Quote

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

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
Mental
Bottom
Alive
Together
Interconnections
Whole
Interconnection
Right
Fabric
Metaphor
Holds

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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components, or Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
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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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The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
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We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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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.
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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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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We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
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