"I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'"

"Scientists are always assuming or hoping that things are simple, and then discovering that they are not."

"In sum, it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance."

"Man's behavior is corrupted by deceit - even self deceit - by purpose, and by self-consciousness."

"The essence and raison d'etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictablilty, information, and/or the reduction of the random by "restraint".

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la rasion ne connait point" - The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive)

"Samuel Butler was perhaps first to point out that that which we know best is that of which we are least conscoius."

"Without skill is no art."

"...learning to learn."

"From a systemstheoretic point of view, it is a misleading metaphor to say that what travels in an axon is an "impulse." It would be more correct say that what travels is a difference or a transform of a difference." "I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'"

"...quiescence and activity have equal informational relevance." "I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'"

"the great schizophrenic, John Perceval" "I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'"

"If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus enviornment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure." "I once heard a Zen master state categorically: 'To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing'"

"...the subject matter of cybernetics is not events and objects but the informatin "carried" by events and objects."

"Evidently, the nature of "meaning," pattern, redundancy, informatin and the like, depends on where we sit."

"Lamarck, probably the greatest biologist in history, turned that ladder of explanation upside down. He was the man who said it starts with the infusoria and that there were changes leading up to man. His turning the taxonomy upside down is one of the most astonishing feats that has ever occurred. It was the equivalent in biology of the Copernican revolution in astronomy."

"...what gets to consciousness is selected; it is a systematic (not random) sampling of the rest."

"My own slight experience of LSD led me to believe that Prospero was wrong when he said "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." It seemed to me that pure dream was, like pure purpose, rather trivial. It was not the stuff of which we are made, but only bits and pieces of that stuff. Our conscious purposes, similarily, are only bits and pieces."

also writes about: Iatmul culture, zero learning, schizophrenia, gestalt theory, transference, double bind, systems theory, information theory, 12 steps of A.A., cybernetics, Freud, schismogenesis, Balinese culture...