly. there needs to be
some qualitative shift.

And in order to see that
it's time for a qualitative shift.

it would take an extraordinary
vision and imagination.

because slowing the economy
creates unemployment.

pain. suffering and political backlash.

The double bind
is a creative imperative.

It's the moment when.

because this and that doesn't work

something else
is going to have to be improvised

A creative impulse is necessary
at that moment

to get out of the situation.
to take it up a level.

Can we see a bIgger picture? Can we
think about the way that we think?

Can we see the probIems
of linear thinking

In a worId made up of cIrcIes?

EInsteIn saId

"No probIem can be soIved
from the same IeveI of conscIousness

that created It"

My dad asked

He often talked about this.

And he never answered it.

It became sort of
the big Bateson puzzle.

If you look at those

things he mentions.

the crab. the lobster. the orchid.
the primrose and two human beings:

What do they have in common?
Obviously. they are living beings.

What is the pattern of organization

that is common to all living beings?

He might say. looking beyond the surface

and looking for the principles
behind something.

that becomes. I think. the general

description of much of
what he does when he looks at nature.

He recognizes that by looking
at the patterns. at the regularities

in nature. the redundancies.
the similarities of things.

but recognizing
that it's always theme with variation.

The combination of theme and variation

immediately points you to something
behind it. a formative principle.

He was often accused of taIking In
rIddIes and never coming to the poInt

HIs questIon about the connecting
pattern was never meant to be answered,

because the patterns are changing

It was the act of questIoning
that he was pushing for,

knowing that the eyes
behind that curIosIty will be

the most apt to gIve the patterns
of connectIon room to wiggIe

as they perpetually seIf-correct,

and to see the beauty In that process

When you see process.

you see constant change.

That's why Gregory

was constantly quoting Heraclitus.

Heraclitus. the Greek philosopher. said:

"No man can step
into the same river twice".

Because it's flowing.

And by this same token. maybe you can't

kiss the same person twice.

You can't pick up the same baby twice.

Growing up In CalifornIa,
I Iearned that In an earthquake

the kInd of structures that Iast are
the ones that have enough flexIbillty

to allow for the ground to shift

That was the same soft of architecture

that Gregory trIed to deveIop
In his students- thinking skills

Those moments of being able to say.

l used to think it was like this.
but now I think it might be like this.

that was a way of saying:
l learned something.

So there wasn't any sort
of concrete value

placed on the stability of an opinion

ln fact. it was just the opposite.

It's like an acrobat.

He's walking on a high wire.

and he's got a balancing stick.

Whenever he feels himself
fall over that way.

he does this

with his balancing stick.

pushing this side down.
raising this side.

and thereby gets a little bit of torsion
in his own body

to balance himself.
to not go over that side.

If he overdoes it.
He'll have to do the reverse.

but he may wobble.
He may. as they say. oscillate.

like any other self-corrective system.

A machine with a governor or so.

But what he's essentially doing is using

the changeability of
his relationship to the balancing pole

to preserve a basic proposition:
I am on the high wire.

Change may be scary,

but not changing Is even scarIer

Our abillty to remaIn stabIe

Is IronIcally a measure
of our flexIbillty

Not allowing change Is

the perfect formuIa
for becoming obsoIete

The world in which you've been placed

is rather a strange world.

because it doesn't contain anything.

It only contains news.

Reports of difference.
reports of change.

preferences for change.
preferences for stability.

Etcetera. etcetera. etcetera.

But really no high wire.
no balancing pole.

only states of a balancing pole.

states of you on a high wire.

From the moment when I saw
that the word "stable"

refers not to the cat.

not to me. not to

the object. when I say: "lt is stable."

the moment I discovered that "it"

was an error.

I was living in a world

of ideas.

Very important ideas. or elegant ideas.

To live in a world of ideas
is to be alive.

So. here we are. floating

in a world
which consists of nothing but change.

Because if there isn't any change. there
isn't any knowledge that there isn't.

Only by the creation of change
can I perceive something.

And in this world we float. we talk.

and we talk as if

there were
a static element in the world.

Change Is happening
with or without our noticing It

We live on a ball,
swirling with systems within systems

that are Interacting all the tIme

Any attempt
to Iock down eIements of that process

Is an abstractIon
and causes ImbaIance

LIke the tIght rope waIker,
If he were to tie down a limb

We talked about
Goethe's thing about

the leaf.
the stem. and the bud.

how the stem is defined by having leaves
which have stems in its angles.

and so on.

Now. that stuff. for me.

is really
very right-brain-ish sort of stuff.

And if I go for a walk in the woods.

stuff like that is
what I enjoy as I walk along.

Any kind of aesthetic response

is a response to relationships.

When you read a poem.

the rhythm
is the relationship between the words.

The different vowels echo each other.

The images

match up in various ways
with images in your own head.

So the experience you take

from the reading of a poem.

or looking at a painting.

is an unconscious exploration

of the many different relationships
that the artist

has managed to capture.

One of the things that I think is

most amazing about being a human being

is that we can get inside of
each other's heads.

that we can share stories.

that we can live parts
of each other's lives vicariously.

If you've been in a society for any time
and in communication with people.

you are really entwined in a web
so deeply with other people's stories

that it must be very hard
to tell ourselves apart from that.

The story is of a man
who asked his computer:

"Do you compute that you
will ever think like a human being"?

The Computer worked on the question
and finally printed the answer.

And the piece of paper
had on it printed:

"That reminds me of a story".

Gregory was very much interested
in how the kind of relationships

developed and structured
human personalities and societies.

The reverse of that. however.

we find

in torture.

in humiliation.

in oppression.

It's link to ugliness
is straightforward also.

It's destroying relationship.

It's using relationship
to undermine other relationships.

That's ugly.

One of the interesting things that
happens is if you look at your hand and

consider it not as some bananas on
the end of a sort of a flexible stick.

but as a nest of relations.

you will find that the object looks much
prettier than you thought it looked.

This means that
with a correction of our epistemology.

you might find the world a great deal
more beautiful than you thought it was.

No only that. but you wouldn't be able
to collect things.

The whole problem of possession

begins to look totally different.

lt's easy to collect
multiples of bananas.

You can stack them in various ways
and so on and so on. count them.

tell your neighbors
now many you've got

and so on.

But the same relations.
l don't know how many relations go

to make
this rather elegant object here.

and relations between relations
and relations between relations ...

ExpressIon through the arts
was consIdered by Gregory to be

the most honest and pure form
of human communIcatIon

It's easy to forget that
when we find meaning In a story

or enjoy the beauty of a piece of musIc,

we're engaging In the reaIm of thinking

that Is most In sync with nature

Metaphor
Is the Ianguage of reIatIonships,

the Ianguage of naturaI systems,

In which there's room to communIcate
In spectrums of possIbillty

Instead of tightly defined cul-de-sacs

He thought

from such a big place.
His mind was big.

But his heart was as big as his mind.

So you put those two together.

that's what was so exciting
about living with Gregory.

I'm endlessly fighting a battle

with people who want
to throw the intellect out

and think of nothing but the heart.

When you fight that battle.
you sound like an intellectual.

When I meet intellectuals.
I am fighting the opposite battle.

The perceptIon of separatIon

of me from you,
of us from the redwoods,

of the redwoods
from the AfrIcan deserts

Is an illusIon

I wonder what Is the opposIte
of the pattern which connects

Aren-t the lines we draw,
the spiItting and the dIviding,

ImagInary anyway?

T S Eliot saId

"A condItIon of compiete simpiIcIty,

costing not Iess than everything

and all shall be well

and all manner of things shall be well"

Over here there's humanity
and everything it does

and then over here is the other
living stuff. climate and such things.

And the idea of those being

conceptually. operationally.
theoretically. scientifically separate

is just nuts. lt just asks for some
of the kinds of problems we've got.

To believe that there is such a division
and the belief in such a division

does affect our conduct
in all sorts of ways.

It affects our entire ethical system.

it affects our whole notion of

what is healthy. what is sick.

what is a crime.
the whole McNaughton rule and all that.

all hinges around what I believe to be
a nonsense dichotomy

and one which the sooner
we get all the way away from.

so that we don't have it lurking around

in our vocabulary or anywhere else.

the sooner we shall be happy.

Or a little happier.

Blake said

"If a fooI shouId persIst In his foIIy,
he would become wise"

Are we there yet?

What-s on the other sIde
of the garden door

Is totaI obsoIescence and freedom,

and maybe another sort of democracy

It-s ChrIstIan, It-s Buddhist,
Muslim, Pagan

It-s Jewish
and radIcaI and conservatIve

It-s totally punk rock

It-s authentic,
and It questIons authorIty

QuestIons It till It bIeeds with
the authenticIty of the unseparated

What are the premises
that we want to maintain?

What are fundamental
and essential parts

of our ways of living.

of our lives. of our perception

that we wish to keep intact

and that we're willing to use
our thresholds of flexibility

to maintain?

What are we willing to adjust.
and what do we want

to keep as essential?

The nature of the world in which I live.

and in which I wish you lived.
all of you

and all the time. but
even I don't live in it all the time.

There are times when I catch myself

believing that there is
such a thing as "something"

which is separate
from "something else".

Gregory taught me

that to be compiete, really compiete,

IncompietIon must be IncIuded
Into the system

It-s Iearning to Iearn

Anything else Is just static,

not evoIving, finIshed

I eventually realized

that even In death,
reIatIonships contInue to grow

I-m still Iearning things
from my father

lt's like climbing a mountain. Nora.

You've got trails going up it.
where people have gone before.

If you want to get up higher than they.
You go up their trails

and then you push on a little
bit further than they were able to get.

That's what I was trying to say.
- I said it first.

Well. I thought it first.
- All right.

Subtitles: Anja Schulte
Titelmanufaktur

Well. I hope that may have given you
some entertainment.

something to think about.

And I hope it may have done something
to set you free

from thinking in
material and logical terms

when you are in fact trying to think
about living things.