"What do you mean, ecology of mind?" Approximately what I mean is the various kinds of stuff that goes on in one's head and in one's behavior and in dealing with other people, and walking up and down mountains, and getting sick, and getting well. All that stuff interlocks, and, in fact, constitutes a network which, in the local language, is called mandala. I'm more comfortable with the word "ecology," but they're very closely overlapping ideas. At the root, it is the notion that ideas are interdependent, interacting, that ideas live and die. The ideas that dies do so because they don't fit with the others. You've got the sort of complicated, living, struggling, cooperating, tangle like what you'll find on any mountainside with the trees, various plants and animals that live there--in fact, an ecology.
---Gregory Bateson
A Sacred Unity (265)