Bonnitta Roy is the Founder of Alderlore Insight Center and Founding Associate of APP Associates, International. She is an author and international presenter on post-formal learning and thinking, and the new sciences of complexity. She teaches a Master’s course in consciousness studies at The Graduate Institute, and is an associate editor of Integral Review. Full episode here.

In this episode of the podcast I spoke with Joe Norman. Joe describes himself as a recovering academic and an applied complexity scientist. He focuses on complex systems engineering and design, systemic and large-scale risk, systems strategy, and systems-thinking education. This work, Joe tells me, is engaged in for the pursuit of liberty, localism, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.  The full episode is here.

I’m joined today by David Collins, who some of you may recognize as a contributor to The Side View essay series. He’s contributed two articles, one on Western mysticism and contemplative practice and another on the history of mindfulness in the United States. You’ll notice at the top of the show that I took a different approach in this episode in that I asked David to lead us through two short meditation exercises—one at the beginning of the episode and another one towards the end. As you’ll hear in a moment, David is an experienced and excellent guide in these areas, so I encourage you all to follow along and participate with us. Listen here.

Peter Sjöstedt-H is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind and a metaphysician who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, with special regard to panpsychism and altered states of sentience. Peter received a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick, where he was awarded a first-class distinction for his dissertation on Kant and Schelling in relation to intellectual intuition. He subsequently became a Philosophy Lecturer in London for six years and has now passed his PhD at Exeter University, where he also teaches philosophy modules and writing skills. Peter is the author of Noumenautics and is an inspiration behind the inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak. Full episode here.

Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy. As a school of thought, its primary goal is to enable the individual to achieve happiness. It does this primarily through emphasizing the distinction between what is within our control and outside of it. The good Stoic focuses on what is up to them, and stops worrying about what they cannot control. But such a perspective can be difficult to obtain, and requires training, or askēsis, as the Stoics called it. I will argue that the contemporary martial art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is perfectly suited to be a modern form of Stoic askēsis, one that can train the individual to focus on what matters and become a better Stoic. Read more here.

We are very used to thinking of wholes as composed by parts. That is, a whole is generated by gathering the necessary parts (which, crucially, already exist) and putting them together in some way such that a thing is made from the parts. This is the essence of manufacturing. In this view, wholes are “built up” from parts. The logic is recursive: the parts are themselves manufactured in an analogous way. But the modern mind misses that in the organic and living unfolding of the world, wholes are generated by and out of other wholes, and the parts we observe are very often descended from the elaboration and internal differentiation of a whole whose existence precedes them. Read the full article by Joe Norman here.

I’ve been a student of meditative techniques and contemplative traditions for a while. I have a decades-long personal practice and academic degrees in both religious studies and psychology. And I have mixed feelings about the kind of attention mindfulness is currently receiving and the ways it’s often conceptualized today in the West. On one hand, the fact meditative practices and contemplative experiences are getting increased study I feel is deeply beneficial and long overdue. On another, with only slight exaggeration, I’m worried many of today’s biomedical and psychological researchers think they know what they’re doing. Read the full article by David L. Collins here.

Active perception lets us as perceivers consider how both members of an interaction create information through their actions, body language, conversation content, tone of voice, spatial positioning, and countless other features of social presentation. In the ecological sense, social knowledge is created by both the perceiver and the behaviour generated by the person being perceived. Read the full article by Liam Satchell here.

The past two months have been busy ones for The Side View. We launched our website, podcast, and essay series, and we reached over 10,000 page views. We thank you for your interest!

In 2019, we’re keeping the momentum going with new episodes, essays, and, in January, the launch of The Side View Journal. The quarterly journal will put all our written work in one place—numbered, printed, and delivered to you, our readers and supporters.

To keep us rolling, we’re asking for your help. Your support will help us pay for printing, editing, designing, web hosting, sound engineering, and more. Our needs are small. We’re looking to raise $800.00 to print 100 copies of our first issue. 

You can help us reach our goal by making a simple, one-time donation through PayPal, or by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. If you make a donation of $10 or more on PayPal or commit to a monthly donation of at least $5 through Patreon, we’ll send you a free copy of our first issue.

If you’re not in a position to support us financially, don’t worry—our content will always be free online from our website. And you can still help us reach our goal by forwarding this message to your friends and colleagues, or by sharing our info on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.