Gregory Bateson and ‘the Sacred’.

“The old beliefs are wearing thin and there is a groping for new. It is not a matter, you see, of being a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Jew. We do not yet have another answer to the old problems…. We have to have in mind not an orthodoxy but a wide and compassionate recognition of the storm of ideas in which we are all living and in which we must make our nests - find spiritual rest - as best we can.”
Bateson, G. Angels Fear: An Epistemology of the Sacred, Macmillan, New York, 1987. (UK edition: Angels Fear: an Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred, Rider, London, 1988, pp.178-9.)

This is the third key area examined in Understanding Gregory Bateson. Bateson’s central message is that when we have recognised again our interconnective membership within the biotic world, we can learn to see the total living system itself as ‘the sacred’, as ‘divinity’. We can rediscover the sacred process within which we live. This will not be a religion, rather a new (and very ancient) way of offering respect, reverence, awe and love, for and in the ongoing relating that is the informational process of the material world, the relating that enables life.

In this chapter I have examined Bateson’s thinking in some detail and have related his ideas the thinking of Carl Jung, Benedict Spinoza, Arne Naess, Joanna Macy, James Lovelock, Mary Midgley, Diarmuid O’Murchu and Anne Primavesi.