The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent, Derek Perkins (Narrator), Fritjof Capra - foreword

This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different early hunter-gatherers and farmers, ancient Egyptians, traditional Chinese sages, the founders of Christianity, trailblazers of the Scientific Revolution, and those who constructed our modern consumer society.

Taking the listener on an archaeological exploration of the mind, the author, an entrepreneur and sustainability leader, uses recent findings in cognitive science and systems theory to reveal the hidden layers of values that form today's cultural norms. Uprooting the tired clichés of the science-religion debate, he shows how medieval Christian rationalism acted as an incubator for scientific thought, which, in turn, shaped our modern vision of the conquest of nature. The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped. By shining a light on our possible futures, the book foresees a coming struggle between two contrasting views of one driving to a technological endgame of artificially enhanced humans, the other enabling a sustainable future arising from our intrinsic connectedness with each other and the natural world. This struggle, it concludes, is one in which each of us will play a role through the meaning we choose to forge from the lives we lead.

Audible Audio

Published September 19, 2017

About the author

I’m author of The Patterning Instinct, (Prometheus Books, May 2017), and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute. I’m passionate about doing my part to make a difference in humanity’s future trajectory. I’ve come to believe that our global society needs a transformational shift in our underlying values if we want a sustainable and flourishing future for the human race.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Future, is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning into their universe – from hunter-gatherer times to our current precarious civilization – and traces how these have affected the course of history. Taking the reader on an archaeology of the mind, it reveals the hidden layers of values that form today’s cultural norms and asks: how can we shape humanity’s destiny by consciously forging our own structures of meaning into our lives?

The Liology Institute, of which I’m president, is dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Liology offers the experience of living life in an integrated, embodied and connected manner. Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded. Liology sees humanity as a fractal entity within the natural system of the earth.

Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was founder and CEO of an internet company. Now, I’m living happily in the San Francisco Bay Area with my amazing wife, Lisa Ferguson. Together, we’re trying to do our bit to make the world a better place.