Gregory Bateson (1904 to 1980) was an anthropologist, biologist and thinker who helped found cybernetics, the study of how systems use feedback to regulate themselves. By an “ecology of mind” he meant a way of seeing mind not as something locked inside a single skull, but as a pattern of relationships running through people and their surroundings, so that the true unit of survival is “organism plus environment”. His argument that our troubles come from separating ourselves from the living systems we belong to sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on interconnection, though his language is scientific, not religious.
Who was Gregory Bateson? #
A thinker who crossed many fields. The son of the biologist William Bateson, he trained in natural science and anthropology at Cambridge, and did fieldwork in New Britain and New Guinea and, with his first wife, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in Bali.1 His book Naven (1936), on a ceremony of the Iatmul people of New Guinea, made his name as an anthropologist.
After the Second World War he became, in his editor Rodney Donaldson’s words, “a primary figure in the birth of cybernetics and systems theory”. He later worked in psychiatry, where he and his colleagues developed the ‘double bind’ theory of schizophrenia. His essays were collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), followed by Mind and Nature (1979). A Sacred Unity, a further collection, was published after his death.2
What is an “ecology of mind”? #
Bateson’s name for a new way of thinking about ideas and minds. In the foreword to Steps, he wrote: “This way of thinking I call the ‘ecology of mind,’ or the ecology of ideas. It is a science which does not yet exist as an organised body of theory or knowledge.”3
At its heart is the idea that mind is not confined to the brain. For Bateson, mind is a system of pathways along which information travels, and information is “any difference which makes a difference”. Those pathways run out beyond the body. His famous example is a blind man walking with a stick: where does the man’s self begin, at the handle or at the tip? Bateson’s answer is that the question makes no sense, because the stick is part of the pathway along which the world reaches him. So, he wrote, “mind is immanent in the larger system, man plus environment”, and the network “is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel.”4
What did he think had gone wrong? #
That modern people have made a basic mistake about what they are. If you think of yourself, or your species, as separate from the environment, you end up treating the rest of the world as something to be used and fought. “The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.”5 Bateson called the mistaken way of thinking an error in epistemology, our theory of how we know, and he warned that such errors spread: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”.6
He also thought that ordinary conscious purpose, on its own, cannot see the whole. It picks out short “arcs” of the great circuits of nature and acts on them for its own ends. Art, dreams and the like, he suggested, are among the things that help us see the larger pattern.7
He touched on animism directly. Speaking of how earlier peoples saw the world, he said of totemism that “In a way, it was all nonsense, but it made more sense than most of what we do today”, and animism, “extending the notion of personality or mind to mountains, rivers, forests”, as “still not a bad idea in many ways”. The trouble came, he said, when people went on “to separate the notion of mind from the natural world”.8
What did he mean by the sacred? #
Late in life he spoke more and more of the sacred, though he called himself “a fifth generation of unbaptised atheist”. For him, the sacred was the wholeness of the living system itself. In a seminar recorded in A Sacred Unity, he put it simply: “The damage is the taking apart. The sacredness is the coming together.”9
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though the books do not name Bateson. The heart of his ecology of mind, that we are not separate beings but parts of a larger living system, is close to the heart of Therapeutic Shamanism. In shamanic reality “everything is connected to, and a part of, everything else”, and “Although in ordinary reality things appear to be separate, in fact they are merely protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy in shamanic reality.”10 Each of us is like “the tip of a twig that goes back to a common branch”.11
Both also see the sense of separation as the root of our troubles. Where Bateson speaks of an error in how we think, Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer as a shift in how we pay attention: “The Fall was not the process of the right-brain shutting down, but the process of us shifting our attention and focus towards the left-brain”, the side of us that sees the world in separate pieces.12 See What is the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Bateson was a scientist and, by his own account, an atheist. He saw mind only in systems complex enough to carry information around circuits, such as a forest or a coral reef. He did not attribute mind to single atoms, and doubted that a water jug, lacking “the necessary circuits”, lives in a world of ideas.13 Animism, and Therapeutic Shamanism with it, sees the whole world as alive and conscious, though not necessarily conscious in the way we are: there is a continuum “with self-awareness at one end and collective-awareness at the other”, and our habit of treating self-awareness as the only kind of consciousness is “part of our arrogance as humans”.14
Bateson also declined, on grounds of simplicity, to build on the idea that mind or soul can leave the body, though he accepted that many people believe it.15 To many people, a shamanic journey seems to be just that. Therapeutic Shamanism does not ask anyone to take its view of journeying on trust. The invitation is to have your own experiences of journeying, and then you will find out for yourself.16 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Was the double bind theory right? #
Bateson himself had second thoughts. The double bind is a trap in communication where a person is given two messages that contradict each other and cannot win whichever way they respond; the original paper suggested that growing up in such traps might lead to the symptoms of schizophrenia. Years later Bateson wrote that the first paper contained “numerous errors”, and admitted that the theory “has contributed its share to the sufferings” of people diagnosed with schizophrenia.17
