The Entangled Human: Fourfold Vision, Sacred Unity and the Ethics of Transmaterial Living

Abstract

This chapter introduces the Entangled Human as a way of perceiving and practising that recognises our inseparability from the living systems around us. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, William Blake’s Fourfold Vision, and Karen Barad’s idea of onto-epistemology, it proposes an ethical stance grounded in awareness of entanglement rather than connection alone. 

Through a blend of lived reflection, ecological observation and theoretical dialogue, the chapter situates systemic practice within what Simon and Salter (2019) describe as transmaterial worlding. Presence is reframed as practice, and Sacred Unity as an embodied discipline of attention that honours the patterns linking all forms of life.

Blake’s Fourfold Vision is interpreted as an ecology of perception. Single Vision represents the mechanistic logic of separation. Twofold Vision opens relational awareness. Threefold Vision brings imagination and emotion into knowing. Fourfold Vision points toward a lived experience of unity within diversity. Rather than stages of progress, these ways of seeing coexist, offering a fluid and ethical sensibility for practice.

For systemic practitioners, this orientation involves inhabiting relationship rather than observing from outside it. To live systemically is to live immanently, recognising that every act of meaning-making has material and ecological consequence. Ethical practice then becomes participation in an ongoing field of mutual becoming.

The Entangled Human invites a stance of humility, imagination and care. It calls for therapists and others to cultivate a Fourfold sensibility that holds paradox, acknowledges kinship across species, and acts with reverence for life. In doing so, it gestures toward a transmaterial ethics for living that may help us respond with integrity to the crises of our time.