"Integrating Wisdom & Finding Meaning" with Jeremy Lent

Listen on your favorite podcast app here.

Jeremy Lent is an author and an integrator. He is the author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning. His work is to weave together knowledge from across disciplines, cultures and time. The conversation offers a vision for the future of humanity while also looking at the difficult reality of the times that we're living in.

In this conversation We explore the dance between science, and spirituality. We dig into the cultural and ethical implications of taking a systems approach to life, and understanding the cyclical nature of things and our interdependence. We talk about how the cultural integration of this knowledge is going to be necessary for us to survive the times that we’re in. Whether it's politics, racism, ecological threats or the risk of losing ourselves in technology, we need to recognize and actively start living into an understanding of our interconnectedness.

Jeremy Lent Resources

Website: Jeremylent.com
Blog: Patterns of Meaning (patternsofmeaning.com)
Book: The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
Organization: The Liology Institute

Other Resources

Here are some links and resources inspired by our conversation in the episode:

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Complex Systems

Santiago Theory of Cognition created by Humberto Maturana andFrancisco Varela

Fritjof Capra is an a powerful advocate of taking a systems approach to life. Check out is talk where he discusses the Santiago Theory “Mind, Matter, and Life” at the Science and Non-Duality (SAND) Conference.

Capra's newest book is called The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. It will be the text book for his upcoming Capra Course (Fall 2020). I'm going to be participating. Join me. Register here.

Listen to this episode of RadioLab: “Cellmates” to hear more about what Jeremy was saying about how life was born from the symbiotic relationship of distinct cells working together? Did you know that mitochondria (in every human cell) have a different DNA from you?

Chaos and Fractals

Edward Norton Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist and is the one who discovered chaos theory. He is also the originator of the ever-famous Butterfly effect. This article from Forbes is a great breakdown of the story that Jeremy told about Lorenz’s discovery of Chaos Theory: “Chaos Theory, The Butterfly Effect, And The Computer Glitch That Started It All”

Benoit Mandelbrot is is the father of fractals and the person that I most regret will never be a guest on Fractal Friends. This article explains the point that we made in the episode about how Mandelbrot's understanding of fractals helps us understand the simplicity of complexity: “Benoit Mandelbrot (RIP) and the quest for a theory of really everything”

China: Uighurs, Belts & Roads and Taoism

In the episode Jeremy and I talk about the pros and cons of the potential future global Chines empire. Here is some information to put that in perspective. While China is the home of Taoism (Daoism) which has a foundational belief in being in balance and in alignment with the way of nature (the Tao*) and China declared “Ecological Civilization” as a goal in 2007, China is currently acting in ways that are both extremely authoritarian and destructive to the environment. Two examples, that we discuss in the episode, of why it is looking like China will not bring ecological civilization into being are…