Jeremy Lent on "Restoring Connective Tissue"
Breakthrough author and integrator of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science, Jeremy Lent, is interviewed by AllCreation co-founder, Tom VandeStadt.
In this interview, Jeremy Lent, "one of the greatest thinkers of our age" according to renown journalist George Monbiot, discusses ecological reality, how we understand it, and what we should do next as a society. Jeremy contrasts our modern ways of thinking about existence with the ancient ways from China and the world's Indigenous communities. He shares how connectedness, "which is to say love," is the essence of these ancient worldviews and today's burgeoning complexity science. Jeremy describes the necessity of "deep transformation" into an "ecological civilization," the reality that "the health of the whole system requres the health of each part of the system", and shares what keeps him going.
Listen to Jeremy’s interview here.
Highlighted Quotes
Traditional ways of making sense of things always focused on connections. So in early China, for example, about 1,000 years ago, they integrated three of the great Chinese traditions: Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism…
You don’t have the universe without all the stuff and all the relationships…
If you look at the evolution of Life… Every one of (the big shifts) arose not through different species out-competing the other, but from learning how they could work together in what is called “mutually-beneficial symbiosis”, where species apply their specialist skills so other species can gain from them. That is what we get from life today. Symbiosis is all around us. The whole thing is a symbiotic ecosystem, and if we can start to look at our human relationship with the rest of Nature, not at how can we conquer it, then we have a chance at shifting our trajectory.
We can really understand “love” as being the realization and embrace of (our) connectedness. When we open our eyes to that connectedness, embrace it with our being, that is love.
It’s all about recognition of connectedness.
“I think therefore I am” is saying that thinking capacity is the only thing that actually is fundamentally my identity… but again, modern science shows how fundamentally wrong that is…
What we really are as human beings is a combined, conceptual consciousness that allows us to think in symbolic ways, and, what we can think of as our animate consciousness, our embodied wisdom, which actually is that vast bulk of what we are as human organisms and is also a gateway to connect us with the rest of life.
Some of the deepest elements of what we have within our bodies are what we share with all life. And again, modern science validates that.
Half of the genes we see in a banana are shared with us.
… And that’s not just a gee whiz fact, what that basically points to is that the way in which our bodies organize themselves, the way in which they actually are coherent and allow us to have awareness and consciousness are deeply similar. In Biology this is called “homology,” the deep history of our evolution is shared with all these other creatures around us.
Once we realize that other animals, far from being machines, are actually sentient, feeling beings, and in fact that any animal with a nervous system and a brain capable of cognizing that we put in factory farms, those are animals that suffer. They may not think in the same way we do, but they are suffering in every bit as terrible a way from torture and a diminishment of their own life possibilities as humans would. There is a deep, a profound, moral implication to that.
Ecosystems are based on principles of Life that have allowed them to be flourishing in many cases through millions years, through changes in climate, through all kinds of disruptions...
An Ecological Civilization asks, “What are the principles we can learn from nature that we can apply to human civilization that can allow for flourishing into the indefinite future?
…That recognition that I actually am Life, that really drives me.
###
For more visit JeremyLent.com.
This interview is one of the keynote features from our Summer 2022 collection, Restoring Connective Tissue.
