“Bateson noted a formal similarity between the double bind and the contradictory instructions given to a disciple by a Zen master—Zen ko- ans. In the terms I laid out before, the koan is a technology of the nonmodern self that, when it works, produces the dissolution of the modern self which is the state of Buddhist enlightenment. And Bateson’s idea was that double binds work in much the same way, also corroding the modern, autonomous, dualist self. The difference between the two situations is, of course, that the Zen master and disciple both know what is going on and where it might be going, while no one in the schizophrenic family has the faintest idea. The symptoms of schizophrenia, on this account, are the upshot of the sufferer’s struggling to retain the modern form while losing it—schizophrenia as the dark side of modernity. This, then, is where Eastern spirituality entered Bateson’s approach to psy- chiatry, as a means of expanding the discursive field beyond the modern self“ (In: The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2010, S. 176)