EP 150 Jeremy Lent on the Web of Meaning

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. They discuss the dominant worldview in today’s advanced economies, its lack of scientific basis, how worldviews shape the direction of history, myths of selfishness & separation, how viewing nature as resource leads to self-reinforcing feedback loops, money-on-money return, origins of capitalism & colonialism, the extractive mindset as a European development, a complex-systems approach to spirituality, “natural attractors” as spirits, discovering Taoism, wu wei & yu wei, animate vs conceptual consciousness, integrated consciousness, yu wei as multipolar trap, problems with using GDP as a metric, improving the relationship between I & self, a democracy of consciousness, contemplative & embodied practices as a way of moving the brain toward new attractors, false ideas about evolution e.g. the selfish gene, how cells began cooperating, how humans might do the same, changing our social operating system, stepping off the hedonic treadmill, fixing transnational corporations, and much more.