The One You Feed - Jeremy Lent on the Integration of Science and Traditional Wisdom in Life

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current crisis of sustainability.Today Jeremy and Eric discuss his new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the UniverseBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Jeremy Lent and I Discuss the Integration of Science and Traditional Wisdom in Life and …His book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the UniverseThe difference between want and intention Understanding the power of kindness toward the “negative” parts of usHis character, “Uncle Bob,” who represents the dominant worldviewWorldview is the lens through which we see and make sense of everything How humans pattern meaning into the world based on what our culture tells usCultural mindfulness frees us to open up to other possibilitiesThe idea that humans are selfish or have a “selfish gene” and how science refutes thisThe self-organization of life: the different parts make the whole and the whole relates to the different partsHuman nature and how cooperation, not competition has led to the abundance of life on earthDifferences between Eastern and Western traditional beliefs in regard to human natureThe negative aspects of humans’ ability to cooperateThe Taoist notion of Wu-Wei (effortless action) and Yu-Wei (purposive action)Integrating two elements of human consciousness; conceptual (left brain) and animate (right brain)The most important relationship in life is the “I’ and the “self”Chi is translated to matter and energy that make up the universeLi is how Chi is organizedHow the deep spiritual traditions from the past add richness to what modern science revealsThe realization that deep human intuitions are our internal validation of what science tells us about how the universe really isFractals and the holarchy or structure of life’s interconnectednessJeremy Lent Links:Jeremy’s WebsiteJeremy’s BlogTwitterFacebookNovo Nordisk – Explore the science behind weight loss and partner with your healthcare provider for a healthy approach to your weight management.If you enjoyed this conversation with Jeremy Lent, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Neuroscience Behind our Reality with James KingslandMike McHargue (Science Mike)Science and the Sacred with Sasha SaganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh boy, it's holiday time again. You know how that brings up all sorts of negative feelings for me. Well, you're not alone in that. Lots of people have negative feelings around the holiday, which is why we are doing a One You Feed community event that we are titling, Stressed by Holiday Expectations? How to Feel Peace Instead This Season. Everybody is burdened by expectations during the holidays, whether that's other people's expectations of you or your expectations of the holidays. It's a struggle for all of us. So we are going to get together as a community, and I'm going to teach a spiritual habit that will allow you to release these types of expectations

and touch into a deeper feeling of wholeness, peace, steadiness, and presence. Ground yourself through a dose of genuine nourishing connection with others in this wonderfully supportive community. Go to oneufeed.net slash holiday to sign up for this free community event. That's oneufeed.net slash holiday. I have a chapter entitled the most important relationship in your life, which is not necessarily between you and your partner or your parents or whatever, but it's actually between I and myself. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance

of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jeremy Lent, an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization's existential crisis and explores

pathways toward a life-affirming future. His new book is The Web of Meaning, Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Hi, Jeremy. Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much, Eric. Great to be here with you today. I am really happy to have you on. I have admired your work for a number of years now, and your latest book is called The Web of Meaning, Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, which is an idea that lots of our listeners will love to hear because they're very into both modern science and traditional wisdom. But before we jump into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He

says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, thanks. You know, when I first heard that parable, it brought to my mind what I feel are some very wise words I heard a number of years back that really affected me profoundly. And those words were basically this, that you already are who you truly intend to be, which is this kind of

amazing kind of thought in a way, because it's as if it's coming from the deep heart of who you truly intend. Of course, once you have an intention, you're not already that person, but somewhere deep within you, you are, and that's what you can connect with. And to me, what it shows is the profound power of intention in how we shape our lives. And, you know, for me, that parable is very, very powerful in that way. It's so simple. And yet it really shows how when you set the path in a way you can sort of stop trying so hard because you've already set that path.

And then this is really borne out by modern neuroscience. Those neural pathways get reinforced and reinforced when you get into those habits of that path. So it becomes easier and easier to move in that direction that you truly intend for. I love that. It's interesting. You should bring that up. We just finished the first week of a program I lead called Spiritual Habits. And the first principle that we focus on is really that idea of intention. You know, it's really about like, who do I want to be? What matters? What's important? By clarifying that, we're able to actually then follow it through.

It's kind of like clarifying, well, what does it mean to feed the good wolf? Or what does it mean to feed the bad wolf? Let me get clear about what that means for me. Yes. Yes. I think that's right. And one thing around that time that I really discerned as being really important is the contrast between two words that we think of usually almost as interchangeable. That's between want and intention. Because, you know, you can say, oh, I want this, I want that. But there is a profound difference because when you want something, it's like a goal orientation. And when you set up a goal orientation, you sort of set yourself up to fail. And you also set

yourself up, it's almost like the opposite of intention. It's like you ignore the path you're on and you focus on the destination and you don't get that. So you feel I'm a failure. And so it's this continual judging that comes into the whole thing. With intention, I see it almost like as if you're on the journey, you might have a sense of that destination, but that's not what intention is about. It's like shifting your orientation towards where you want to go. And then just really being present in every step of the path towards that direction. And you know, if you set the intention in the right place, you can't go wrong. You might sort of waver around a bit, but you're moving, you're shifting in that right direction.

Right. It makes me think of, again, in the program, we talk about aspiration versus expectation. You know, that intentions, we want them to be aspirational, but we don't want to get hooked into expectation because we're not going to live up to them. Usually, like if my intention is that I want to be kind to my children, I can move more in that direction. But I'm not always going to be kind every time to my children. So or to use a metaphor that Stephen Covey often uses, right? An intention is more of a compass versus a map, right? It doesn't get us to this exact point. It points us in a direction we want to go.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But then if I can add, there's one thing in that parable that kind of troubles me a little bit, which is this kind of dualistic, you know, this is the good, this is the bad, or the good versus the evil or whatever. And what I fear is that it can set up this sense that when we recognize those voices or those patterns within ourselves that we don't necessarily want as our intention, we then judge them and say, no, that's the bad thing. And I have to not feed that. And I think by setting up that sense that there are parts in us that are bad, that rather than actually overcoming them, or it can actually

reinforce them. And so one of the things that I personally believe in is the power of kindness around that, of like looking at those parts within ourselves that we don't necessarily aspire to. But then rather than saying, that's bad, I need to overcome that, I need to fight that, to actually say, I can treat that with kindness. I can recognize it had a place in my being at a certain young age, most likely, where I tried to defend who I was at that time. And, you know, it was young. It was not so smart, maybe. It didn't quite understand. And then it developed into this voice of judging myself or whatever. And if I can treat that with kindness, recognize it's there, I don't need to get rid of it.

I can just almost like smother it with kindness so that it becomes less and less of a powerful influence within my overall being. Yeah, there's definitely elements of that parable that set up a dualism that I just don't think really exists. You know, to me, it just points to that basic truth of we have choices where we choose is kind of what we get. I'd love to just have you start us off where you start the book off, which is you set up this sort of imaginary conversation between, say, you and somebody named Uncle Bob. And I thought it was interesting because I realized that some of the things that are coming out of Uncle Bob's mouth have come out of my mouth, particularly maybe as I talk to people who are younger than me. And so what gave you the idea to start things off that way? And what are the things that Uncle Bob is saying? Right. Well, essentially, what the book is all about is looking at the dominant worldview that

almost all of us take for granted, and showing that that worldview is not only dangerous and driving our whole society to destruction and causing so many of us to feel alienated and isolated. But it's also plain wrong. We think that there are these kind of scientific truths that must be true because we've heard them so many times. But it turns out a lot of these are myths that got developed in around the 17th century in Europe. And modern science shows that they're wrong. And then what the book does is show that there's a different way we can make sense of things, a way that is actually scientifically valid, and also one that points to the same insights that the great wisdom traditions of the past, indigenous traditions, Buddhism, Taoism, and others have pointed to, which is our deep interconnectedness. So that's sort of what the whole book's about. And I really wanted to begin with

something that people could sort of grab onto and sort of relate to. So it's been my own experience, but to protect the innocent, I obviously made up a name of Uncle Bob. It's not really the real person, but it's this sense of when people think about what's possible and can get excited about the notion of a different kind of way of living, there's always this person like an Uncle Bob type person to kind of shoot it down. we can do this. We need to change the world, make it a better place. And Uncle Bob comes along and says, I'll tell you, let me tell you. And you've been around the block a few times like I have. You'll know this is what it's really all about. And he's basically the spokesperson for the dominant worldview. He says, let's face it, humans are selfish. In fact, all of nature is selfish. Haven't you heard about the selfish gene? That's how evolution works. And because of that,

you know, our system of capitalism, that's the way it's meant to be, because everyone doing their own selfish thing, it's called the invisible hand, right? And that's the way the world works most efficiently. And technology will save us. And of course, there are problems with technology and capitalism, we'll get through them. It's always there's been so much progress. And all of a sudden, the conversation dies down, it's all over. And, and we move on. And so what I sort of say in the book is, this whole book, in a way, is a refutation of Uncle Bob. But to your point, I had those Uncle Bob, not just those voices, but I live my life according to that sort of dominant worldview to Uncle Bob's idea of what

it's all about, for a big chunk of my life. So I know only too well what it's like to have that. And even now, with all of the work I've done to look at this different worldview and live into it, there's still times when I still see the world from that Uncle Bob perspective, because it's what we all grow up in without even realizing that it's actually a worldview. Right. And your previous book, you talk so much about worldview. Let's talk about why is worldview so important? Why is it foundational? I mean, when you say worldview, it seems like, yeah, that would be pretty important, but I'd love to have you sort of talk about why it's so important. Yeah. Well, we can really think of a world view as the lens through which we see everything that

happens and make sense of it. And just like we look at the world through our eye itself as a lens, but we're not aware that we're seeing things through a lens. We just think that's the way the world is. But meanwhile, through that lens and through the patterning of our brain neuronal network, we're making sense of the world around us. That's what I call in my first book, actually, as the title of the book, the human patterning instinct. It's true in other mammals, but in humans, it's way more advanced than others, that we pattern meaning into the world. And different cultures pattern meaning into the world around

them to form a sense of what is the world. Questions like, who am I? What should we do in the world? Where do values come from? All those things. And the thing about a worldview is that it's mostly not explicit. It's not like somebody takes their daughter, age six or seven, and puts her on a lap and says, now, let me tell you, this is what we believe about the world. But it's implicit. And as a child grows up, first, you know, she learns the language of a culture without even knowing she's meant to learn it. That's our patterning instinct at play.

And then she patterns meaning into the universe based on what the culture tells her. And so just like in the same way, if you look at a fish swimming in the ocean, that fish is totally unaware that it's in water, right? Because that's all it knows. Similarly, we don't even realize we have a particular worldview until we look at more deeply the way other people or cultures make sense of things and realize, oh, wow, they're starting from a totally different foundation. or cultures make sense of things and realize, oh, wow, they're starting from a totally different foundation. And then the pattern of values and meaning they make of things might look very different from our own. Yeah, I think that's so true. I mean, so much of, you know, particularly my work in Zen Buddhism

has been about trying to see those lenses a little bit more clearly, you know, recognizing like they're always there. Conditioning is always present, but how can I peel back more and more of it to have a closer view of reality itself? Yes, I think that's right. And I think what's so important is to realize that it's the way our consciousness, our human cognition works is to pattern meaning into things. That doesn't mean that when we pattern the meaning, it's wrong. But it's just any pattern, by definition, almost the definition of a pattern is it looks at what would otherwise be random dots or essences of something, and it identifies ones

that are more important and puts a shape around them, and then excludes the ones that are not so important. And there's nothing wrong in doing that unless you take that pattern for reality. And of course, like you say, Zen itself is one of the greatest traditions that exists for looking at our own consciousness and recognizing that that's what we're doing. There's this great Zen quote from a Zen master, which simply says, whatever you think is delusion, which I love because at first you say, wait a minute, but then you realize that's the whole point.

It's not, it's only delusion if you think that is the truth and the only truth. But once you realize it's just a way in which I've patterned meaning, then it opens you up to look at other possibilities. And in a way, we can consider the books I write almost like a cultural version of Zen, of like looking at how we can actually develop a practice of cultural mindfulness. And we can recognize that the sense we make of the world through our culture is also very specific to that culture and is not necessarily right. And that's what I try to point out in the book. Say more about that cultural mindfulness. That's a very interesting term.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, essentially, there's actually a practice that I sometimes will take people through workshops, which is exactly this notion that so through either Zen or basically almost any kind of mindfulness meditation, one of the things we learn when we sit on the mat is that we make stories up about ourselves. And as we're watching our mind work and we see that we just made up a story about, oh, he said that to me and that means he thinks that about me and I think that. And when we get to a certain point in mindfulness, we recognize, oh, I just made up a story about myself. Maybe there's some truth in it, maybe not, but it's a story I constructed.

And that frees us to go beyond that story, to open up to other possibilities. And cultural mindfulness does the same thing. What I often do in workshops is we'll look at some of these profound concepts that are always ambiguous, but that we build our civilization and our values on. Say things like human nature, or concepts like prosperity, or safety, or education, or happiness. All of these are very ambiguous concepts that different cultures will interpret in very different ways. And what I do is I'll actually have people on a worksheet for each of those concepts, like say human nature, to write

down what are the things that we hear about human nature in normal articles in the press or just regular conversations or whatever. And things like, well, humans are competitive, humans are selfish, like those are some standard things. And then to look at what is the underlying root metaphor or some sense of what underlies some of these stories and what does that lead to in our world? And then to pause and say, what are other ways in which we could make sense of that? Supposing we saw humans as actually ultimately cooperative, what would that lead to in terms of stories and ways in which we could make sense of the world in a different way? And so in each of these, what we see is you can pick any one of these big, ambiguous concepts that we structure our whole culture and values on and interpret them

in fundamentally different ways. I love that idea. That is really great. I'd love to learn more about the work that you do with that. Let's do that a little bit right now then with one of, you know, Uncle Bob's key tenets. Uncle Bob's key tenets that I find myself spouting is the one about progress. We've made so much progress. We've made so much progress. And maybe we'll get to that. But you just used one, Uncle Bob's idea that humans are selfish. You know, we've got the selfish gene as a metaphor that has made it pretty deeply into our culture, you know, survival of the fittest. There's this sense that at base, nature is this hyper competitive thing. And we've built a society that reflects that to some degree. So tell me what we know that might say that isn't true. Yes, for sure. Yeah. And really,

there's kind of two layers to that. And you touched on both of them. One is that nature itself is selfish and humans are selfish. In fact, we're more selfish than we've done so well in out-competing the rest of nature that we must be even more selfish than the others, something like that. And both of those, at both levels, these are ideas that we think are scientific from our dominant culture, but they've been absolutely refuted by what modern science says. Why don't we begin with nature itself? Seems like a better place to begin. So we're told that it's all about the selfish gene. Richard Dawkins popularized that back in the 70s with one of the greatest bestsellers of sort of scientific works, the selfish gene. And, you know, he spoke for a lot of what was the dominant way of understanding

things in those days. And basically what that says is like, we're dominated by our genes. In fact, we are just machines the gene uses to replicate itself. And that's how nature works. And even when we see things like cooperation in nature, it's really just the selfish gene figuring out a way to kind of play the game to be even more successful in the future. Well, it turns out that both the concepts of the gene dominating everything about nature and evolution and the selfishness have been refuted by modern science. First off, actually, the gene is part of an interactive process with the cell. The gene is viewed nowadays in modern cellular and systems biology as more like a palette, that the organism itself, the cell that

holds the gene and the organism itself actually can use to express different elements within the gene, depending on what's needed with the environment. And things are seen much more interactively in terms of the organism in relation to the environment in relation to the environment, in relation to the gene being one complex set of self-organized processes. So that's one thing. So it sounds like what you're saying is the metaphor we would have had for genes, had for a long time, was they were the blueprint that everything got built by. And what you're saying is, yes, it's sort of like the architect delivers the blueprint. But then the builder says to the architect, hey, you know, maybe we might want to think about changing that. And the architect goes, well, we could.

There's a little bit more dialogue back and forth between the blueprint and the builder than just the blueprint being this is the way it is no matter what. Yes. Yeah, I think that's great. And what's so interesting is, again, if we look at these metaphors and how they lead us to thinking, even the very concept of blueprints assumes that ultimately there is some God out there, there's some source, there's some great mind that said, this is how it's meant to look. But what the sciences of self-organization and systems biology show is, and this is really one, perhaps the greatest miracle of all around us, is the self-organization of life. That life itself is known as autopoiesis. Life itself self-generated through its own interactive processes with the different parts of it,

where all the different parts make the whole and the whole relates to the different parts. And so even the very notion of blueprint is part of that way of ultimately inherited from traditional Christianity, like in the beginning there was God and God created. But the irony is that many of these early scientists took the same concepts from Christianity, but sort of made them into a quasi sort of science. And then just to finish on the nature part of it, well, of course, there is both competition and cooperation in nature. We see that all around us in ecosystems, and they both play a part. But what is so fascinating is that evolutionary biologists now look, when they look at the increases in complexity since life began on Earth, from the very early cells to complex cells to multicellular life, all the way up to the abundant riches of ecosystems today. There's just four or five big

steps that have been identified. Each of them were the results of different organisms working out how to work together symbiotically, where the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. So it's true to say that actually it's cooperation, it's increases in cooperation that have led to the abundance of life on earth today, not competition, which is so fascinating. So that's just nature. But then, of course, people say, yes, but humans, I mean, just look around us. Of course, we're selfish and competitive by nature. That's how our world works. And if we look back where that comes from, probably one of the most important sources is like Thomas Hobbes back in the 17th century came up with this idea that originally it was this battle. Humans' life was nasty, Buddhist and short, but luckily we got morality

and we got society to instill some rules. And that's how we get to enjoy a more civilized life. And that is the way, even all the way up to Richard Dawkins and beyond, people still see that in that way, that our nature is to fight each other. But thankfully, we've got these higher moral impulses. Well,, actually anthropologists and evolutionary biologists recognize that what differentiates humans from other primates is our ability to cooperate. That when humans separated from other primates millions of years ago in the savannah, it was those that learned to cooperate better in groups that were the more successful. And over millions of years, we developed a group identity, and not just this identity of this male, alpha male who tries to dominate the others, but

it's these feelings we have like compassion, or loving people who are generous, or a sense of fair play and willingness to even put ourselves at risk to put something right that we think is wrong. These are deeply felt. These are not like we have to overcome our instincts to do these good things. They're actually what we deeply feel as evolved human beings. Yeah. And you talk about sort of a fundamental divide between sort of Eastern and Western thought, right? Is that, you know, Western thought we've been shaped so much by the doctrine of original sin. Eastern thought, at least the parts of it that I am familiar with, particularly Buddhism, posits that the underlying thing is good. That your basic nature is good.

It gets covered over, but as you uncover it, what emerges naturally is compassion and love. You don't have to go out and then make it. It's there. But as you uncover it, what emerges naturally is compassion and love. You don't have to go out and then, you know, make it. It's there. Yes, that's completely right. In particular, these ideas came partly from Buddhism, but also from traditional Chinese thought all the way back to a couple of thousand years ago. There was one of the great sages from ancient China who was called Mencius, who talked a lot about human

nature. And his point was that exactly to your point, that human nature is essentially good, but it needs to be cultivated. It kind of goes right back to the original parable that we start off with. And he talks of thinking of humans, just like we think of a plant, that a plant wants to flourish. It wants to grow into its own unique place, but it's only going to do so when it's on good soil. It's only going to do so when there's no pollution around, when it has enough nutrition and water in order to flourish. And so Mencius would say about human cultivation, he'd say, you know, every farmer around knows how to cultivate a tong tree, it was called, or, you know, any kind of plant that they want, and they know what to do.

But they don't spend the same amount of time thinking about cultivating themselves. And if they did, like, that's what would lead to so much more flourishing. So it's this notion that our culture can lead us to sort of really layer over that core sense of our innate goodness and end up contorting ourselves to try to do good within what our culture says are its values, when actually what that does is diminish our ability to flourish for ourselves. Yeah, it's something you say late in the book. You say an individual can only fully flourish within the context of a society which is itself healthy. Yes.

Our global civilization is built on values that align with hedonic impulses and oppose eudaimonia, which is a term we may get to about a different kind of good. Let's go back to cooperation for a second, because it is one thing I frequently reflect on and look at in the world is I'm like, I can't believe how well so much of it actually works. going 70 miles an hour in these cars. And yes, there's accidents. Yes, there's jerks of drivers, but the vast majority of it works incredibly well. We cooperate on a grand scale to make that happen. You know, we go about our business. I can go into a store. I mean, there is so much cooperation. Yes. You know, that is so true. I love your image of the freeway there. And there's actually a biologist, somebody who's a primatologist who studies other primates, who gives this idea, like, she says, imagine when you fly on a plane, you all neatly get on the plane, you sit there next to hours later, when the plane landed, you'd have like fingers in the aisle, you'd have blood everywhere, you'd have to be dead, it would be a complete

mayhem. And that's the thing, we humans are actually super co-operators. Overall, I see that as a fundamentally wonderful, exciting thing. It's as if we were talking about these different layers, increases in cooperation, ever since life began on Earth. And I think it's reasonable to see humans as through our ability to connect and through our global consciousness, like through the internet too now, it's almost like we're taking it to a whole other level. But at the same time, that ability to cooperate has its dark side. So when back in early agricultural times, when people began to develop possessions and chieftainships, the ability to cooperate led

people to develop obviously armies to go and conquer other people to sort of bring them into their empire. And so the cooperation when it's in-group cooperation, can often lead to seeing others as the out-group, which can be one negative. And then there's the fact that now we've become, through our cooperative society, but because it's been now tinged in this kind of framework of global capitalism, which is all about exploiting and extracting those who are not part of the power system, we are cooperating so much that we're basically cooperating and destroying the rest of life on earth. We've become too effective at things that are actually destroying life and destroying actually the bonds between

other human beings, but not effective enough at really seeing our true deep interdependence with all of life. And that's a lot of what I tried to point out in the book. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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I'd like to talk about broadly an idea that you explore through lots of different lenses, but it's a sort of split in human consciousness. We've recently had Ian McGilchrist on the show who talks eloquently about this in the left brain, right brain ideas, right? We've had Joe Bolte-Taylor who talks about that. But you talk about it lots of different ways. You call it our inner interpreter versus our mystic. You talk about in Taoism, the idea of Wu Wei versus Yu Wei or core and higher order consciousness. So there's lots of ways we can talk about it, but set it up for us. What is this split in human consciousness? Yeah, sure. And this is a huge central theme for anyone trying to figure out what is humanity's place within all of life and within nature. And really, those early Taoists were the ones who I think first set this kind of theme in motion, as you just mentioned. And they had this notion of looking at the way all of nature, non-human nature, worked.

And they called that wu-wei, which basically means effortless action, that there's just this kind of flow with the Tao, if you will, that all animals and all plants seem to do. And then humans somehow are different. And they have what the Taoists called yu-wei, which you can translate as purposive action, which is this sense of, they describe it as things like using a pump to pump water up a hill or using fire to dry up a well, like going against the flow of nature. And that, of course, is what civilization is all about. And what the Taoists said, right. And in fact, civilization is kind of like a crime against the Tao. So they kind of wanted to sort of,

they were the original sort of back to nature type group of thinkers, if you will. But what I try to explore in the book is this possibility of integrating those two elements of human consciousness, recognizing that we do have them. There is this symbolic thinking, this conceptual consciousness that does seem to make humans unique among pretty much any other creatures. among pretty much any other creatures. And as Jill Balty Taylor and Ian McGilchrist explained so well, that relates to the left hemisphere and the interpreter and the way in which that part of us makes stories out of things. It creates the sense of an eye, of a separate eye, separate from others around us and separate from really kind of the rest of life all around. But then we also have our animate consciousness. That's where Western civilization sort of went off the rails, if you will. When

Descartes, in that probably the most famous statement in philosophy, he says, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Basically, what he's saying is, my only identity is that thinking capacity. If you're saying my only identity is that prefrontal cortex mediated left hemisphere, and the rest of me doesn't even exist. It's just this kind of machine. And that's what our society says, that the rest of nature is just this kind of, you know, doesn't have an intrinsic value. But within ourselves, we are nature.

And just that we have this conceptualizing faculty, we also have that Wu Wei within ourselves. We have 40 trillion cells. Even the single cell has incredible intelligence, what we can call animate intelligence. 40 trillion of them all working together to create this amazing organism that is each of us. And we can recognize that we are actually mind-body organisms, that we have both this conceptual and inanimate consciousness. I talk about it in terms of the I and the self. I call that, I have a chapter entitled, The Most Important Relationship in Your Life, which is not necessarily between you and your partner or your parents or whatever, but is actually between I and myself. And, you know, we see this in normal language. If I'm chatting with you about this new job I had, I might say to you things like, oh, I'm really, I've been pushing myself too hard. It's like, you know, I'm really beside myself with like anxiety. And who's I and who's the self that

you're pushing? It's like there's two different parts of our identity. And who is I and who's the self that you're pushing? It's like these two different parts of our identity. And we can think of that self more like this animate part of us that lives on a moment to moment, present moment. And that's the self that we're always kind of relating to and trying to make one way or another. And my point about this is that we can actually find ways for I and the self to live more harmoniously together, to live basically in a state of full integration, where we recognize that both I and the self can actually be working together for the whole of our organism, and that within sort of nested within larger identity, even beyond that. Discussions when we start talking about these things as if the right brain or the animate consciousness is better. And I don't think that's at all what is being said. type of consciousness that we want to cultivate the other type in order to sort of balance these

things out a little bit and bring them into a little bit more harmonious relationship with each other. Although to say that they're actually separate is perhaps debatable also. Yes, right. It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, because they are separate and related. It's as though almost like we can think of them as kind of Siamese twins that are absolutely joined integrally and also have separate manifestations, but also manifesting out of the same hall. And yeah, I think this is so important to point this out, by the way, that everything that I'm saying in my book and my writings can easily be misinterpreted by people who don't look so closely as, oh, he's saying like, you know, the West is bad and the East, the mystical East is

good and our civilization is bad and the indigenous way of being was good and right brain is good and left brain is bad and all these things. And that's absolutely to your point, not what I'm saying. But just like Ian McGilchrist talks about so eloquently, and it's as though that left brain consciousness has actually come to dominate our global society right now. So that there is, in fact, a massive imbalance between the power of those two ways of cognition within each of us individually, because we grew up in this culture, and within our global culture as a whole. So my point is that we can recognize the benefits of scientific thinking, that the reductionist way of making sense of the world that tries to understand how each little part works, has driven us these miracles of the internet, of you and I being able to talk with each other

thousands of miles away in real time, antibiotics, hygiene, so many things we can be grateful for. And at the same time, we need to recognize that some of these have come at the expense of our separateness, even from within ourselves, from others, and from all of life. And we can rebalance that, not by rejecting technology, not by rejecting this incredible unique gift that humans have, but using those towards integration, towards a sense of making something whole, even while it's differentiated. I'm not trying to get rid of our richness of the differentiation around us, but to recognize there is a whole. And right now we are cutting that whole apart. We're disintegrating our world the way it is right now through our dominant culture.

I think that's a great place to transition into another idea that runs through the book that I love, which is this difference between, would I say it as Chi and Li? Exactly. That's right. And that is another very profound idea about the universe that came from East Asian thinking, and actually came from a school of thinkers about a thousand years ago during the Song Dynasty. And they call themselves the school of the Tao. We actually know them nowadays as Neo-Confucians. But what's fascinating about this group of thinkers is they ended up synthesizing three of the great wisdom traditions

of the East, both Taoism and Confucianism, and also Buddhism, which had become very central in China for hundreds of years before then. And ironically, they were trying to refute Buddhism and Taoism, but it was so much part of their thinking, they ended up incorporating these ideas. And they tried to say, no, we've got to make sense of the entire universe in a comprehensive way. And they did that. And they said, basically, all of the universe is comprised of qi, which we can translate in today's terms as basically matter and or energy, like all the stuff of the universe. And we know from Einstein that matter and energy are essentially relating to each other in that

famous equation. So if you think of that as qi, they said the entire universe is made of that, So if you think of that as qi, they said the entire universe is made of that, but it's organized in certain ways. And the ways in which that qi is organized, the principles of organization, they called li. So they felt that what we needed to do is try to investigate that li, investigate the way things are organized and in all the different elements of the universe to understand it. And what I found so fascinating as I was doing research years ago, looking really for my own search for meaning, is I was reading a lot of modern systems scientists at the same time who were arguing against that Richard Dawkins type of reductionist, say, like the whole world is meaningless, just little bits of selfish genes and little bits of molecules, and that's all there is. And there's one particular great systems scientist called Stuart Kaufman, one of the leading complexity theorists, who was

talking about what we're learning from complexity science is that everything in the universe has these patterns of self-organization. And we've got to explore. It's never been explored before. It's like new territory for humans to understand what it means to recognize we live in a universe that's fundamentally self-organized according to these principles we're uncovering. At the same time, I was reading about these Neo-Confucians and I was going, well, Stuart, I agree with you totally, but there's been actually these great traditions of the past that have also recognized that the can see that these deep spiritual traditions from the past are not anti-scientific. In fact, they add a richness to what modern science is telling us

when we feel, when maybe we have a peak experience and we sense this deep interconnectedness of everything and being part of something so much bigger. And what modern science oftentimes, or the modern worldview tells us is, oh, well, you know, that might be a nice feeling, but of course, that's got nothing to do with science. But, you know, you go ahead and feel that. But what I'm really offering in the book is this realization that actually those deep intuitions we have as humans, those peak experiences, are actually our internal validation of what science is in fact saying is how the universe really is. this self-emerging intelligence. When I heard Qi and Li and I read it, I immediately thought of the most famously chanted Zen scripture, which is the Heart Sutra, which says in about 10 different ways, emptiness is form, form is emptiness. You know, emptiness could be the Qi, it's the

potential, it's the unbound stuff. And then there's form, the way it all shows up, the different shapes it all takes. And that those are, their form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And, you know, to your point, it's talking about chi and li. You don't have one without the other. Yes, exactly. And I think you've really hit the heart of it. Exactly. And I think you've really hit the heart of it. That is that Buddhist perception that actually was part of what led to that Neo-Confucian synthesis of Li and Shi. There

was actually a Buddhist school called the Hua-Yen School, which was the first place we know of where they actually talked about Li in the way that the Neo-Confucians did. And they had this beautiful image. You might have come across it, what was known as Indra's Web. And it was a sense of the ancient god Indra, Indra's Net, it's also called, made this incredible golden net where it was filled with jewels. And each jewel was so perfectly shiny that it reflected all the other jewels in this web. So much so that it didn't just all the other jewels in this web. So much so that it didn't just reflect the other jewels, but it even took the reflection from the others and reflected those

too. So that if you could look at one jewel, you saw the entire universe of all these other beautiful jewels reflected in that one. And it's this profound concept of how each of us really like these kind of fractal entities of something so much larger, and the principles of our own existence, the principles by which ourselves themselves self-organize and come alive, the same principles by which we are and our society and all of life. And we can see ourselves embedded basically in this kind of Indra's net of all of life around us in this amazing sort of fractal unfolding of reality.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You led me right where I wanted to go next, which was this idea of sort of this fractal nature of existence. So first share what that means. And then let's talk briefly about sort of the implications. Yeah, sure. Well, basically, when scientists recognize that these connections between things are so important, one of the things they do is try to look at principles of these connections.

And one of the most important principles they come up with is fractals. And basically, a fractal, in simple terms, is just a pattern that repeats itself at different scales. And what scientists have discovered is that every time you see fractals in nature, they are evidence of self-organization. And you see it everywhere in nature. So you see those repeating patterns, everything like the patterns on trees, on the veins of leaves and clouds, branch, lightning. We see fractal patterns in our lungs, in the neuronal connections of our nervous system. You even see it in the way cells are self-organized. So basically, everything is like as fractal within a fractal within a fractal.

And this notion of these fractals forming coherent holes, but within bigger holes, of these fractals forming coherent holes, but within bigger holes, is also sometimes called a holarchy. This sense of nested entities that are coherent in themselves, but have smaller nested entities within them and are part of bigger nested entities. And that basically describes an ecosystem. It describes our own bodies. It describes basically the way life itself evolved over billions of years. So that is a key element of understanding sort of where we are in the universe. We're actually sort of fractal self-organized patterns within larger fractal self-organized patterns. And that has profound implications. One, it has profound implications for our identity, that rather than seeing ourselves as fixed individuals

with sort of this adamantine sort of structure and everything else outside is separate and everything within me is mine, we begin to realize that actually we're just kind of these temporary eddies in these much smaller and much larger patterns, which we just happen to form a coherent whole for a certain while. And that also leads to this concept that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I talk about in the book of what I call fractal flourishing. That once we recognize that all of nature is a fractal, once we recognize that our societies are fractals and part of the living earth, we realize that there's no such thing as true flourishing of any one of those elements in the holarchy without all

the others being flourishing too. So in just the same way, if your heart is having problems, the rest of your body feels bad. Or any element in your body, if it's having difficulty, the rest of your body has difficulty too. And it's only when all the different layers are feeling health that you can feel a true sense of integrated health. I think that's a great way of saying it. We could take that example a little smaller and a little bigger. We could say that if certain cells in my heart are not doing well, then my heart will not be doing well. When my heart is not doing well, the me, Eric, as I think of myself, will not be doing well. And then thusly, the way I react and the burden that puts on my family means that my family won't be doing as well.

And so on and so forth. It just keeps going out in that way. And I love that idea. I often, when I think about, you know, the Buddhist ideas of, you know, quote unquote,, non self, right? I often think of it. And you say this very well in the book, it's not saying that at a level, from a certain view that I'm not sitting right here being who I am, of course I am. But I am made up of lots of other little things. And I am part of lots of bigger things. And depending on what level you look at in that system determines how you would view me, you know, to a cell, a cell is like, well, I'm pretty big deal, right? You know, I'm like the center of things, right? But to us, we're like, well, you're one of 40 trillion cells, right? You know, and, and then I'm like, I'm a pretty big deal. And nature's like, well, buddy, you're like one of 7 billion who's alive today. Like, it's all context.

You know, and you say that so well about, you know, when you're talking about Qi and Li, that idea that the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves. Yeah, that's so right. Yeah. And in fact, that Buddha's notion of non-self, based on the conversation we've already had, I like to sort of really think of it, maybe the best way to translate it is the no fixed I. Because basically, that's what it's saying is that when I say I am like this, I am like that, the recognition that that is a construction, and it's not fixed, is what allows us to then free ourselves from those constraints. And to your point, everything you said, I just love how you describe that.

And what I feel is crucial is to realize how true that applies to us in our society too. So we're told in our society, you know, be successful. It's a zero-sum game. You know, you gain at the expense of those around you. And our entire culture is based on exploitation of those that we are stronger than in order to be successful. But once we realize this principle of fractal flourishing, we realize that actually, I can only be healthy when those around me are healthy and happy, when actually our society, our community, and then our society is doing well, when humanity has the conditions for flourishing, our community, and then our society is doing well,

when humanity has the conditions for flourishing, and fundamentally when all of Earth can be regenerated and happy. And it's not a zero-sum game. And that's one of the biggest shifts I think we can do for ourselves and our culture is to realize that, that we're all part of this hierarchy. Well, I think the way you ended it there, Jeremy, was really beautiful. And so you and I are going to talk some more in the post-show conversation about this question of how could things be in continual flux yet remain persistent. And we talked a little bit about it with Chi and Lee, but we're going to talk about the ship of Theseus.

And then I also want to talk about a line that you used to end the book, which I think is so important, which is, what is the sacred and precious strand that you will weave? And I'd like to talk about how some of us find that for ourselves. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, episode I do every week called A Teaching Song and a Poem, where I present a song, a poem, and a teaching that I love, you can get all that at oneufeed.net slash join. Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed it. We'll have links in the show notes to your books and where people can find you. And this has been really fun. Thank you so much, Eric. It's been a great pleasure talking with you today. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts