toward the sacred Tao

The epistemological difficulties to define and describe level 3 terms such "sacred" and "sacrament" are sono central themes of the posthumous book by Gregory Bateson of 1987, edited by the daughter Mary Catherine. In her introductory remarks:

In 1978, my father, Gregory Bateson, completed the book titled Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Dutton, 1979). Under the threat of imminent death from cancer, he had called me from Tehran to California so we could work on it together. Almost immediately, as it became clear that the cancer was in extended remission, he started to work on a new book, to be called Where Angels Fear to Tread, but often referred to by him as Angels Fear. In June 1980 I came out to Esalen, where he was living, having heard that his health was again deteriorating, and he proposed that we collaborate on the new book, this time as coauthors. He died on July 4, without having had the opportunity to begin work, and after his death I set the manuscript aside while I followed through on other commitments, including the writing of With a Daughter’s Eye (Morrow, 1984), which was already under way. Now at last, working with the stack of manuscript Gregory left at his death – miscellaneous, unintegrated, and incomplete – I have tried to make of it the collaboration he intended.

It has not seemed to me urgent to rush this work forward. Indeed, I have been concerned on my own part to respect the warning buried in Gregory‘s title: not, as a fool, to rush in. The real synthesis of Gregory‘s work is in Mind and Nature, the first of his books composed to communicate with the nonspecialist reader. Steps to an Ecology of Mind [Chandler, 1972, and Ballantine, 1975] had brought together the best of Gregory‘s articles and scientific papers, written for a variety of specialist audiences and published in a multiplicity of contexts, and in the process Gregory became fully aware of the potential for integration. The appearance of Steps also demonstrated the existence of an audience eager to approach Gregory‘s work as a way of thinking, regardless of the historically shifting contexts in which it had first been formulated, and this moved him along to a new synthesis and a new effort of communication.

Where Angels Fear to Tread was to be different. He had become aware gradually that the unity of nature he had affirmed in Mind and Nature might only be comprehensible through the kind of metaphors familiar from religion; that, in fact, he was approaching that integrative dimension of experience he called the sacred.

This was a matter he approached with great trepidation, partly because he had been raised in a dogmatically atheistic household and partly because he saw the potential in religion for manipulation, obscurantism, and division. The mere use of the word religion is likely to trigger reflexive misunderstanding. The title of the book therefore expresses, among other things, his hesitation and his sense of addressing new questions, questions that follow from and depend upon his previous work but require a different kind of wisdom, a different kind of courage. I feel the same trepidation. This work is a testament, but one that passes on a task not to me only by to all those prepared to wrestle with such questions.

The intrinsic and paradoxical difficulty to describe what it means and what it points to the term sacred (from latin sacrum and from archaic latin sakros, whose indoeuropean root is the radical sak, which indicates something that has been given validity) is well synthesized by a story often told by:

A well-known anthropologist, Sol Tax, was working with a group of American Indians outside Iowa City some twenty or more years ago. They invited him to the National Convention of the Native American Church, which was to be held quite close to Iowa City within a very few days. This is the church whose central sacrament is peyote – the little psychedelic cactus button which helps to determine the religious state. Now, the church was under attack for using what would be called a drug, and it occurred to Sol Tax, the anthropologist, that he would be helping these people if he made a film of the convention and of the very impressive rituals which would go with it. Such a film might serve as evidence that this worship is in fact religious and therefore entitled to the freedom that constitutionally this country grants to religion. He therefore dashed back to Chicago (his home base) and was able to get a movie truck and some technicians and a stock of film and cameras. He told his people to wait in Iowa City while he went and talked to the Indians to get their approval of the project. In the discussion that ensued between the anthropologist and the Indians, it gradually became clear to Tax that

    They could not picture themselves engaged in the very personal matter of prayer in front of a camera. As one after another expressed his views, pro and con, the tension heightened. To defile a single ritual to save the church became the stated issue, and none tried to avoid it. Not a person argued that perhaps the church was not in as great danger as they thought … They seemed to accept the dilemma as posed as though they were acting out a Greek tragedy. As he [Sol Tax] sat in front of the room, together with the president of the church, and as he listened with fascination to the speeches, gradually the realization came that they were choosing their integrity over their existence. Although these were the more politically oriented members of the church, they could not sacrifice a longed-for and sacred night of prayer. When everyone had spoken, the president rose and said that if the others wished to have the movie made, he had no objections; but then he begged to be excused from the ceremony. Of course, this ended any possibility for making the movie, the sense of the meeting was clear.

The curious paradox in this story is that the truly religious nature of the peyote sacrament was proven by the leaders‘ refusal to accept the pragmatic compromise of having their church validated by a method alien to the reverence in which they held it.
(1956, Mind and Nature, 1987)

The intrinsic paradoxical nature of sacrality is that if authentic then is inexpressible, if it is expressible then is false.