On the Web of Meaning

This event was recorded and is available to watch on our YouTube channel and portions of the audio were released on our podcast.

As our civilization careens toward a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings and humanity’s age-old questions become even more urgent. Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? Our dominant worldview of disconnection―which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world―has passed its expiration date.  
 
Author and integrator Jeremy Lent investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His work weaves together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom to more fully explore how humans make meaning. In his latest book, The Web of Meaning, Jeremy shares how seemingly disparate streams of thought are compatible and when taken together, they are key to facing the existential problems of the 21st century and can lead to a flourishing future for all.   

Join CIIS Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness professor Matthew Segall for an inspiring conversation with Jeremy exploring a new worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. Jeremy offers a compelling foundation for a new story of interconnectedness, showing how, as our contemporary civilization unravels, another world—and other ways of being—are possible. 

Learn more about Jeremy's new book, The Web of Meaning.

Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Born in London, England, Lent received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, explores the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth, and he writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments at Patterns of Meaning. He lives with his partner in Berkeley, California.


Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.