QUOTATIONS
CLOSE TO CRAZY TIGER’S HEART

     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.
     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.

—

Gregory Bateson, 1957 Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Memorial Lecture, from A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, edited by Rodney E. Donaldson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

     The reader may at this point usefully recall that pregnant phrase in the first chapter of Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity: "to unify and thereby sanctify."
     If, as Bateson asserts, all we can know is difference, then it becomes at least plausible that the bulk of our personal, interpersonal, international, and ecological problems arise ultimately from the simple turning of a distinction into a separation, and the separation into an opposition. It is obvious enough that an opposition presupposes a separation, and that a separation presupposes a distinction. It is less obvious, though readily grasped once the effort is made, that a distinction cleaves a ground of some sort in which the two halves of the distinction were previously joined. One can even gain a glimmer of the idea that this ground is in some sense oneself-in-interaction, or at least that the distinction is in some sense a distinction within one’s own experiencing. All this is not to propose and espouse what a world of logic would tend to deduce: a void wherein there are no distinctions whatever. This, while true within its own terms, is too simple. Rather, what is being proposed is a dance: a dance of, for lack of a better word, integrating. The dance of an evolving ecological tautology.

—

Rodney E. Donaldson, "Introduction" to A Sacred Unity.

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single Vision & Newton’s sleep!

—

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802

For we now recognize the nature of our disease. What is wrong with us is precisely the detachment of these forms of experience—art, religion, and the rest—from one another; and our cure can only be their reunion in a complete and undivided life. Our task is to seek for that life, to build up the conception of an activity which is at once art, and religion, and science, and the rest.

—

R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

I consider that the natural biological manner of living is constitutively aesthetic and effortless, and that we have become culturally blind to this condition. In this blindness we have made of beauty a commodity, creating ugliness in all dimensions of our living, and through that ugliness, more blindness in the loss of our capacity to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, and to understand, the interconnectedness of the biosphere to which we belong. We have transformed aesthetics into art, health into medicine, science into technology, human beings into the public, ..., and in this way we have lost the poetic look that permitted us to live our daily life as an aesthetic experience. Finally, in that loss, wisdom is lost. What is the cure? The creation of the desire to live again, as a natural feature of our biosphere, the effortlessness of a multidimensional human living in a daily life of aesthetic experiences.

—

Humberto R. Maturana,
from The Biological Roots of Reality and Humanness:
An Invitation to Freedom, edited by Rodney E. Donaldson
(forthcoming from Hampton Press).

He who really knows how far our generation has lost the way of true freedom, of free giving between I and Thou, must himself, by virtue of the demand implicit in every great knowledge of this kind, practise directness—even if he were the only man on earth who did it—and not depart from it until scoffers are struck with fear, and hear in his voice the voice of their own suppressed longing.

—

Martin Buber

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