Note: ‘Initiative’ is now published as 'Faith Initiative: Embracing Diversity'
See website: www.faithinitiative.co.uk

Common Ground: the Living Earth as Sacred. Noel G. Charlton.

This magazine enables us, together, to explore the common ground between the world faiths. ‘Common ground’ is a useful metaphor - a word, image or idea that enables us, by understanding a meaningful similarity, to comprehend something more profound - one of our truest ways of understanding the world. We stand on the ground, walk across, feel at home on it. The ‘ground of our being’ is the foundation on which we base and shape our lives. We ‘orient’ ourselves, ‘find our place’ by relating with the ground on which we live. So what is the common ground between the many ways in which we approach or attempt to understand the divine, the sacred? I suggest that, common to all our perspectives, is the knowledge that we live in a world that is created by divinity.

Whatever there may be beyond this planet and universe, the web of living organisms that we are part of, the living skin of Earth, is evidence of our creator’s nature. For all of us, Earth is the primary revelation of the sacred. Though there may be other channels of revelation, our membership of the community of living beings on Earth provides our first, our most immediate knowledge of the divine. The beauty, the complexity, the inter-relatedness of creation indicates what God - the sacred - the divine is like.

I want to explain some of the thoughts of a man, not widely known, the centenary of whose birth occurs this year. His name is Gregory Bateson and I believe that he discovered a view of the living world and of our appropriate attitudes to membership of it that is vital for our future. He grew up in academic Cambridge, studied zoology (“I’ve been a biologist all my life”), made anthropological studies of native peoples in New Guinea and Bali, married anthropologist Margaret Mead, became a U.S. resident, worked in intelligence during World War II and then made successive and important contributions to the new discipline of cybernetics (systems theory), clinical psychology, family therapy, animal communication and learning. He became aware (in the 1960’s) of our growing ecological problems, developed his central theory of ‘mind’ as existent in all the living systems of the world, became outspokenly opposed nuclear weapons and came, before his death in 1980, to see the totality of the ‘mental’ systems of the living Earth as “the sacred”.

Bateson’s hope was that an understanding of the unity of all the systems that are the living world might allow us to regain what he came to call “the grace” that the non-human animals still have. They relate directly to the world without language and without conscious purpose. They share the grace and humility that creative artists still have access to. Bateson learned to see the beautiful, the aesthetic, as “the hall-mark of the sacred”. Engagement in aesthetic process, as creative artist or ‘appreciator’ of art (and ‘art’ means poetry, music, drama, dance and ‘natural history’ as well as painting and sculpture) enables us to recover our lost sense of unity with the living world, our integration with the rest of life on the planet. The key to comprehending this is Bateson’s understanding of ‘mind’.

Bateson claims that mind exists everywhere in the living world. This is difficult to accept. We are conditioned to think that minds exist only in humans or physical brains. We have thought, for centuries, that ‘mind’ is a non-material ‘substance’ which somehow communicates with the bodies of people, but that nothing else has a mind. Bateson claims that wherever there is a system of sufficient complexity in the living world, there is ‘mind’ or mental process. The ‘mind’ is the relating between the material components of the system. If information is communicated and there is response, a mind is working. Hence, there are minds at every scale. Human mind is a special (but not unique or superior) case. The world is a single intermeshing hierarchy of processes which are ‘mental’ in kind: “comparable to thought”.

These ‘mental processes’ do not require consciousness, which is a small part of mental activity, even in humans. Only part of our knowing reaches the ‘screen of consciousness’, the bulk is unconscious knowledge shared by all the organisms in the world. Perception does not require consciousness either. It includes many types of responsiveness: all the many ways in which organisms or systems can register and respond to ‘news’ or informational stimulus reporting change or difference. The processes which produce healing in organs, growth in organisms, development in societies or balance in large ecosystems are all “minds”. Bateson asks us to understand that our mental going on is the same sort of process as the systemic activities in a cell (opting perhaps for division or death), a healing organ (rebuilding its symmetry), a forest ecosystem (moving towards a new balance of species), a herd (defending or killing a weak member), a human society (learning the humility of interconnectedness) or the whole Gaian process as it maintains the conditions for life on this planet. Mind or intelligence is found throughout the living world; evolution itself is an immense process of learning and memory.

Bateson saw “purposive consciousness”, our tendency to go for what we want by the shortest path, as our most pathological feature. We want more carrots per acre but there is a problem with carrot-fly so we spray the fields with DDT, which kills off many of the birds. Next year there are few insect eating birds so the problem is worse, the insects become resistant to the insecticide, we spray more poisons and eventually there is human illness - and so on. It is our greed which makes us unfit to live in the Earth community. We rely only on our consciousness - a small part of our minds – rather than our far wider greater-than-conscious mentality which holds the wisdom we have gained during evolution and throughout our experience. Engagement with the beautiful in ‘nature’ and in art re-enables that wider, wiser mental process. When we spend time in a wood, lying in the grass or with non-human animals, make poetry or music, paint or garden, we regain systemic wisdom. If we learn to use this wisdom it may permit us to remain on Earth planet as members of its living community. Bateson’s daughter wrote that Gregory came to see “the integrated fabric of mental process” - the totality of the systemic minds that comprise the living world - as, itself, “the sacred”: “… The principle way he knows that has allowed men and women to approach this (but not necessarily the only way) has been through religious traditions, vast, interconnected, metaphorical systems. Without such metaphors for meditation, as correctives for the errors of human language and recent science, it seems that we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways - so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one in which we cannot live.”¹

Our task is to learn how to use religious process, to recognise the divinity immanent (or ‘inscendent’) in the living world, to enable the members of all faiths to see and treat the Earth as itself divine. We need, for example, to extend our ideas of ‘justice’ beyond the human.

We are, necessarily, groping, unsure, uncertain of how such a vast task can be approached. Bateson understood this:

“We are in extraordinary confusion at this very moment. Our beliefs are undergoing rapid change at a pace comparable to the rate things were changing in classical Greece in, say between 600 and 500 bc, or again in the beginning of the Christian Era. Ours is a strange and exciting world in which the very premises of language are in question. What is the language of the heart?…

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.”²

Bateson’s message is that we live in sacred interrelation - with all people and also with all organisms, because the systems of relating are themselves holy. The total interacting of sunlight, climate, weather, geological processes, seas, mountains, jungle, grasslands, deserts, swamps, forests, rivers, seas, animals (including humans), plants, algae, bacteria and the smallest of microscopic beings is “… the sacred…call it god if you will.” This offers a basis for mutual understanding between people of every faith. It shows the necessity of co-operation and proposes a single moral imperative - to revere the Earth and all her systemic relationships because they are holy, divine, sacred.

References:

1 BATESON, G. and BATESON, M. C., Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred. (British edition: Angels fear: an investigation into the nature and meaning of the sacred.) New York: Macmillan, 1987; London, Melbourne, Auckland and Berglei (South Africa): Rider (Century Hutchinson), 1988, p. 200.

2 Ibid. pp. 178-179.