The Web of Meaning
Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
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The Web of Meaning
Buy Now for $30.99
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Narrated by:
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Adam Henderson
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By:
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Jeremy Lent
About this listen
As our civilization careens towards a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. 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.
Yet another world is possible.
Award-winning author Jeremy Lent investigates humanity's age-old questions - who am I? why am I? how should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism and Indigenous wisdom.
The result is a breath-taking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other and with the entire natural world.
©2021 Jeremy Lent (P)2021 Hachette Audio UKCritic Reviews
"The Web of Meaning is both a profound personal meditation on human existence and a tour de force weaving together of historic and contemporary world-wide secular and spiritual thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?" (Gabor Maté MD, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
"We need, now more than ever, to figure out how to make all kinds of connections. This book can help - and therefore it can help with a lot of the urgent tasks we face." (Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
Excellent
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Inspirational synthesis
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He goes hard on showing how the mainstream global culture is a monocrop of the mind. This incredibly prolific culture is a product of the wildly successful Cartesian worldview that Plato inspired. The success of materialism, however, has been achieved at the expense of a more profound and inclusive conceptualisation of life as an intertwined, inter-dependent whole...an "interbeing" as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it.
Lent draws heavily on Chinese concepts of balance and integration, adds in a healthy measure of complexity theory, and comes up with some big prescriptions for how to break ourselves out of the death-spiral our global capitalist/consumer culture finds itself in. The key is our personal narrative. In this sense, he ends up directing us to spark the global change through revolutionary changes within each of our perceptions and reflections on the world around us.
Excellent marks for the story.
Sadly, I think the choice of narrator lets the production down. I reckon Henderson is about 150% too emotive and expressive. It is a wearying experience to constantly dial down his inflections so that the already powerful content is allowed to stand on its own. I hesitate to recommend the audio version to people not yet familiar with Lent's arguments as I think Henderson sounds far too much like a suspiciously overexcited salesman.
On balance, it may be a much better option to buy the book and use your own internal narrator!
Shedding the western mind!
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Worst Audible purchase ever made.
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