Pattern, Meaning & Integration with Jeremy Lent, author of Web of Meaning

An in-depth understanding of patterns, meaning and their integration into human lives. Jeremy Lent gives insights into his transformation journey and how it affected his search for meaning in his life. His research focuses on the concept of the "patterning instinct", and realizing that patterns, when seen as fixed entities, can block out other possible views or perspectives in one's life. Jeremy also dives into how modern culture uses dissatisfaction as a weapon to drive continuous want for more, creating an endless cycle of craving and fulfillment. The conversation points out that realizing one's ability to shift mindset and to see the pattern of life as dynamic, ever-changing, can lead to a healthier approach to satisfaction and happiness. Jeremy has also established an online community, the "Deep Transformation Network", aiming to bring together individuals who see that something is fundamentally wrong with our civilization and aim to work towards the betterment of society.

A discussion with the author of The Patterning Instinct and Web of Meaning. Podcast posting soon on all platforms. This is a mostly uncut video without introduction. Wishing you all the very best of patterns, meanings, integrations and regenerations for 2024.

Jeremy Lent's website: https://www.jeremylent.com/

Deep Transformation Network: https://deeptransformation.network

Towards way-making research, this conversation is especially helpful regarding:

The notion of polarity as not being dualistic. Jeremy's comments are very helpful here as a way to understand how the parts of a whole come to recognize one another, doing so as though they were not part of the same whole even while always being so.

“the patterns between things are often more important than the things themselves”

“the distinction we make between science and spirituality is a false distinction”

"I come up with a way of we can use language to define spirituality from the perspective of system science. And we can look at spirituality itself as really being like, an approach of seeking meaning in the connections between things rather than the things themselves."

Also especially helpful is the talk about dynamic patterns and strange attractors (what Jeremy calls natural attractors).

“Anytime we make sense of something, the best thing we can do is then having made sense of it to let that go and accept the next experience that might slightly shift the way of making sense of it.”

"It is not that the self is a delusion, it is that the fixed self is a delusion."

Transcript:

Pattern, Meaning, & Integration with Jeremy Lent

​[00:00:00] hey, everyone. Here is another research conversation with Jeremy Lent.. He's the author of the patterning instinct. And most recently. The web of meaning. We started out talking about his own search for meaning and some excruciating experiences he had that drove him. To search for some kind of narrative that could help him find his way. Through this crucible period that he was in. And during that time, he determined that the only way he was really going to live his life or make it through this and continue living his life was to find something that was truly meaningful, that he really believed in. Not just something he accepted that someone else had told him. So he was reading everything he could find and really searching and seeking and following through on some things he had started earlier in his life.

And. He found a [00:01:00] lot of things that meant a lot to him, but he couldn't quite find one book that integrated it all. So to speak all these different traditions from different parts of the world. So he ended up writing that book. And then another another book, it's all sort of part of the same project and that's what he's. Offering to us with this books is this kind of integrated story. More like a cognitive history.

He looks at the cognitive patterns that have developed over time. That we find differently, according to kind of our cognitive trajectory. So you can see how that relates and it's a different angle on this idea of cognition as way-making or as navigation. We also talk about dichotomy of course, and how to think in a different way than a dualistic way. We've had all these patterns that are so dualistic in our science and philosophy.

And. Even in our spirituality and we're trying to get past them now, or look at them. From a better or wider angle. And Jeremy's comments were really helpful here. [00:02:00] To me for that reason, because he talks about polarity. And how in his study of various traditions of Taoism and. Other scientific studies. He started to realize that polarity is not the same thing as dualism. And this helps. Us to see things that look like opposites from a different angle. More as parts of the same whole. And through this conversation, we talk about how patterns. Are more important than the things themselves. Which is something I wrote about relative to the hippocampus and that I've thought about a lot.

And I think a lot of people are thinking about this idea of focusing on patterns. Rather than on something static, like an object or a thing. Uh, so he shares some really interesting ideas about that. And. Uh, one thing I remember that. Has stayed with me is he talks about how the best thing we can do after we've made sense of something. Or after we've made way so to speak is to let it go. To, uh, accept the next [00:03:00] experience. And see where the patterns overlap, but realize that it might slightly shift the answer we just found. We might need to make sense of it in a slightly different way. Uh, so I love this idea because it doesn't mean that making sense of something is wrong or that there's not a right answer, but it does mean that we have to kind of always dance and. Realize the dynamism. This ongoing process. Which speaks to the dynamical systems or complex systems view of the world.

Uh, I posted this conversation for new year's because it's quite regenerating. Um, and, and I hope you find something in it that helps. Regenerate you in a way or help you, uh, see something from a slightly different angle. As you start this year. I also wish you a happy new year. And thanks for listening.

Thanks to Jeremy for talking to me. And yeah, enjoy. [00:04:00]

Andrea Hiott: Hey Jeremy, it's great to see you.

Jeremy Lent: Hey, so yeah, so glad to be entering this conversation with you,

Andrea Hiott: Andrea. Yeah, me too. Thanks for doing it. So, um I want to start kind of on a personal note because I'm really interested in how you came to write these books and, and the way you developed sort of your knowledge base to write them.

Um, and I know Uh, yeah, you, I know a little bit about you. I kind of wonder, I guess, first question is, were you an early sort of seeker? Were you looking for something different?

Jeremy Lent: It's interesting because the answer is sort of both yes and no in a way. Um, because during my teens, I was absolutely a seeker.

 And I was completely, even from my early teens onward, I was just rejecting the whole sort of world I was brought up in, in Northwest London in the suburbs where I lived. I just knew there was something so much bigger. And I was an undergraduate student at Cambridge. Um, and I totally rejected the whole ivory [00:05:00] tower thing along with that.

And I was living in a squat with anarchists from Italy and stuff. And I felt myself to be really a rebel looking for something else. But then my life took an unexpected turn because I, I left England as part of that. I just wanted to, it just seemed like this kind of place stuck in the past. I grew up in a particular niche in England. I grew up in a j Jewish family, which in England is different from Jewish, uh, Jewish sort of, um, minority in the US in the sense that from a young child onward, I got taught to really keep a low profile, as if we were sort of there on sufferance and, to be grateful, like other, um, people from that same generation of my parents were the ones who died in concentration camps or whatever Europe said. There was a sense, like, just keep a low profile.

And I hated that. I just wanted to shed all of that. And that was part of why I came to the States. But ironically, I came to the States because primarily because I [00:06:00] was entranced by, um films of Woodstock and hippies. And I wanted to go explore, open my mind. But then I, I met somebody who became my first wife.

She passed away some years back now, but um, she had been a hippie and she'd been, she traveled all over South America. And to me, it was like iconic. This is the stuff that's going to open my mind. The strange thing was that she, in her words, wanted to go straight. Like she had two sons, two sons, which became my step sons.

And she had. In her mind, she'd figured that, um, she wanted to give them the best start in life, which meant going back into the mainstream, giving them the conventional education and then let them go where they would go. And so I went with that and. I did a complete, almost like a U turn in my life.

I got an MBA at the University of Chicago, um, started a, business, went into consulting, started, a business doing the first internet. com phase back in [00:07:00] the 1990s, um, and took, and was very successful in it. Actually founded a company, got top tier venture capital funding, took it public as a CEO.

It's an exciting time. Well, it was both exciting and bizarre because I felt it wasn't me. And yet it was, there was an energy, you just sort of go with the flow and

Andrea Hiott: like,

it's very interesting to think of you coming in the certain spirit and falling in love. So that's a big, a big word too. We'll get to it later, but falling in love.

And then it's almost that kind of yin yang, between the two of you in a way. You sort of saw what you wanted in her and she in you and then, but it seems that you needed stability at the time. So it went towards that, but you hadn't really, it sounds like you hadn't really played out that other energy at all.

That's

Jeremy Lent: completely right. I had not really, fulfilled what I, I felt as I look back where my sort of being really wanted to grow into. And I felt that even in those times, I felt like I was putting stuff in abeyance, [00:08:00] waiting for it to come back.

Andrea Hiott: It sounds similar to the childhood thing of Keep it all quiet and just go along with things

and maintain.

Jeremy Lent: Yeah, And I think that's really part of my own personality traits is that tendency to do that, which I did it exactly in that way. Um, but then what happened to me is. And my wife at the time, her name was Molly, um, she got very sick, from different things from her earlier and from, from her past.

Um, and I left the company to look after her full time. I left the company when it was too early, and it was immature. And then the company crashed within a year or two, but then I got embroiled in all the fallout from that. And meanwhile. Molly, as she got to be very sick, she ended up going through years of sort of borderline dementia.

And while I was looking after her, I really lost the person I had really, was my closest contact in life. So I felt like everything I'd built from in my life had [00:09:00] crashed around me. And it was a traumatic, um, really terrible time for me. And there was years of like purgatory when I felt very much on my own.

looking after this person who was only sort of half there. And I, it for me became a crucible where I determined whatever I do with the rest of my life was going to be something that was truly meaningful where I wasn't taking meaning from somebody else. Um, in this case from Molly and her experience or from some guru telling me that believe in this, I wanted to really believe in it and cognitively really understand and be convinced

in my intellectual mind that something's right at the same time, really be there with my heart and spirit really live that meaning. And so I started to search for that. And I wanted to peel the onion, if you will, like whatever concepts we take for granted, like you Who, whatever, wherever we are in life, whether it's God or soul or, um, a human [00:10:00] difference from, the rest of nature or whatever.

I wanted to understand where these ideas came from, really get to the bedrock. And that's what led me to end up. doing the research that led to that book called the Patterning Instinct.

Andrea Hiott: Were you reading a lot during this time? Or this sounds like a really, really excruciating moment. And first, before we get there, was this, did you meet her in New York?

Because I also wanted to ask you, I feel like you just sort of arrived in New York from London and I think you said you came across the Tao there. And I'm wondering, like, were all these things connected?

Jeremy Lent: That's a great, great question. I did land in New York when I first came to the States and I always felt a sense, a real sense of love for New York, but also that it wasn't quite for me.

It was too hectic and hustle and bustle. And I decided I wanted to go to where my childhood imagery of where minds got expanded was in California. That's the hippie place, right? Exactly. Exactly. And then counterculture. Some sort of, uh, later lame version of [00:11:00] Jack Kerouac on the road. I, I actually, yeah.

I was

Andrea Hiott: thinking of the beats, you know, in a way I was completely thinking of that.

Jeremy Lent: Totally. So I actually hitchhiked, yeah. Hitchhiked my way across the US woods Wow. Of Lou Reed, I think it is. And um, and, you know, thought I was so cool doing that, but I was really just very innocent and naive in those days too.

I was quite, you know, just young, just 21 years

old.

And so it was actually getting dropped off by a, uh, a ride as I was hitchhiking in Berkeley, California, which is interestingly where I live now decades later. Which was actually where I met, Molly, who then became my wife, um, later on. Um, so it was, I was actually in Berkeley that I met her. Um, and, but so to answer your question during that really difficult period of these years of purgatory, yes, basically, other than caring, For Molly, um, my primary time, my, my days were spent reading and reading, um, just absolutely, [00:12:00] voraciously, and

. And that's what I, and because when in that early seeking time in my teens, I really had never come across other, spiritual traditions or any kind of deep wisdom tradition, like from the East Asia or whatever. So I didn't really know what I was looking for. And then over the years I was doing business, I barely read a book for years. The most I was too busy and I'd read. business articles and magazines, but that was about it. And then I suddenly just dove in. And I'd read a book and it would raise questions.

And what I was trying to do really wanted to understand things. So if a book was convincing on one critique or one particular perspective, I would then look for the best book I could find that was on the other side of that. So I could really not just get stuck in a mode of thinking, but really kick the tires.

Of everything. And when I found a book that led me into new pathways, I'd just eat up the footnotes and look at the most [00:13:00] significant sources and then go directly to those. So it was like sort of piecing together a jigsaw puzzle and just looking and looking sort of a little bit like an puzzle Um, meta level, uh, detective work.

So it took me from, uh, ideas, like, in, modern philosophy, if you will, to history, and then ancient history, and then cognitive science, and then co and then cognitive anthropology, and then evolutionary biology, and then. Understanding like, um, different sort of cosmologists of systems thinking versus reductionism.

And that was just a really rich time for me in that research. And at the same time I was doing that, I was really looking for the book that I ended up writing. I was looking for a book that could be a guide for me, trying to understand how all these different pieces fit together. Um, and then it occurred to me at some point, well, maybe I could actually write.

this myself. And so my own notes for myself became notes for a book. Um, but at the same time, it [00:14:00] was also leading me to, if that book, The Patterning Instinct was more like a history of looking at how we got to the way the world is right now and our way of thinking right now. I also began to piece together my own way of making sense of it and more integrative sense.

And that was, what became the more recent book called the Web of Meaning integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe. Um, which really was what I did do, in those years, I, I did integrate like hardcore science and, uh, spiritual traditions in the best way that I could.

And that did lead me. To come up with a way of making sense of, um, the, of our place in the universe in a way that feels very meaningful to me. And that's what I really wanted to share, with others who are interested in these kinds of patterns. Yeah, it's,

Andrea Hiott: It's interesting to me because, uh, as you were talking, there's a kind of pattern, right?

Pattern is an [00:15:00] important word in your work and these kind of resonating patterns. So I still can't quite see it totally clearly, but there's something about. Your youth and things being a little bit extreme, feeling one way and acting another way or something. And then also this movement of going to a completely different country, there's something about that that makes one have to step on the, to the other side, in a sense, look at things differently.

And then we already talked about your wife and stuff. So it's interesting to me that you were already looking at science and spirituality because I guess, you know, we'll get to it. You're really integrating all of these things that we've thought of as dichotomies as, you know, you're either scientific or you're spiritual, um, but it sounds like you were already trying to bridge that.

Jeremy Lent: It's a good point. I think, yeah, there was something in me during that crucible period that I was talking about where I just wanted to find something that could truly be alive for all the different parts of me.[00:16:00]

And that was what a lot of that search was like saying, no, I don't accept following one path, which doesn't fulfill. another part of me. Maybe it's because that first part of my life, I did feel big parts of me were not getting fulfilled. And so I, I didn't want that to happen again.

Andrea Hiott: And you wanted to open the space so that it could all be okay

Jeremy Lent: there.

Exactly. Exactly. I wanted every part of me to feel it had a place in my own way of experiencing life. Um, and to your point about patterns, I do think that was crucial for me. And of course, the, that first book I wrote is called the patterning instinct, because I got to realize through my work in cognitive science and evolutionary biology, um, that actually, uh, that is what makes humans.

unique among other mammals. That, we have this, this very highly advanced prefrontal cortex, um, more advanced, more developed than any [00:17:00] other mammal. And it's that prefrontal cortex that allows us the sort of pattern meaning into things. And that does that for other mammals too, but we do it to such a degree that it creates almost, well, no, almost like I say, um, is really a different form of consciousness that I call conceptual consciousness,

Andrea Hiott: versus animate consciousness.

That's the other one.

Jeremy Lent: Exactly. Which perhaps, you know, we can come to at some point, but yeah, but the thing I wanted to say about patterns is what I began to realize is. There's an interesting thing about patterns what a pattern does is it takes what would otherwise be sort of random spots, like spots of data or spots of light or color or whatever it might be.

And it kind of creates a coherence in that by connecting certain of those spots together in a way that forms a shape that we can then make sense of. But equally importantly, what it does is it eliminates, it ignores those spots or [00:18:00] bits of data that aren't part of that pattern. And so if you look up at the stars.

In the sky, basically every human culture, I think, uh, all the way back from prehistory and found constellations and they gave them names and they put myths or whatever around those constellations. But when you think about what a constellation does, it's, it says these stars are important. Maybe they're a bit brighter or whatever.

And the other ones you stop seeing. And because of our patterning instinct, once we begin to see things according to a pattern, we begin to ignore those that don't fit into the pattern. So the pattern itself becomes like a lens, where it kind of, it distorts the world, or sort of shapes, meaning for us into how we see things, which could be a very valuable way of seeing things.

I'm not saying that in itself is bad. But it does mean that there are other things that we might, that might be available to our sensory experience that we stop seeing. Um, and that's, and that's one [00:19:00] of the ways in which I saw how, over history what different cultures have done is they formed, they patterns of meaning about the universe.

Um, but by doing that, they also ignored other patterns of meaning that were available. And there's something we don't usually realize. And to me, there's something liberating in recognizing that because as you begin to see that our worldview, whatever worldview it is that we have, or the dominant worldview that we're part of, when you began to see, it's actually a lens is a particular lens of understanding the universe.

It liberates us to start to explore for other lenses or other ways of making sense.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, I think there's two things in there I want to draw out a little bit. First the PFC and what you said is all true, but it also, as you do point out in your work too, that it allows us to become aware of patterns, which is something a bit different from other forms of life in a way, where we can notice patterns in, in life, let's say.

It's like life noticing its own patterns, which is kind of remarkable. [00:20:00] And in that way we can maybe start to change them, so there's this very powerful thing that happens. But worldview is the other, the other word that's very important. I want to try to understand how you set out to write this first book for, we'll just spend a little time, but because it's a sort of cognitive history, which is a little bit unusual to think about history through cognitive patterns as you've sort of just explained them in a way.

As You're talking, I'm thinking, okay, we're born into this blooming, buzzing confusion, so to speak, as little kids, and, of course, the body has to make sense of that, I mean, we think about evolution, and over time, all these bodies have been making sense of all that encounter, and you do develop patterns in order to survive, you can look at it evolutionarily how we've developed patterns so as to survive.

Um, and, and you show in your book that those patterns, are similar. There's a lot of statistical regularities around the world. We all live on the same earth. There's, certain things we all share, but they're also very different according to language. For example, I mean, [00:21:00] language itself kind of co develops, um, in this way, but then of course it becomes like an external representation of it.

So these, these ways that we've developed over time, there's many different ways, um, of being in the world, in the same world. But we don't, as you were saying, I think there's a kind of blindness, right? We don't realize that we can all see the world from such different points of view.

Jeremy Lent: I, I agree. I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense.

And um, Maybe, and it's a good point right here to introduce this notion of animate intelligence, um, along with the, and another form of conceptual intelligence. Exactly. Because, to what you're saying about how basically all mammals or, Basically, any,

Andrea Hiott: anything that's

Jeremy Lent: making its way doesn't have to be, um, even, uh, an animal that has a brain, um, is working according to patterns and and to your point, that's really one of the great intelligences [00:22:00] of life itself from the very earliest days that those.

Connections between molecules that actually work, um, then actually get to get re instantiated in the next generation of whatever entity that is. And it's as though, um, well, there's this great concept, um, that only very recently evolutionary biologists has come to think about that. evolution itself learns like evolution itself is like a force that has intelligence.

Um, and by things that work and things that don't work evolution itself actually becomes more sophisticated than what it does. But life has maintained so many of those patterns that work in shared DNA, which is why, you know, we share. Big portions of our DNA with, entities that we'd think of ourselves completely different from, like plants or even more like simpler, um, simpler organisms, not to mention the vast amount that we share with other mammals.

And those are the [00:23:00] different patterns of, um, the intelligence within an ecosystem. Ecosystems themselves are considered to have memories. If you look at the whole ecosystem as this complex interconnectivity of all these different patterns of behaviors. Um, so that's, that's really what we as living entities inherit as our animate intelligence.

But then this notion of conceptual intelligence, I think a great way to get at it from the way that you were just describing things is, A whole field of thinking that really got started by George Lakoff, and other people in that field of cognitive linguistics. And I'm sure you're, you're familiar with it. And to me. When I came across his books, he wrote a simple book, um, metaphors we think by, which is just a real simple, easy introduction. And then he wrote a lot thicker terms to go into in more detail, but it just blew my mind. This was early on in my whole sort of research [00:24:00] project. And to, and just for people who don't know his work, in real simple terms, what he basically says is that, um, that what that animate intelligence is that we were just talking about, he was showing how, as infants, or maybe evolutionarily as pre linguistic hominids, um, we Feelings.

Um, we had a sense of warm and cold or a sense of high and low or a sense of near and far, um, or a sense of big and small. And those are our embodied experience shared. Basically, every human being has a very similar sense of those fundamental ways.

Andrea Hiott: Almost like shared regularities. Yes.

Jeremy Lent: Right. Shared regularity.

Great way of saying it. And, and what he described is how with, you know, he doesn't use the term conceptual consciousness, but that's basically what he was describing. But with that, um, PFC, uh, mediated level of consciousness, we then use those embodied experiences as [00:25:00] scaffolding to create symbolic thinking.

And so what he shows is that all these concepts that we think of as intangible concepts, whether we're talking about infinity or mathematics or, any kind of philosophical, any abstract concept, you can barely say a sentence or two in in normal language without coming up with some sort of abstract concept.

But what he shows is that in every case, it comes from, and embodied scaffolding when we use a big word. So if I'm saying to you about a conversation I had yesterday and I say, Oh yeah, she gave me a warm smile. Um, you know what I mean? She didn't actually give me something. . And the smile she gave didn't like raise the temperature in the room, but, um, I felt perceived as well. And so that's, that is key to understanding human, uh, sort of cognition. But what I did in the patterning instinct was then apply that to cultures, which [00:26:00] is something, that. Some people in cognitive linguistics do that, but I've never seen it done as explicitly. And that was almost like the foundation of cognitive history of this idea in the patterning instinct. Recognizing that cultures themselves take their embodied existence and they will put a metaphor, a core metaphor, for the universe in that, um, in that sense making, which then will have entailments and implications, just like these scaffoldings have in all the way we think about things.

So if you're a hunter gatherer and you think that nature is a giving parent, you'll naturally see all other living beings as family, because nature as your parents, um, whereas if you are, if you're living in an agrarian civilization and and you see all these hierarchies around you and the metaphor that's gotten created is seeing the gods as this kind of hierarchy of the gods.

It makes sense that just like you've got [00:27:00] a Kneel down and, and pay obeisance to your, the big chieftain who comes to, who comes into the village. Similarly, you have to like kneel down and pray to that big God and then sacrifice something to hope that he'll look nicely on you. Very different way of looking at the universe based on the sort of lived metaphor and the lived experience of your society.

Andrea Hiott: There's some stuff in there I want to unpack a little bit or dig around in because, the book sort of lays out these different world views and you see that each one of them does have this sort of root metaphor to it. And just by showing that it kind of shows, well, okay, obviously there's some teleology here. Or some search for meaning, not teleology like a final purpose, but I think you use the word more like a search for purpose or meaning, not necessarily a final one at all. Just, there's some way in which the survival of whatever culture is, , um, benefited by, feeling like they have meaning or purpose.

Jeremy Lent: Yes, I think that's true. And I think that, [00:28:00] and what I'm really, that's what I mean by that title, the Patterning Instinct. My kind of thesis, I guess, if you will, is that that's, um, that's highly developed prefrontal cortex. It didn't develop in order to find meaning. It developed in order to to optimize people's lives in a highly complex social environment that hominids found themselves in, um, after the great rift valley split, as we evolved over millions of years away from our primate, shared ancestors. So it didn't evolve because we were trying to find meaning. But what evolved in us was this instinct to make sense out of complex things around us. And those Who did that most successfully the ones who are most successful in those hominid communities, but that kept going that instinct.

So basically, that's the instinct that drives us to find meaning and when we find meaning and things it makes us feel good. There's a sort of aha. A sense of satisfaction that we get. And it, [00:29:00] we feel at home and we feel secure when we sense that what we're doing has coherence and there's meaning to it.

Um, and that's why people are so willing to, like latch onto a sense of meaning that they, maybe they inherit from their culture or maybe they find through their own path and whatever it is, if it might be. Believing in a particular God, um, or it might be, have a whole set of rituals around that, that really, compromise other elements of their life, but they're ready to just do that because it gives them that sense of being at home in the universe in a way that they can

Andrea Hiott: feel.

Andrea Hiott: It's definitely an embodied. Yeah. Experience. Do you think that the resonance itself is a kind of meaning in terms of just this process and you do describe it in a kind of systems thinking approach,

so there's this sort of spiraling or looping, it's not really a loop, it doesn't come back to where it started, but there's this, movement in which um, the way that we're patterning [00:30:00] and aligning with the world and making sense of it, surviving, that somehow that way, that itself, the resonance of that, it felt, felt like to me you were saying that is the meaning.

 Like, an animal would sort of have this sense of animate meaning, not conceptual meaning, in the sense of wanting to continue those patterns in a certain way. And then if you sort of scale that up through external representation into concepts of language, we're sort of still doing the same thing.

Andrea Hiott: Just like we might develop patterns with our family that are very meaningful, but we're not necessarily thinking about them, but we want to keep those. And if we break them, or if, if something happens to them, It's a loss of meaning for us.

Jeremy Lent: Yes, I, I agree with you. And in the book, The Web of Meaning, I end up kind of defining meaning, in fact.

And I thought a lot about this because it's not a term, well, it's a term that when people do define it, it's usually fits within the [00:31:00] worldview of wherever they're defining it from. And so it actually, uh, is not a term that is well, is easy and is clear to define. And I ended up seeing meaning itself as a function of

connectedness. It's an emergent phenomenon, in fact, just like life itself is an emergent phenomenon or, um, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Basically it's something, um, and for people not familiar with systems thinking or whatever, basically we can think of an emergent phenomenon as something that arises from a very, very complex set of.

interconnections, um, in a self organized system that, from that deep complexity, a certain new level arises that actually can sometimes look simpler, but, and it's really emergent from the incredible complexity that comes. Like birds.

Andrea Hiott: Moving together in the sky or something like that is easy image of it, although actually our bodies are doing it all the time as you show that kind of fractal.[00:32:00]

Depending on where you're looking at it, it either makes sense or it looks like emergence, I

Jeremy Lent: guess, but right, exactly right. Well, I mean, basically, any. Any body that's moving in space and you look at it and it could be a single bird or a human just

Andrea Hiott: walking. It's incredible. Coordinated cells, like how is that happening?

Jeremy Lent: Basically, yeah, there's like, you know, 40 trillion cells, all interacting, some dying and being born and all this stuff happening at the same moment. And yet it seems so simple and elegant. And that's an emergent phenomenon and meaning itself is like that. And so we can see meaning as almost like, the network of relationships that are, that we perceive because meaning in that sense only arises, we have to create the meaning because we have to be, uh, we have to be part of this set of relationships where we are perceiving something and making sense of it, but at the same time.

That doesn't mean like the reductionists and somebody who's a fundamentalist reductionist will say, well, right, that's what I'm saying. There [00:33:00] is no meaning in the universe. It's utterly meaningless. And we just make up our meaning. Like it's this fiction. And I would disagree with that. I'd say, this is the whole point is that there is no.

And that's one of these false dichotomies between what is just objective out there and what is subjective. That actually the reality is that we are always engaged in enacting our consciousness. We are engaged in enacting life. We are engaged in enacting meaning in a way that There is no separation between the subject and the object in that sense.

And meaning is very much like that. And so what you're saying makes sense in the sense that we could, to think of non human mammals, uh, who have a prefrontal cortex, they're making a ton of meaning out of things. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: There's meaning. to animals lives, but they're not, it's not conceptual. You could, you could just think of it as this resonance. You talk about music a lot in the books and there's something about the kind of harmony or the, you know, [00:34:00] these words that you use, I think that applies to all levels of mind or intelligence , but then once we add concepts and language, that's where the meaning gets tricky because then we're talking about it and We're putting it into these very conceptual forms, which as you just said, those become very, those differ very much depending on how you've developed, where you've developed all this.

Jeremy Lent: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, those, those do very much differentiate. And I do absolutely agree with you that we should see elements like meaning or consciousness or any of these, um, uh, in terms of the spectrum, but, and having said that. That spectrum is not necessarily a linear spectrum. It's not like, um, I mean, there are certain jumps that happen, um, in evolutionary terms of the jump that happens, you know, say when animals develop a nervous system and evolutionary biology, and there's a certain jump that happens when warm blooded mammals evolve. And there's a jump that happens when, when humans evolved. So [00:35:00] in each case, there are kind of jumps in that level of Consciousness or meaning making that takes place. But that doesn't mean that there is one point at which there is and isn't. But it's very much a spectrum,

Andrea Hiott: right?

And this linear thing, I think is really hard to get out of. Um, I don't know exactly how to get into this. We, you were already talking a little bit about the paradox and this kind of dichotomy and, and so on, but thinking of it cognitively, like you sort of tell a cognitive history and then we're thinking now about mind being almost.

Just life, you know, continuous with life in the universe developing, uh, in different ways. Why does it get so tricky at some point that, uh, we start to only talk about it as if it's mental or only conceptual? What is it that, why do we forget this whole animate? Why do they become two things? Why isn't it seen as a continuity rather than, oh, we were animate and now we're conceptual.

It's not like that. We're always both. But yeah. How do you, how have you sort of dealt with that? [00:36:00]

Jeremy Lent: Well, I think, yeah, you're asking a crucial question. And, and I think what's important to understand is that distinction itself is a function of a particular worldview, which is basically the modernist worldview that developed, um, really in early modern Europe, uh, around the time of the scientific revolution. And until then, there, Was, well, there was in the Western tradition, a dualistic split that was a precursor of that modern worldview, which itself is very different from other worldviews. So if you look at East Asian worldview, they don't see that distinction that we, that to us, it seems so obvious between mind and body or whatever.

Well, they might now because most. Um, the dominant worldview has infiltrated other cultures so powerfully now for many generations. But if you look at traditional Chinese thought, absolutely, they just simply don't see that distinction. And actually when they looked at [00:37:00] them, when they tried to essentialize what is there that's different between humans and other mammals, they actually didn't look at the conceptual animate split.

They actually looked at a split of. Morality. They actually viewed humans are different than other animals because we, um, we sort of have a moral compass around what we do. And so that's just really interesting to see how you could look at that in a completely different way. But, and of course, indigenous cultures around the world never saw that split.

They, they saw incredible intelligence all around them, but the splits in my view began with dualistic thought, which can be traced all the way back. To, even before Plato, that's a little bit hazy, like proto Indo European, um, thoughts and things like that.

But the first obvious kind of spokesperson for dualism was Plato. And he did a Great job of putting out a cosmology that was a dualistic cosmology. Yeah. Where basically you had this eternal [00:38:00] truth in some other domain and the world itself, this pale imitation of trying to be that perfect goodness. And along with that split universe, he saw a split human being.

He saw a, basically a soul that connected us to divinity and a body that the soul was imprisoned in. Um, and the. The basically the soul being in the body was like the death of the soul. So when the body died, it freed the soul to go back to that perfection. . And that led to a very much rejection of, um, the body and of worldly stuff as if the mind itself and that abstract prefrontal cortex mediated conceptual consciousness was what connected us with, uh, with divinity.

So reason became divine. And that led to a rejection of. bodily experience, very different from what was happening in East Asia at the time with the rise of Daoism and

Andrea Hiott: Confucianism. I have to push at you on this though, because as I was reading your book, first of all, I wonder [00:39:00] when did you, it seems like mostly you're interested in Chinese thought.

So I, I wonder if that's true or, and where that. Came from, but also, um, as you point out in the book, there are these, there's still this proclivity to put things in twos, you know, if it's Yu vei or Wu vei, uh, the two, like, Yen Yang, but then you talk about the two.

Jeremy Lent: Wu Wei, Wu Wei, right.

Andrea Hiott: There's always two, right? I mean, I think part of me is trying to say there's a way in which, just as the prefrontal cortex, as we were saying, allows us to become aware of our patterns, there is something about oppositioning things that actually is helpful, and that we always do, but we start to take it as reality somehow, and that's the tricky thing.

How do we get, how do we understand that's a tool, and there's never just two? Like, you could actually turn from any one and find In systems thinking, for example, numerous nodes and other twos, right? So everyone has like a multitude of twos, but still think of it in this [00:40:00] dualistic

Jeremy Lent: term. And this is a really interesting concept actually.

And again, something as I was researching this, I thought about this myself a lot. Um, and, There's a important distinction to be made between, um, what's between polarity and duality. Mm-Hmm. Okay. And so when we look at, say traditional Daoist or traditional Chinese thought, like you say, absolutely.

They, they look at yin and yang. And yin is more like the sort of dark or the, um, wet or the, more mysterious and yang is there bigger and, um, maybe brighter and, um, drier, whatever. So they make all these distinctions between yin and yang. Um, so you say, oh, well, isn't that like, uh, Plato making distinction between perfection and the, and the worldly or, good and bad or, and, uh, what I became convinced by, and a lot of different Chinese scholars [00:41:00] have shown this, is there, there's a fun, there's a different quality.

And when you look at a polarity, you recognize that the two opposites actually need each other to complete the whole. And it's not like one is good or one is bad, but that is actually very much the way the world works. And we see that in magnetism, um, you know, you'd have a plus and a minus and you have a North Pole and the South Pole.

That doesn't mean the North Pole is good and the South Pole is bad. Right. And you can't have. a North Pole without a South Pole, because they actually, they're by definition, they create each other, um in creating that whole. And so that's the notion of yin and yang or, um, others, other of these kind of ways in which traditional Chinese thought made these splits.

Whereas with the dualistic thought in the West, it was very different from that. It was like, there's good and there's bad or good and there's evil. Um, and there's perfection and divinity and there's.

Andrea Hiott: You make a choice. They're not [00:42:00] connected somehow.

Jeremy Lent: Exactly. And so, and then there's conflict. So, rather than the opposites being actually a harm, rather than the potential to harmonize with each other to fulfill a whole, um, the opposites are in conflict with each other.

So then when Christianity inherited these ideas from Plato, you have people like Paul, um, Saint Paul talking about high. you know, this horrible, terrible battle that goes on within him between his desire for sexual satisfaction and this, he hates that lust his

Andrea Hiott: body has. Yeah, fight against it. This whole metaphor of the fight

Jeremy Lent: and battle.

And he wants to go to heaven. He has to kill that part of himself. So it leads to this very, very conflictual way of understanding. That's

Andrea Hiott: very helpful to think of it in that way. But it still is a little confusing because with the Yuve and Vuve. It's like flow. Vuve is kind of flow, right? It's kind of this graceful, effortless presence.

And then you have the other one, which is action, [00:43:00] purposeful action. And they do seem to be different, like contrasting,

Jeremy Lent: but. I agree with you. And that's actually where I think the tradition, the traditional Taoists did have make a moral judgment basically where they said Wu Wei, which is like sort of basically effortless flow with nature.

That's good. And that's kind of connects us with the Tao. And that's, what other animals have naturally. Um but the humans, basically they looked at. what we're calling in this conversation, conceptual consciousness, that pre PFC mediated consciousness, they call that new way thinking, like purpose of action saying, I want to achieve this.

And they said, that's what civilization did is took us away from the Dao and it's kind of bad. And what we want to do, the whole points of life is to shed that and go back to Wu Wei. That was kind of traditional Daoist thought. One of the reasons why I kind of fell in love with Neo Confucian thought.

Andrea Hiott: More like ninth [00:44:00] century or

Jeremy Lent: is it basically about well yeah about 10th century but actually all the way to the 15th century um in terms of our western time timeline um but it was the song dynasty like around a thousand AD kind of thing was when it's at its peak. And what they did, they thought they were actually rejecting, um, Daoism and Buddhism, which had become very, very powerful parts of Chinese culture.

They thought they were going back to Confucianism and, and which is why they're called by the West, Neo Confucians, but they actually call themselves the, um, the school of the Dao, because they were trained to understand. and the Tao, uh, from a new perspective. But what they actually did, um, ironically, is they did this incredible integration of all three of these traditions into a really a comprehensive, meaning making, ontology, which to me was so incredibly powerful because of its [00:45:00] close alignment with what modern systems thinking has to say.

Um, but what's important about Neo Confucian thought is that they almost like took away. they went beyond that Taoist rejection of purpose of thinking of Yu Wei. And they came up with a way of looking at how humans can experience life that is really truly integrated that it's almost like the, the Confucian part of that tradition was the one that said, it's actually good to use your mind in that sort of more human way and we can celebrate that and, and society and morals and all these things are actually a good thing. Um, and so they found a way of integrating that with the, the more traditional Taoist understanding of things. And they would focus a lot on that sense of embodied knowledge.

They had a word like Tiren, which basically means not just with your mind and not just with your body but all through your mind and [00:46:00] body. It's really a word we lack in the West because we don't have that way of thinking. The closest ever come people who are sci fi fanatics might know Robert Heinlein's work and he he used he and uses word to grok something.

This becomes sort of part of. of where, sort of just common language, if you will. But the idea of grokking something is I really get it. I get it through my entire body. Yeah. That was the idea of Tiran.

Andrea Hiott: I think some of my favorite parts of the book are. When you're talking about those ideas that I, and some of those quotes, the Neo Confucianism, but I was thinking also of T.

S. Eliot, you know, this quote that coming back to where you started and knowing it for the first time, um, in the poem, and I, I'm wondering how you feel about like, in this tradition, I don't think you're saying let's go back and be Neo Confucianists necessarily. I mean, we are where we are and

that's part of what you bring out in Web of Meaning can move to that book Is it's not an either or it's not reductionism or dualism. We can have both But [00:47:00] it's a different, Mindset or something. It's not that we're going I mean are we coming back to where we started and knowing it differently and is this opposition somehow important for that?

Jeremy Lent: Hmm. Great, great question. Yeah, I love that. Well, I do think, that there might be things that we can treasure from, say, early nomadic hunter gatherer worldviews, or Neo Confucian thought, or Daoist thought, or early Buddhist thought. But like you say, I I feel strongly we need to recognize there was no golden age.

Um, in fact, even, the Neo Confucians, um, which thought I thought was so valuable, um, very, very strongly patriarchal. In fact, the Neo Confucian period was when foot binding first became predominant in Chinese culture, just a horrendous torture going on through generations. So there's no way to look back at that and say, Oh, we need to go back to that.

But my. My core point really, and this is really a big theme of the Web of Meaning, is [00:48:00] that, well, maybe for starters, uh, to recognize that our society right now, our global civilization is on a very terrifying trajectory towards potential collapse, towards massive devastation to the world. We need. we desperately need to come up with a different sense of meaning making a worldview that could redirect us into a more positive direction.

And so given the desperate need for that, it feels to me the best thing we can do is. Actually, look for what are the greatest insights available from all the great treasure trove of human history and human experience and see if there's a way we can integrate them in the best possible way to move forward and To me, one of the most important breakthroughs I had when I was doing that kind of intellectual journey seeking, um, that I described earlier, was actually, it was [00:49:00] almost like this kind of my own sort of aha moment.

Um, when I was reading a lot of the stuff about Neo Confucian thought and discovering this concept they had of Li. And the word Li in Neo Confucian thinking basically means like the patterns of organization, the way in which all that they, they make this, they say that Chi basically is matter and or energy, all the stuff of the universe.

And to them, Li is the ways in which all that matter and energy and self organizes in a way that causes things to be either earth or air or fire or human beings. It depends on the Li, the ways in which all the stuff is organized. And the Li was what they thought was most important. So as I was reading that, I was also coming across some of the greatest pioneers of looking at the implications of systems thinking in complexity science.

One in particular was Stuart Kauffman, great, thinker who's, uh, [00:50:00] associated with the Santa Fe Institute and, just a brilliant, uh, person who melds together, um, concepts in physics and biology and neuroscience. And he writes books like called with titles like At Home in the Universe, looking at how when we look at the deep implications of complexity science, we find that the patterns between things are more important often than the things themselves.

And that leads to new implications. And there's a point at which. He's waxing very eloquent about this. And he goes, we're finding we're entering new territory. We're trying to make sense of the universe in a way that no one has been able to make sense of before. And he's right from the point of view of modern Western thought.

But what he didn't have was that actually overlay of other traditions, such as Neo Confucianism. And it was that moment, I sort of began to realize, oh, the Neo Confucians when they were describing Li were describing the very universe Stuart Kauffman is describing. And they weren't doing it from a mathematical scientific [00:51:00] standpoint, but they were doing it from the standpoint that actually integrated some of the great wisdom traditions of our human experience of Buddhism and Taoism.

And so that's what began to help me to realize that this distinction we make between science and spirituality is a false distinction. It's actually a distinction that arises from this modern dualistic world view rather than a distinction that is ontologically, um, true or out there. And when we begin to look at the world from that system's perspective, we begin to see that we can actually embrace spiritual understanding without giving up that very rigorous systems scientific perspective.

We can begin to see, um, as I, and as I do in the book, the web of meaning I begin to, and I'm not trying to come up with a final definition of these things, but I come up with a way of we can use language to define [00:52:00] spirituality from the perspective of system science. And we can look at spirituality itself as really being like, an approach of seeking meaning in the connections between things rather than the things themselves. And then we see these distinctions we made initially are just no longer

Andrea Hiott: valid. Yes. I think that's wonderful. There's a point in the book, I think it's a quote or maybe You write it to where you say it's the connections between things, but also this idea that there's, there's patterns.

I think it's important that we can recognize the patterns, but no one pattern is ever the same. Um, that there's this kind of, I mean, I think that's a very important point too. And to connect it to what you just said, um, it's sometimes can feel like we're going, like, we just want to embrace the spirituality too. Um, and leave the science or leave the technology, for example, behind because we can sort of think, oh, that's what's causing all this. Um, inertia, cause I wanted, we don't have [00:53:00] much more time, but I wanted to talk a little bit about motivation in this new ecological civilization, because I think about something like social media or the way in, in the U S or Europe, a lot of people are motivated to become famous or to become well known or to be liked. There's this motivation for attention. And so I guess. What I'm trying to say is we could blame the technology for that. We could blame science for creating all these wonderful things and, but you're not saying that either in the book. you're kind of saying like these patterns, we can look at them and they're unique and we can find a new pattern, uh, emerging out of that.

And the paradox is important, isn't it? This idea of conservation, innovation, resilience, flexibility. So, that's hard, I think, for people to get, but.

Jeremy Lent: No, I think you're, you're so right in that, Andrea. And, um, and I do think there's a, a couple of big points, ones that are attached on coming out from what you're saying. One is that notion you're saying about patterns not being fixed is crucially important. The word pattern, and the way [00:54:00] I've described them in our earlier part of this conversation, gives a sense of fixed patterns, like, like a constellation or.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Almost like a train track you're on and you can't move it.

Jeremy Lent: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But what's crucial to recognize, um, in basically in any self organized system and any form of life or any form of, uh, ways in which humans make sense of things, there actually are dynamic patterns. And these are what are called in system science, in complexity theory, attractors. An attractor actually has, depending on the kind of attractor, it basically means like points at which a complex system will settle. So, from a physics point of view, a point attractor means like if you have a pendulum, it settles at one point, and that's what its attractor is. But when these, when physicists looked, started to apply their thinking to complex things of life like ocean waves, or [00:55:00] any kind of Living forms or how they work.

They called them strange attractors because as they sort of began to pattern them out, they realized they never stayed in one place. There was like a pattern that would always be moving, but always be roughly within some sort of set of parameters, like a simple way of understanding what this what a what they call the strange attractor is, is a candle flame.

You can look at a flame of a candle and it's always changing, but you know, it's not suddenly going to go into a blowtorch and until you blow on it, it's not going to go out. It's going to stay relatively stable as long as the inputs allow it to, or similarly. the, the, if you turn on a tap and look at the pattern the water makes before it goes down the drain, it's always changing once again, but it's kind of roughly predictable.

So they call that a strange attractor. I came up with the term natural attractor because to me, they're not strange at all. They're only strange. if you actually are looking for those linearities. The thing that's strange is that is the, [00:56:00] there's a, that are not natural attractors.

So, but it's those dynamic patterns that is actually how life works. And once we embrace that, it doesn't help us to move from a fixed way of making sense of things to really opening up to this kind of unfolding. set of patterns of the universe and recognizing our very way. Anytime we make sense of something, the best thing we can do is then having made sense of it to let that go and accept the next experience that might slightly shift the way of making sense of it.

Doesn't mean we throw out what we just made sense of. It just means it can be continual, continually adapting and moving, which is a way of understanding the. Buddhist notion of no self, which again is sometimes is, it might be mistranslated, well, as basically being no self, as if the Buddhist is saying there is no such thing as self.

The very idea of self is a delusion. I think a more accurate way of looking at it is to say the very idea of a fixed self. is a delusion. [00:57:00] And what we tend to do as human beings is say, okay, this is a self, this is who I am, this is what I am, and that's fixed. And then dukkha or suffering arises when that is shifted at all.

Once we embrace

Andrea Hiott: Called into question or threatened and all that.

Jeremy Lent: Exactly. But once we embrace that sense that actually our very sense of self is a natural attractor, always moving, always shifting with life, always opening and closing, always adapting, then it kind of allows us to be much more open to what we're not necessarily expecting.

Andrea Hiott: That's a wonderful point. And I think it's so crucial and it's kind of what you're gifting with a web of meaning, but it's, it's so subtle because we do come out of an inertia and it is hard not to think of everything as solid and static and the self.

And we didn't really get into it too much, but you sort of talk about the I and the self. And I guess maybe that's also a way in which these contrasts, instead of seeing them as only one and [00:58:00] two, It reminds me of Varela's paper, Francisco Varela. You talk a bit about, uh, Santiago theory, I think, and Maturana, but he has this paper called Not One, Not Two.

And it really is that, it's not one and not two, but there's some way in which contrast awakens us in the same sense of the PFC letting us become aware of ourselves. But then we can shift what a self is. It doesn't even have to be confined to the body as you kind of show, that there's a way in which you can start resonating with patterns that are.

Beyond the body and as you were talking another point, I think it's very important for people to understand is you make a very You're very Sure to say that there's no separation. We're not like sitting in a space as humans. We are all part of ongoing Movement or pattern so anytime anything shifts in your body or anywhere.

It's shifting everywhere. That's part of the system's thinking So in that way, we kind of have access to change ourself and our patterns

Jeremy Lent: Now, I think that [00:59:00] that is so true, Andrea, and what you're saying leads. On to very, very important point that I think, yeah, maybe we can begin to close on but I think it's it's so important to explore this in some depth is recognizing that exactly what you're describing recognizing that our own identity is deeply interconnected with everything else. It leads to a realization that when we're looking at what's going on in our global unfolding and what our civilization is doing, the everything from climate breakdown, ecological destruction, incredible injustice and inequities from around the world among different people, we realize we're not separate from that either.

Any of us who are in a place of privilege, economic privilege, or Racial privilege or whatever it might be, or in a place where we get to enjoy some of the benefits that only arise because of the oppression and destruction that has been taking place [01:00:00] historically and is currently happening right now.

And that leads to moral implications too, because, um, once we do realize that deep interconnectedness, well, we can always choose to just. close off our minds and our eyes to seeing it because it's inconvenient. Um, and that's a moral choice we make. But if we want to really live into what it means to recognize our identity as being part of something so much greater, part of all of humanity, part of all life, and then it leads us to actually want to engage.

In making a difference in moving towards, uh, basically what imagining like what, a future could look like that was affirming to life that we don't have to live in the civilization that actually arises from that same dualistic way of thinking that we were talking earlier rises from the sense of a separate individual, like taking it. Um, and that's what sort of [01:01:00] Neoliberal thought is about like, it's good for an individual to like optimize for themselves at the expense of everybody else. That's okay. In fact, that's meant to do or humans are separate from nature. And so, um, let's extract everything we can from nature, for our human benefit. Those are, um, what happens when. You look at the worldview in that dualistic split way. But when you look at the world, um, in this more, uh, recognition of deep interconnectedness, then there's this possibility of exploring what, what, what would a civilization look like if it were based on that interconnectedness, based on actually, uh, trying to organize ourselves as human beings in a way that could set the conditions for all life to flourish. So that's, I think, what is so exciting, when we actually take these, um, sort of ontological ideas and apply them to things like politics and society.

Andrea Hiott: And you show that in the book, it's a subtle [01:02:00] and delicate and somewhat challenging shift, but it's also incredibly powerful to begin to see the world like that and how quickly things can change in, in different directions when we realize this this connection.

But just to close, um. I do want to ask, as you were talking I was thinking, you know, it's really hard to hold the space of, of the paradox, I keep coming back to that, or because you see somebody, for example, in, in media who seems to have gotten to where they are through that worldview that you just described of being the selfish gene, and then people think, oh, that's the only way, and that must be the way, because it's very hard to understand that, it's not exactly how it looks, um, from this position, and there's many different ways to see it.

The systems view kind of opens the space and shows us, oh, just because it looks like it worked doesn't mean it did work. Also, as you show in your book, what is it working towards? Is that really what we want to choose? Because that's part of this acceptance of the worldview that you point out to [01:03:00] that. We just assume that's the thing we want because everyone else wants it.

We don't even question it. So I think to try to just close it out and really get to this ecological civilization, you talk a lot about cooperation and competition and we're not trying to squelch capitalism and just completely, like, reject all of this stuff. We're trying to embrace it and open the space around it.

And dance is a kind of way you talk about it. So that we can start to see how to change these patterns and see them differently. It's, in a way, a cognitive shift to go back to that. So maybe I don't know if you could just talk a little bit about that just to close of how you understand opening the space, I think it's the concept of integration, that you that you really come to.

Jeremy Lent: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think so. And I think that what it has a lot to do with is really that if you will, like the sort of search for true happiness in our lives, that we realize that as, as human beings, um, one of the things that [01:04:00] we always are driven for, and basically, and something we share with other mammals, so I shouldn't make that distinction as, as human beings, but we want to feel better in our lives.

We want to feel good. We want to feel happy and yeah. Buddhist thought, and they use the word dukkha to describe that sense of being dissatisfied with something and always wanting something more and not being fulfilled by anything that we have right now, and something to recognize. Is that our modern consumer culture, if you will, has taken that very notion of that Buddhist Dukkha and weaponized it, if you will, like to and recognizing the companies corporations, sort of capitalism itself, and thrives on everybody feeling dissatisfied. Because if you're dissatisfied you want to need to work harder to buy more and to gain more status so that just to your point so you can be better known on. Whatever on [01:05:00] Instagram or TikTok or, um, and then be wealthier and more powerful. And you see, and no matter what, where you are on it, you always want that next stage.

And it's something that some social psychologists have a great name for. They call it the Hedonic treadmill, that once you're on that treadmill, no matter how fast, just like a rat on a, on a wheel, no matter how fast you go, um, you always, the treadmill forces you to go even faster and faster. Um, and this is, I think, one of the great And learnings that we can get from a deeper look at our own identities and deeper exploration of that is realizing that true happiness does not come from those kind of hedonic attainments.

And, and in fact, Aristotle made this great distinction. Which is interesting because it's some people might think I'm rejecting a traditional Greek thought, but I was talking about Plato. But [01:06:00] in very many ways, Aristotle was more aligned with Neo Confucian thought than he was with Plato, in fact. And he talked about this notion of And the distinction between what you called hedonia, which is like that hedonic treadmill wanting the next thing or gaining, gaining pleasure from short term things or from attaining things.

And what do you call eudaimonia? Which we can really translate nowadays is more like fulfilling a sense of well being, but he specifically saw eudaimonia as really any entity and could be a plant or an animal or human being basically on its own track to fully fulfilling become what it's capable of to fully fulfill its own potential as that unique existence.

And that's very, very different from gaining the sort of hedonic attainments, because in eudaimonia, we get this ability to [01:07:00] really look into what is it that Is truly what an I as a unique human being and as evolved human being, what is it that I actually want in life? And when you come from that place, it will lead you to a very different path in the choices you make than when you get sort of sucked into that hedonic treadmill.

way of

Andrea Hiott: thinking. Mm, that's so good because that gets back to that idea that every pattern is unique. And so if we think of each human as a pattern, which we can, we are patterns of activity and they're each unique and it's not about fitting in, in the way that We've gotten stuck I mean, it's just a little bit sad the way we've kind of gotten stuck in trying to get each other's attention and getting kind of, stuck in trying to get likes or whatever. but what you're saying there, it's like, step back. That's okay. Think of it as kind of, Interesting, a game, I don't know, but actually you're a unique pattern and I think it's the question you ask, like, what is the sacred, precious strand that you'll [01:08:00] weave into the web or something. It's what kind of the ending of the book in a way. And you've just before that talked about love that in a way that sinking out of that system and realizing there's so many other systems you could be part of, and you are a unique system. You start to feel connected.

You start to realize, Oh, you're actually not separate. And that's kind of how you define love in the book, isn't it?

Jeremy Lent: Exactly. I define love basically as the realization and embrace of connectedness. And that can be a small, that can be small bits of love. Like as you walk down the streets and you just look at somebody and acknowledge their presence and you're connected with them.

Um, and that can be large love of deep, deep connection. with a soul partner, somebody you're spending your life with. And it can be a realization of connected with the universe, a sense of unconditional love for all that is that, and you, each of us are gifted to be able [01:09:00] to experience by this miracle of this life.

And so that simple Opening up and embracing of our connectedness is really a pathway that can allow us to leave behind some of that dukkha, some of that suffering of those, of that hedonic treadmill. And

Andrea Hiott: then when we're doing this, we do start to move towards that ecological civilization in a way because there's a different pattern that emerges.

So thank you. It's been wonderful to talk to you. I guess just to come back to your beginning, we talked about your personal, you, it seems like you've really made a journey. So do you feel like you're now with your, with these books? Do you feel like you're getting close to this sacred, precious sort of strand? You're still probably an explorer, but when you look back at the excruciating time, like how does it strike you now?

Jeremy Lent: Oh, yes. Well, really, I do feel extremely fortunate to really feel blessed, in terms of this place that I'm in, in my life right [01:10:00] now, where I have been very fortunate now to have a. love partner that, um, has given me the sense of like deep fulfillment of really allowing me to pursue my own eudaimonia to use that word we were talking earlier. And from the point of view of my life's trajectory, I'm feeling Uh, very much. I'm on a path to that sense of being somewhat complete, if you will, because having written those two books, um, I feel what is really important and book I'm working on right now is to look at this vision of an ecological civilization.

Look at this sense of what might be possible, uh, for a life affirming civilization and do whatever I can to try to help. steer our collective human consciousness toward that more life affirming future. I feel that's what life is calling on me right now. And because of the great amount of suffering that is happening in the world right now to none [01:11:00] are non human Relatives and to, and to our human, uh, relatives all around us, this incredible suffering taking place, that the part of me that does identify with that feels that and does not feel at all.

Um, that it's okay to feel satisfied with whatever place, any of us are at right now, but that any of us that are awake to what's going on, really, I feel life is calling on us to engage with others and engage in the most skillful ways we can to try to turn around the trajectory that this civilization is on right

Andrea Hiott: now.

Yeah. And you say that in the book, we need communities and just to end, you actually have your own sort of community. I don't know if you want to talk about that or if there's anything that I haven't mentioned that you want to be sure people know about.

Jeremy Lent: Well, thank you for that. And yes, I guess, um, just to, really mention over the last couple of years, I've actually, created, um, an online community, people, thousands of people from around the world [01:12:00] called the.

Deep Transformation Network and this is a community of people who really the only thing that connects them all is a sense that there is something very wrong in what our civilization is doing, and the worldview that we have right now, and a desire. to be part of trying to weave together possibilities for a deep transformation within ourselves and with all of society.

So there's all kinds of live events that we have and we have, um, lots of articles and feeds where lots of discussions take place. We have monthly events, we have interactive conversations. So it's a great place, to just join if people feel inspired by any of this conversation and want to engage further in these kinds of conversations is right there. It's just www. deeptransformation. network.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's good. It's a great resonance of technology that can be actually healthy. So well, thanks for all you're doing. Thanks for the books. Thanks for persisting. Thanks for [01:13:00] learning and sharing. And thanks for talking to me today.

Jeremy Lent: Absolutely. Thank you, Andrea. Great for great conversation. Really enjoyed the way places you took us. Thank you. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you. [01:14:00]