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There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.

Gregory Bateson

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Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Sound
Hearing
Tell
Matters
Marker
Used
Quiet
Markers
Music
Circumstances
Undesirable
Matter
Listening
Approaching
Many
Holy
Secrecy
Silence
Noise
Consciousness
Golden

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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
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Science probes it does not prove.
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious'
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Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.
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But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
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