The Observing I Podcast
by David Johnson
Society & CultureE · Explicit
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About this podcast
A little podcast about philosophy, psychology, and the human experience. Pirate radio for the mind. Allegedly. New episode every Tuesday.
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Episodes
The newest 20 of 170 episodes
- October Hangout · 1 h 17 minAs it’s Halloween in a few days, I decided to focus on Edgar Allen Poe and the Tell-Tale Heart for this months live session. There’s a reading of Poe’s magnificently unhinged…
- What Do We Want from Monsters?: Noël Carroll and the Paradox of Horror · 41 minThere's something rather strange about watching a horror film and complaining that it wasn't frightening enough. We spend much of our lives trying to avoid danger, discomfort and…
- L’Appel du Vide and the Trouble with Being Free · 36 min · Episode 167Warning: This episode includes discussion of intrusive thoughts around self-harm and suicide. So, if you’re struggling with that, or if you’re really not feeling it right now…
- Monster of Will: Aleister Crowley and the whole of the law · 40 min · Episode 666Aleister Crowley was a magician, occultist, self-proclaimed Great Beast 666, and a man the British press famously dubbed “The Wickedest Man in the World”. But behind the…
- The Malignant Malfunction: Thomas Ligotti and the Horror of Consciousness · 39 min · Episode 165Most horror stories try to convince us that the monster is out in the woods or lurking behind a cellar door. It’s a comforting setup, because it means you can turn the porch…
- September Live Hangout · 1 h 8 minOn the last Tuesday of the month, I do a live session with whomever wants to drop in. There’s a short essay to start, and then a casual Q&A. It’s more of a hang out with the…
- René Girard and the Trouble with Other People’s Desires · 42 min · Episode 164Why do we never seem to want anything until someone else tries to pick it up first? In this episode, we look at the work of French thinker René Girard and his unsettling theory…
- Epictetus and the Things You Can’t Control · 36 minEpictetus is usually reduced to one clean Stoic idea: focus on what you can control and let go of the rest. But his actual philosophy is stranger than that, especially once you…
- The Anti-Guru: U.G. Krishnamurti and the End of Seeking · 39 minU.G. Krishnamurti spent most of his life chasing enlightenment, then decided the entire search had been a mistake. He rejected gurus, methods and the promise that enough…
- Weaponising Self-Awareness: The Mind That Can Catch Itself · 39 min · Episode 161What happens when the mind catches itself in the act? This episode explores self-awareness, metacognition and the strange moment where a thought, reaction or impulse becomes…
- I Never Asked for This: Anti-Natalism and the Ethics of Birth · 40 min · Episode 160What if having a child is a moral decision we rarely treat like one? Anti-natalism begins with an awkward fact: nobody consents to being born, every life contains some degree of…
- The Return from the Peak · 38 min · Episode 159You can dissolve the self, touch the infinite and return convinced you have seen behind the curtain. Then the tea goes cold, someone still deserves an apology, and the ego…
- Ken Wilber and the Trouble with Everything · 40 min · Season 1 Episode 158Wilber’s four quadrants begin with a persuasive idea. A human problem has an inside and an outside, and it belongs to an individual as well as the world around them. This episode…
- Bernardo Kastrup: Is Consciousness Fundamental? · 44 min · Episode 157Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness may not be something the brain produces, but the reality within which brains, bodies and the physical world appear. In this episode, I…
- Donald Hoffman's Desktop of Reality · 42 min · Episode 156We like to believe that our eyes are honest, that the world we see is a reasonably accurate representation of what is actually there. But the math suggests a different story. We…
- Christof Koch and the Problem of Other Minds · 41 min · Episode 155Waking up is a slow return, a flicker of weight, a point of view, the sudden, jarring realisation that you're here again. It's the most basic fact of your existence, yet the one…
- What the scanner cannot see: David Chalmers and the hard problem of Consciousness · 42 min · Episode 154There is a gap between the brain scanner and the experience it measures. David Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem, and it is the question that will not go away no matter how…
- No Exit, No Problem: Pema Chödrön’s Inner Frontier · 41 min · Episode 153In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Pema Chödrön, exploring shenpa, groundlessness, tonglen, and the uncomfortable spiritual practice of staying present when…
- The Unconscious Has Bad Manners: Stanislav Grof and the Psychedelic Psyche · 43 min · Episode 152In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech-born psychiatrist whose psychedelic research led him to a stranger view of the unconscious: one…
- When the Music Stops: Laura Huxley and Relational Consciousness · 36 min · Episode 151Aldous Huxley sat in his study in 1953, watched a vase of flowers become the first thing he had truly seen, and wrote it down. Millions read it. The reducing valve, he called it…
