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 one you Feed dot net slash Holiday to sign up for this free community event. That's when you feed dot 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 Y, 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, a 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 a idea that lots of our listeners will love to hear because they're very into both modern science and you know, tradition in a 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 a 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 that 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 an amazing kind of thought in a way because it says this sort of 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 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 is being really important is the contrast between two words that we think of usually almost as interchangeable. That's between wants 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 this, so you fail on the failure. And so it's this continual judging that comes into the whole thing with intention. I say it almost like as if you're on the journey. You might have the 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 that 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 um or to use a metaphor that Stephen Covey off and uses, right, and intention is more of a compass versus a map. Right, it doesn't get us to this exact point, eat 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 a good, this is 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 wants as our intention, we then judge them say now 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 and 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, young age mos likely where I've tried to defend who I was at that time, and you know, it was young, it was not not so smart, maybe it didn't find understand and then it developed into this voice that judged 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 uh. I thought it was interesting because I realized, is that some of the things that are coming out of uncle Bob's mouth have come out of my mouth, particularly maybe as I talked 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 world view that almost all of us, I take for granted, and showing that that world view 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 seventeenth 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 same insights that the Great Wisdom traditions of the past, indigenous traditions, Buddhism, Taoism and others have pointed to, which is our deep into connectedness. So that's sort of what the whole books about. And I really wanted to begin with something that people could sort of grab onto and so 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 a 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. And so I started off. I grew up in England. It was this kind of tea party. Family is getting together in London and somebody's talking, oh, we 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. But it's really all about it. He's basically the spokesperson for the dominant world view. 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 worked most efficiently. And technology will save us them. Of course, there are problems, but with technology and capitalism will 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 uh 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 world view, 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 and what it's like to have that. Even now, with all of the well I've done so look at this different worldview and and live into it, there's still times when I still look see the world from that Uncle Bud 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 his worldview so important? Why is it foundational? Yeah? 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 worldview as the lens through which we see everything that happens and makes sense of it. And just like we look at the world through you know, 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, as through that lens and through the patterning of our brain neuronal network, we're making sense of the world around us. That that's what I call in my first book, Actually that's the title of the book. Like the human patterning instinct. It's true in other mammals, but in humans it's way more advanced than others. That we pattern and 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 world view is that it's mostly not explicit. It's not like and somebody takes their daughter age six or seven and puts her on a lap. Now, let me tell you, this is what we believe about the world. But it's implicit. And as a child grows up first year, she learns the language of a culture without even knowing she's meant to learn it. That's our patterning instinct to 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 that 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, 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 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 are are human cognition works, is to pattern meaning into things that doesn't mean that when we pattern the meaning, that's wrong. But it just to any pattern by definition. Almost the definition of a pattern is it looks at what would otherwise be random dots or and essences of something, and it identifies ones that are more important and puts the 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, then 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 as great then quote from as Zen Master, which simply says, whatever you think is delusion, which I love because at first you say, oh, remember, but then you realize that's the whole point that 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 pattern 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 in 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 there's 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 then or basically almost any kind of mindfulness meditation, one of the things we learned when we sit on the mat is that and we make stories up about ourselves. And as we're watching our mind work, can we see that we just made up the story that, oh, he said that to me, and that means he thinks that about me, and I say that, and we and when we get to a certain point in mind from 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 can struck did 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 as well, 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 and different cultures will interpret in very different ways. And what I do is 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 and 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 tenants. Uncle Bob's key tenants 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 our 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 seventies with one of the greatest best sellers 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 e 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 is 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 have seen much more interactively in terms of the organism in relation to the environment and 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 blueprint 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 mental work. 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. It's known as auto poesis 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, of like in the beginning that was God and Good created. But the irony is that many of these early scientists took the same concepts from Christianity but sort of made them into a crazy 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 multi cellular 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, we'll 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. One of the most important sources is like Thomas Hobbs back in the seventeenth century came up with this idea that originally it was this battle humans. Life was your 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 now, Actually, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists recognized 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. That 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. You know that your basic nature is good, right, 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 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 stages from ancient China was called Mensius, 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 your the original parable that we start off with, and he talks of thinking of humans just like we think of a plant. That you know, 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 Mensius would say about human cultivation he'd say, you know, every farmer around knows how to cultivate a tongue tree was called, or you know, any kind of and 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 this this notion that our culture can lead and 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. Our global civilization is built on values that align with hedonic impulses and oppose you'n ammonia, 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 in the world is I'm like, I can't believe how well so much of it actually works, Like I'm driving down the freeway, and we are all driving down the freeway going seventy 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 as she says, imagine when you fly on a plane, you will need to get on the plane. You sit there next to each other, you have your food, you land, and you live. If you put that same number of chimpanzees on a plane and four hours later when the plane landed, you'd have like fingers in the aisles, have blood everywhere, yet half the tempts be dead. It would be a comp mayhem. And that's the thing. We humans are actually super cooperators 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 and people began to develop possessions and chieftainships, the ability to cooperate lead 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 outgroup, 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're 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 bones 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'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 Balty Taylor who talks about that. But you talk about it lots of different ways. You call it our inner interpreter versus are mystic, you talk about in tao is in the idea of Wou Way versus you Way, 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? And this is a huge central theme for anyone trying to figure out what is humanities place within all of life and within nature. And really those early Taoists were the ones so I think first sets this this kind of theme and motion is you just mentioned, and they had this notion of looking at the way all of nature, non human nature work, and they call that Wu way, 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 Daoi is called you way, which you can translate as purposive action, which is this sense of they describe 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 daois said, right, and in fact, civilization is kind of like a crime against the Tao, so they kind of want 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 the symbolic thinking, this conceptual consciousness that does seem to make humans unique among pretty much any other creatures. And as Jill Balti Taylor and Ian mcgulchrist explains so well, that relates to the left hemisphere and the interpreter, and the way in which that part of us and makes stores out of things. It creates the sense of an eye, of a separate eye, and 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, and that probably the most famous statements in philosophy, says Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am basically what he's saying, is my only identity is that thinking capacity. Is if you're saying, my only identity is that prefrontal cortex mediated left hemisphere um 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 we have this conceptualizing faculty, we also have that wou way within ourselves. We have forty trillion cells. Even the single cell has incredible intelligence, what we can call animate intelligence, forty twlli 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 an animate consciousness. I talk about it in terms of the eye and the self, like 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 it's actually between I and myself. And you know, we see this normal language. If I'm chatting with you about this new job I had, I might say to you things like, I'm really I've been pushing myself too hard. It's like I'm you know, I'm really beside myself with like anxiety. And who's I and who's the self that is pushing It's like there's 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 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 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. Yeah, I love the way you frame it up as conceptual consciousness and animate consciousness, you know, conceptual being sort of that left brain symbolic thinking and them being more or that holistic knowing. And I think you know, it often comes across in these 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. I think what's being said in the way I relate to it, is that we've gotten so overreliant on one 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 this kind of as 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. Is always saying like, uh, 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, 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 are 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 gifts 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 like 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 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 what I say it as Chi and Lee 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 Sung dynasty, and they called themselves a school of the day. 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 Das, 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 and is comprised of chi, which we can translate in today's terms, is 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 she and they said, that's the entire universe is made of that, but it's organized in certain ways and the ways in which that she is organized, the principles of organization they called LEE. So they felt that what we needed to do is try to investigate that LEE, 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 sister and scientists at the same time who were arguing against that Richard Dawkins type of reductionists say that the whole world is meaningless, just a little bits of selfish genes and little bits of molecules, and that's all there is. And there's one particular great systems scientists called Stewart Kaufmann, 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 is fundamentally self organized. According to these principles, we're uncovering at the same time, I was reading about these neo confusions as going, well, Stewart, I agree with you totally. But there's been actually these great traditions of the past that have also recognized that the universe is ultimately self organized and the relationship between things some times more important than things themselves. And that's where I began to realize that that was almost like the Rosetta Stone, that we can see that and 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 we maybe we have a peak experience and we sense this deep into connectedness of everything and being part of something so much bigger, and what modern science, oftentimes all the modern world view tells us is, oh, well, you know that's that's 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, as peak experiences, are actually our internal validation of what science is in fact saying, is how the universe really is. Yeah, I like you share a lot of love for systems theorists and complexity theories and the idea that this self emerging intelligence. When I heard Chi and Lee and I read it, I immediately thought of the most famously chanted Zen scripture, which is the Heart Sutra, which says over in about ten different ways, emptiness is form. Form is emptiness. You know, emptiness could be the ch 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 and you know, to your point, it's talking about Chi and Lee, you don't have one without the other, Yes, 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 Lee and She. There was actually a Buddhist school called the Hawaiian Goal, which was the first place we know of where they actually talked about Lee 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 it was a sense of the ancient guide Indra. Indra's net it's also called made this incredible golden net where it was filled with jewels, and each jewel it was so perfectly shiny that it reflected all the other jewels in this web, so much so that it didn't just reflect the other jewels, but it's even took the reflection from the others and reflected those two, 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 as this profound concept of how and 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 our selves themselves self organized 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 injuries net of all of life around us, and this amazing sort of fractal unfolding of reality. 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 is 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 and everything like the patterns on trees, on the veins of leaves and clouds, branch lightning we see, and 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 fractor within a fractal, And this notion of these fractals forming coherent holes but within bigger holes is also sometimes called the hilarchy, this sense of nested entities there are coherent in themselves, but have small innsted entities within them and a part of bigg inested entities, and that basically describes an ecosystem and described aids 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 ed is in these much smaller and much larger patterns which we just happen to form a coherent whole for a certain while. And there also leads to this concept that you mentioned a little bit earlier, that I talked about in the book of what I call fractal flourishing. The 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 hilarchy without all the others being flourishing too. So in just the same way, if I feel heart is having problems, the rest of your body feels bad, or any elements 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 of feeling health that you can feel the true sense of integrated health. I think that's a great way of saying that 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 thus lee 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. I d 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 cells 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 forty trillion cells, right, you know. And and then I'm like, I'm a pretty big deal. And nature is like, well, buddy, you're like one of seven billion who's alive today, like all context, you know. And you you say that so well about you know, when you're talking about ch and Lee, that idea that the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves. Yeah, And in fact, that Buddhist notion of of non self, based on the conversation we've already had, I like to sort of really think of it, it may be 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 points, 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, and it's a zero sum game. You know, you gain at the expense of those around you, and and our entire culture is based on exploitation of those that were 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 how feel happy, when actually our society, our community, and in 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 some 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 hilarchy. 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 g 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 one you feed dot net slash joint. 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. 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. 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