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Show 110, that he had to accept his death, accept his doom, and view it with no self-interest at all, as "a moment of bewilderment, and then a lifeless rumble down the one general precipice." This too was a necessary part of the spiritual journey he had undertaken, and prepared him for an awakening "far out of himself." Gregory Bateson found this fusion of self and other a key step to ecological thinking, where ontology and epistemology could not be separated. Such a mental state, he argued, was necessary to the ecologist's flexibility, to his "uncommitted potentiality for change." Like the bamboo leaf loaded with snow, the mind of the ecologist had to accept the load of information, and wait until his time was ripe, and the load fell. The snow would fall from the bamboo leaf, the shot from the archer's bow, and the thought from the ecologist's mind, before it was ever thought. This flexibility required that there was no "myself" different from the rest of the cosmos. Muir had realized this state of mind when he noticed without self-interest that he was like all the rest of the boulders on Mount Ritter, "detached," and "ready to be launched below." The law which let him live was no more an idle chance than the law which might have let him fall. He was part and parcel of Nature. Perhaps we could call this mystical mountaineering; those who know something about this experience insist, along with Suzuki and Snyder, that it is a normal state of mind, and it happens every day. Bateson believed that he had not accomplished such an "other way of thinking" but still suggested |