Thought

I just pulled out two snippets of conversation between Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson from the book Angels Fear. The main topic of their conversation is addiction but their speak about entertainment is the highlight for me, in this time of the pandemic. Confined to our homes, surrounded by gadgets, equipped with high bandwidth connections, besides bad news, we are having to deal with endless streams of information & entertainment through various channels and in various forms.

Sorry if the conversation snippets seem disconnected or even severed. I found these quite meaningful and worthy of sharing. I recommend reading this book but, be warned - Its not entertaining.

Daughter: {…}Daddy, do you think consciousness is lethal?

Father: Mmm. Empirically it seems on its way to being so. Human consciousness linked with purpose might turn out to be rather like the tail of the argus pheasant, an extreme elaboration of a particular trait that sends a species into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. But that’s happened before. What is frightening is the possibility that the presence of a creature like us anywhere in the system may eventually be lethal to the entire system.

— Mary Catherine Bateson (Angels Fear)

Whatever it is, make your practice something that can bear some revision. Revise it, and revise it again, until it becomes something that truly sustains you.

— Christina Rosalie (A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in the Present Tense)

Materialism is a set of descriptive propositions referring to a univers in which there are no descriptive propositions. Its vocabolury and syntax, its epistemology, is suitable only for the description of such a universe. We cannot even use its language to describe our activity in description.

— Gregory Bateson (Angels Fear)

The hole in the bagel defines the torus. When the bagel is eaten, the hole does not remain to be reincarnated in a doughnut.

— Grageory Bateson (Angels Fear)