Gregory Bateson’s legendary UCSC lectures on “ecology of mind” are brought together in print for the first time in this unique volume. Based on newly transcribed recordings from the 1970s, this book follows Bateson as he explores pattern, communication and relationship across biology, language, culture and politics. Moving between blackboard diagrams, classroom exercises and wide-ranging stories, he invites students to see life as a web of interconnected systems. In these vivid, improvisational lectures, Gregory Bateson invites his students to look again at the patterns that make life possible – from the growth of plants and the development of embryos to the rituals of churches, classrooms and nation states. He treats grammar, evolution and everyday conversation as part of one unfolding study of “mind in nature”. The book lets you sit in his classroom: listening as Bateson puzzles aloud, challenges his audience and slowly assembles a way of thinking that is equal to a complex, damaged world.