Listen now | Jeremy Lent is an author and integrator whose dedicated his life to understanding meaning: how to find it, how to make it, and how to apply it. Author of renowned books ‘The Web of Meaning’ and ‘The Patterning Instinct’, Jeremy explains how to combine traditional knowledge with scientific understanding to navigate the polycrisis, the impact of cultural worldviews and how to shift them, and how we can use interconnectedness as a foundation to creating a better and more diverse world.
This was a wonderful conversation. Jeremy Lent has thought deeply about how we arrived at this current cultural crossroads. I read The Patterning Instinct a couple of years ago, and it contains real insights into how different philosophical schools of thought fed into subsequent religions and civilisations up to the present day. It was listening to one of Jeremy's talks that put me on to Jason Hickel.
I really appreciated the way you pushed back on the idea of people experimenting with new ideas behaving like mycorrhizal fungi and precipitating some kind of emergent global culture shift. I actually love this concept although agree it's difficult to imagine how this can shift the current oligarchy. I think this is similar to what some people describe as a 'societal tipping-point'. As the Buckminster Fuller quote goes, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Is it possible to make an Oligarchy obsolete with an emergent model, with minimal violence?
Alan Watts: There is a flower in a field. What produced the flower? The plant. But the plant could not exist separately from the field. So the field produced the flower. But the field could not exist separately from the land. So the land produced the flower. But the land could not exist separately from the planet. So the planet produced the flower. But the planet could not exist separately from the solar system, the galaxy, the universe ultimately. So the universe produced the flower. Nothing is separate.
This was a wonderful conversation. Jeremy Lent has thought deeply about how we arrived at this current cultural crossroads. I read The Patterning Instinct a couple of years ago, and it contains real insights into how different philosophical schools of thought fed into subsequent religions and civilisations up to the present day. It was listening to one of Jeremy's talks that put me on to Jason Hickel.
I really appreciated the way you pushed back on the idea of people experimenting with new ideas behaving like mycorrhizal fungi and precipitating some kind of emergent global culture shift. I actually love this concept although agree it's difficult to imagine how this can shift the current oligarchy. I think this is similar to what some people describe as a 'societal tipping-point'. As the Buckminster Fuller quote goes, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Is it possible to make an Oligarchy obsolete with an emergent model, with minimal violence?
Being atheist promoting absolute equality this I regret listening to the first 14 minutes. Scientists would pan this
Alan Watts: There is a flower in a field. What produced the flower? The plant. But the plant could not exist separately from the field. So the field produced the flower. But the field could not exist separately from the land. So the land produced the flower. But the land could not exist separately from the planet. So the planet produced the flower. But the planet could not exist separately from the solar system, the galaxy, the universe ultimately. So the universe produced the flower. Nothing is separate.