The Great Remembering

I connected deeply with this book, because it lives in that very human space between our desire to be comfortable and the reality that real growth usually comes through some type of challenge. I've experienced that in sport, motherhood, in relationships, and honestly just in trying to become a more peaceful and better human.  June doesn't preach or pretend to have all the answers. She explores, asks better questions, and reminds us that many of the things we're searching for today—connection, resilience, purpose, healing—may not be new discoveries or ‘hacks’ at all. We simply need to remember. And that's what makes this book so powerful.  I personally need and want more of this conversation in the world.

Talk about a gift from the ancestors. June Cohen has spelunked to the core of our emotional existence and found a soothing surprise. What if everything we need is already within, forgotten and slumbering, waiting on us to just remember? And isn’t this profound—All of the six ancient wisdoms sing this in chorus: We are stronger in nature. We are stronger in community. You will ping constantly as you read this book, as June magically uses curiosity and discovery to resurface a soul truth: We’re all here to walk each other home and that which you need the most already knows your face.

When something captures June Cohen’s imagination, pay attention. I’ve long known her to be among the wisest (and most joyful) people on the planet. In The Great Remembering, she delivers an insightful and inspiring book, driven by impactful storytelling, that’s likely to shift how we understand what I call the current ‘muddle,’ and she describes as a ‘set of existential crises.’ Cohen is perhaps best known as a futurist—she developed Wired’s pioneering website HotWired and for more than a decade co-hosted the annual TED conference—which makes this book counter-intuitive, even paradoxical. Cohen, very much of this century, spent years traversing different cultures, on different continents, across many centuries to unearth ‘a striking truth:’ the answer to our most pressing challenges lies not in the future but in the past, brilliantly arguing that to advance forward, we must look back to the practices or what she calls ‘wisdom systems’ of the ancients. Today’s challenges—loneliness and isolation, intractable divisions, the climate crisis, and the rapid emergence of AI—appear shiny and new. 

But Cohen explains through painstaking research and a wide-range of interviews that our struggles are perennial problems, albeit dressed up in the cultures and contexts of other times. The Great Remembering is a joy to read, Cohen’s own sense of awe and wonder on display as we time-travel with her around the globe.

The bottom line: June Cohen has much to teach us about how to live today. Pay attention

An epic and intimate journey into what makes us human, what heals us, and what binds us together. June Cohen is an unparalleled guide to the ancient wisdom and modern science that remind us why we’re here and how we find joy and meaning in our lives each and every day. What a gift she has rescued from our ancestors.

“With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sense of our mortality and rejoice in our aliveness, to salve our suffering and give shape to our joy. What a revelation, what an invitation, to discover that people who had no notion of gravity, genetics, or democracy answered the questions we live with more wisely than we do – a beckoning to rethink how we make of our fragile embodiment a cathedral of meaning."

“June Cohen’s essential book hooks you from the very first sentence and takes you on a journey of rediscovery that will fill you with joy and rouse you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates with effortless grace. The Great Remembering is an urgent and important book that you won’t soon forget.”

"June Cohen is such a friendly, open-hearted, deeply informed guide to recovering the wisdom that can make us whole and alive once more. She knows all the science, she writes with a professional's clarity and precision and, most of all, she can make us feel joyful and in love again as we go about the beautiful business of living.” 

“An electrifying, dizzying, wondrous celebration of humanity, then and now. I finished it feeling connected, inspired, hopeful."

"I’ve never seen the science explained better for a lay audience.” 

We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better.