“We commonly think of animals and plants as matter,” Bateson’s father wrote in 1907, when Gregory was three years old. “But they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” The elder Bateson likened the stuff of life—the substance of a human mind, or of a bird and its egg, or of a parent and child—to “concentric waves spreading from a splash in a pool.” Twenty-five years later in New Guinea, Gregory Bateson was startled to discover that the secret knowledge of the Iatmul elders, shared in a special, consecrated building set apart from their village along the banks of the
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