The Web of Meaning

Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe

Jeremy Lent

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771423434
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

A compelling foundation for a new story of interconnectedness, showing how, as our civilization unravels, 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 breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world.

As our civilization careens toward 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.

The Web of Meaning offers a compelling foundation for the new story that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth. It's a book for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization.

PART ONE
WHO AM I?

CHAPTER ONE
THE NAMELESS UNCARVED WOOD

There it sits, on top of a chest. A piece of ancient driftwood. I picked it up some years back on the windswept beach of a California seashore. It’s not that big, about the length of my forearm, and it’s shaped a bit like a bone. A femur, perhaps, with a big knobbly end tapering to a narrower point. If you look at the knobbly part from the right direction, you can almost see an animal face. A porpoise, maybe, or the cute bulbous snout of a beagle. Its grayish-blond color hints of the eons of sea and sun that have bleached everything else out of it. While smooth to touch, it still boasts a myriad of rippling lines showing its annual growth rings, along with sporadic perfectly round tiny dots of bygone worm holes.

It’s just a piece of wood. But it’s a beautiful piece, sculpted by nature, and it feels to me like the natural world peeking into my office, keeping me company. Above all, for me, it represents the Tao. ‘Tao everlasting,’ declared the ancient sage, ‘is the nameless uncarved wood. Though small, nothing under heaven can subjugate it.’¹

The Tao (pronounced dao and often spelled like that) is one of the oldest concepts from antiquity that have survived to the present day. Emerging from the mists of ancient Chinese tradition, it is translated literally as ‘way’ or ‘path’, and it refers to the mysterious ways in which the forces of nature show up in the world around us. The ancient conception of the inscrutable Tao is about as far away as you can get from the grindingly busy, technology-based civilization that has come to dominate our world. And it’s partly for that reason that it’s a perfect place to begin our journey into the web of meaning.

I first came across the concept of Tao when I was twenty-one years old in – of all places – New York City. I’d landed there from London on the first stage of my quest to leave my country of birth behind and find my way in the world. After months of trying to fit in to the mean streets like a bad imitation of Robert de Niro’s Taxi Driver, I was pondering my next step. A friend gave me a powerful psychedelic, and I found myself wandering around the grimy back streets of Manhattan. Everywhere around me, I saw a frantic hard-heartedness gaudily concealed by a layer of commercial sleaze.

Back in the apartment I shared in the East Village, I told my roommate about my burning desire to find an alternative to the harshness I saw around me. He handed me a book that, he told me, he’d found helpful in such moments. As I opened it, I came face to face with a shimmering magic of words and pictures that seemed to answer my deepest questions. ‘Know honor, yet keep humility,’ it told me. ‘Ever true and unwavering, return to the infinite.’ The mysteriously wise words were accompanied by gorgeous black-and-white pictures of natural beauty and strangely alluring Chinese script. I didn’t know exactly what these words meant, but they seemed like a font of wisdom I’d never previously imagined existed in the world. This book was the Tao Te Ching, the greatest Taoist classic.²

Going with the flow

I’m not alone in seeing undying value in the teachings of the Tao Te Ching. In fact, it’s the second most translated book in history after the Bible. What is it about this book that caused it to shine through the ages as an inspiration to countless generations seeking answers to their own searching? What can it possibly offer to the internet-enhanced twenty-first century?

According to legend, the Tao Te Ching was written by a sage called Laozi – a name that literally means ‘old master’. More likely, it represents the collective wisdom of ancient Chinese folk traditions, compiled over generations. It presents a way of living in the world that feels like a refuge from the bleak glare of modernity – an invitation to come home again, to leave behind the cacophonous discord of a meaningless rat race and find solace in deep universal truths.

But the reason to begin our journey with the Tao is not just because it offers an alternative to modernity. Rather, the early Taoists articulated a profound understanding of the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, presenting insights that remain as relevant today as they were when they were first conceived. Indeed, the Taoists’ core concepts offer a valuable framework to help decipher some of the most difficult quandaries facing our world today. As we’ll see, their analysis of the human predicament reveals an understanding of distinctive aspects of human cognition that modern neuroscience has only recently come to recognize. Similarly, the Taoist account of how nature reveals itself displays an appreciation of universal principles that correspond to, and illuminate, the findings of modern systems scientists.

Ancient Chinese society at the time of the Tao Te Ching was struggling with its own social and political disruption. This was an age of turbulence, known as the Warring States period, which drove many thinkers to search for what had caused society to come unstuck. The early Taoists saw the ultimate source of disharmony as something in the human psyche that caused people to separate themselves from the natural flow of the Tao. That separation, in their opinion, had set off a cascade of events from the beginning of human history that led eventually to the turmoil of their times.

Living according to the flow of the Tao was, they believed, an effortless state of being. The word te in the title of the Tao Te Ching (pronounced duh) referred to that natural condition. It meant the intrinsic nature of whatever arose in the world, such as the nameless uncarved wood sitting on my chest. And something in that state maintained a certain power, so that ‘nothing under heaven can subjugate it’. Animals, plants and other living beings spontaneously act according to their te, and because of that they flow with the way of nature – with the Tao. The Taoists called this type of activity wu-wei, or effortless action. Through wu-wei, Taoist sages explained, ‘all things come to their completion; such is the Tao of Heaven’.³

Humans, too, can occasionally act according to wu-wei. Another early Taoist text, written by the brilliant philosopher Zhuangzi, gives dramatic and earthy descriptions of various characters who demonstrate wu-wei. Zhuangzi tells of a butcher, Cook Ding, cutting up the carcass of an ox for a festival. He moves his knife in perfect rhythm as if performing a dance. The lord of the estate, seeing him, exclaims, ‘Wow, it’s marvelous that skill can reach such heights!’ Cook Ding lays down his knife and replies, ‘What I care about is the Tao, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes.’⁴

Yet, the reason Cook Ding – and other maestros that Zhuangzi describes – are notable is precisely because they’re so unusual. Somehow, something happened to humanity that caused us to lose wu-wei most of the time. Instead, our lives are filled with effort. We find ourselves working hard, pushing against resistance in one form or another. What happened to us?

A clue can be found in another Zhuangzi story about an archery contest. When the archers are playing for cheap tiles, they show top-notch skill. When they play for fancy belt buckles, they lose confidence; and when playing for gold, they become nervous wrecks. That’s because when the prize becomes more valuable, their goal orientation gets in the way of their natural skill, and they lose touch with their te.⁵

The Chinese word for goal orientation, yu-wei, was the opposite of wu-wei, and represented the antithesis of living according to the Tao. As a result, according to the Taoists, it was a failing strategy. ‘The world,’ states the Tao Te Ching, ‘is a spirit vessel which cannot be acted upon. One who acts on it fails, one who holds on to it loses.’⁶

But isn’t acting on the world the very basis of our entire human civilization? Absolutely, argued the Taoists, and that’s precisely the point. Looking to the dawn of history, even before the birth of civilization, they saw the beginning of human separation from Tao as far back as the emergence of language. Language, in their view, was anathema to the Tao. In fact, the very first words of the Tao Te Ching read, paradoxically, ‘The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao.’ The piece of wood sitting next to me represents the Tao not just because it’s uncarved, but because it’s nameless. It has no name, no purpose.⁷

It’s not just language that the Taoists see as yu-wei. It’s the kind of knowledge that leads humans to use language in the first place, and by corollary the kind of knowledge that language can transmit. ‘One who knows [Tao] does not speak,’ declares the Tao Te Ching. ‘One who speaks does not know.’ Being in touch with the Tao leads to a different type of knowledge that doesn’t need language either to apprehend or communicate.⁸

But, of course, the language-based type of knowledge arising from yu-wei is necessary to build civilization. Realizing this, the Taoists portrayed an earlier golden age, before civilization, when people lived in harmony with the Tao. ‘The men of old,’ declared Zhuangzi, ‘shared the placid tranquility which belonged to the whole world … That was what is called the state of perfect unity.’ At that time, ‘people lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family.’

It was only when ‘sagely men’ appeared, with their new kind of knowledge, that everything changed. ‘People began everywhere to be suspicious. With extravagant orchestras and gesticulatin...