Bonnitta is 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.
We talked about some of the different ways philosophers, scientists, and spiritual practitioners throughout history have tried to describe perception and experience. Bonnitta is especially helpful in this regard in that she’s able to draw on both Eastern and Western sources of thinking in this area, which allowed us to explore some of the unique shapes this conversation started to take, particularly in modern Western societies.
Along these lines, we explored how Westerners came to view themselves as separate observers of the natural world, and we talked about how things like embodiment and physical action were lost in this picture of perception, and how we might reclaim them today. I think you’ll be particularly interested in how Bonnitta connects traditional questions of perception and epistemology with things like athletic performance and skilled action.
We also touched on the role that technology, architecture, and narrative have on conditioning our perception and experience in specific ways, and Bonnitta shared with us some of her insights into how we might develop new practices, stories, and spaces to re-train our perception in new directions. We ended the conversation discussing the strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism, and how metaphysics may offer us tools for re-thinking our present moment.
