You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system–and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology (1969)

The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside of the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology? Gregory Bateson, Form, Substance and Difference (1970)