Jeremy Lent’s new book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place In the Universe was just published and is available for purchase here.
We need a new story. Our civilization is careening rapidly toward a precipice. Climate breakdown, ecological degradation, and gaping inequalities are symptoms of an underlying pathology: the worldview of the dominant culture that has brought us to this crisis. It’s a worldview based on disconnection, telling us that we’re each split within ourselves between mind and body; that as individuals we’re separate from each other; and that a fundamental gap exists between humans and the rest of the natural world.
This worldview has passed its expiration date. It was formed in seventeenth-century Europe, and is based on a series of flawed myths that have been superseded by modern findings in science. It is causing enormous unnecessary suffering throughout the globe and driving our civilization toward collapse.
The Web of Meaning offers a rigorous and intellectually solid foundation for an alternative worldview based on connectedness, showing how modern scientific knowledge echoes the ancient wisdom of earlier cultures. Weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom, it offers a coherent and integrated worldview that could enable humanity to flourish on the Earth harmoniously into the future.
The book presents a new story of meaning, pointing to a central core of wisdom that people have known throughout history but was obliterated by the mainstream European tradition—the understanding that, at the deepest levels, we are all interconnected. It lays out the framework for a new integrated global consciousness, based on an underlying and all-infusing recognition of connectedness: within ourselves, with other humans, and with the entire natural world. Living with this deep realization, we find ourselves at home in the universe—and are naturally driven to engage in the transformation to the life-affirming future our civilization desperately needs.
