Jeremy Lent on Restoring Connective Tissue

The AllCreation Podcast

In this interview, Jeremy Lent, "one of the greatest thinkers of our age" according to renown journalist George Monbiot, discusses ecological reality, how we understand it, and what we should do next as a society. Jeremy contrasts our modern ways of thinking about existence with the ancient ways from China and the world's Indigenous communities. He shares how connectedness, "which is to say love," is the essence of these ancient worldviews and today's burgeoning complexity science. Jeremy describes the necessity of "deep transformation" into an "ecological civilization," the reality that "the health of the whole system requires the health of each part of the system", and he shares what keeps him going.

About Jeremy

Jeremy Lent is author of two breakthrough books on consciousness and Western Civilization. The Patterning Instinct is a cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning, and The Web of Meaning explores and weaves together wisdom from ancient China, traditional Indigenous communities, Western philosophy, and today's Sciences. Jeremy also recently launched a global network for ecological civilization called The Deep Transformation Network.

References

• The Patterning Instinct (Jeremy's first book)
• The Web of Meaning (Jeremy's second book)
• The Deep Transformation Network
• Confucianism - a philosophy / ethics
• Taoism - a philosophy / religion
• Buddhism - a philosophy / practice
• Neo-Confucianism - rationality-based fusion of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism
• Complexity science
• Gewu: to study nature in order to learn how to trive
• António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations
• Coral reefs will collapse
• UN predicts billions of people will be facing severe water stress
• Jevons paradox
• Slavlov Zizek
• Dualism
• The Selfish Gene is not true
• Re: the belief, "Humans and nature are selfish"
• Systems orientation to the world, how things connect
• Mutually-beneficial symbiosis
• Consensus trance
• Ecological Civilization

Program

0:00 Welcome & Intro

A REALITY CHECK

4:00 How series is the ecological crisis?

7:40 How much disruption & suffering do you envision?

10:30 What’s driving this?

16:15 How have we made “meaning” here in the West?

20:30 Why do we believe Nature is a machine?

A NEW VIEW OF REALITY

24:00 What ancient Asian, Indigenous, and complexity science wisdom are you drawing from now?

28:00 Chi & Li explanation

29:00 The contrast between neo-Confucian Gei Wu, Materialism’s desire to conquer Nature

34:15 Separation from Nature, our way of life, is madness, isn’t it?

38:00 And the opposite, re-connecting, brings out love?

CONNECTING to an ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

39:50 So, is the first step to reconnect to our own bodies?

42: 50 What are the moral implications of our modern way of life? What is an Ecological Civilization?

47:15 Please identify some “ecological principles”

51:10 What is The Deep Transformation Network?

53:50 What keeps you going as a “possibilitarian”? What is your spiritual source, what is helping you do this?

WRAP UP

58:00 “How are your connections?”

Quotes

Even though in the West we’re just beginning to uncover the importance of making these connections, Traditional ways of making sense of things always focused on these connections. So in early China, for example, about 1,000 years ago, they integrated three of the great Chinese traditions from the past: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism…

You don’t have the universe without all the stuff and all the relationships…

Every one of (the big shifts) happened because of symbiosis with other species, where they take their specialist skills … and that is what we get from today, where if we walk in a forest we get … and transfer their seeds … and the fungal network underground… the whole thing is a symbiotic ecosystems. And if we can start to look at our human relationship, not at how can we conquer it, then we have a chance at shifting our trajectory.

We can really understand “love” as being really, like, the realization and embrace of (our) connectedness. When we open our eyes, to that connectedness, embrace it with our being, that is love. . . It’s all about this recognition of connectedness.

“I think therefore I am” … is saying that thinking capacity is the only thing that actually is fundamentally my identity… but again, this is where modern science shows how fundamentally wrong that is… It’s actually not the only part of our intelligence… What we really are as human beings is a combined, conceptual consciousness that allows us to think in those symbolic ways, and, what we can think of as our animate consciousness, our embodied wisdom, which actually is that vast bulk of what we are as human organisms and is also a gateway to connect us with the rest of life, because some of the deepest elements of what we have within our bodies are what we share with all life. And again, modern science validates that.

Half of the genes we see in a banana are shared with us.

… And that’s not just a gee whiz fact, what that basically points to is that the way in which our bodies organize themselves, the way in which they actually are coherent and allow us to have awareness and consciousness are deeply similar. . . In Biology this is called “homology,” the deep history of our evolution is shared with all these other creatures around us…

Once we realize that other animals, far from being machines, are actually sentient, feeling beings. and...