Developing Novel Futures
Bonnitta Roy
Bonnitta Roy is a philosopher, futurist, and insight guide with a focus in 4E cognitive science, process philosophy, phenomenology, and metaphysics. She holds a BA in Biology and Philosophy from Colby College and pursued doctoral studies in neurophysics at UC Berkeley.
From 2014-2022 she designed, developed, and directed the MA Course in Consciousness Studies at The Graduate Institute. In 2022 she launched the virtual POP-UP School that grew to be a home for 10,000 students across 162 countries, offering transformative courses such as "A New Theory of the Body," "Lyric Culture: Ontological Designs for Backloop Realities," and "Varieties of Religious Experience". From 2005-2008 she was the President of the Board of Directors of the National Qigong Association. Before her academic career, Roy built a successful landscape design-build firm in New England. On her ranch, Alderlore Insight Center, she taught transformative workshops on energy awareness, body language, and emotional balance through engaging horses and nature in extraordinary ways where participants learned to recognize their unconscious communication patterns through simple gestures.
Currently, she hosts Originals, a podcast series featuring one-to-one interviews with guests who are enabling underappreciated futures that are expanded into community watch parties, creating a space for generative dialogue grounded in insight practices. She also hosts the Cognitive Widget Show, where she releases video tutorials on bite-sized introductions to frameworks that support people to view topics from meta-cognitive perspectives.
Her teaching methodology is distinctive, highlighting "the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge." Through this approach, she guides individuals in developing meta-cognitive skills and helps groups break away from limiting patterns of thought and action.
Roy’s work is now culminating in The Divinity School, which is based on her four key aspects of world building, which we refer to as The Four Powers, her process-relational metaphysics, ontological design, and overcoming what she calls Metaphysical Malware. This philosophical and leadership curriculum trains a new kind of leader who can operate in the same principles as nature, cultivate trust, and guide us towards the futures we want to build.
Published Works and Resources
Bonnitta Roy’s academic work includes over 20 articles published in academic journals spanning philosophy of mind, metaphysics, organizational design, and leadership studies. She serves as the Associate Editor for Integral Review Journal, where you can find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics. She is currently writing a book titled A Once and Future God.
- “Awakened Perception: Perception as Participation”
INTEGRAL REVIEW, August 2018, Vol. 14, No. 1 - “Why Metaphysics Matters”
INTEGRAL REVIEW, January 2019, Vol. 15, No. 1 - “Born in the Middle: The Soteriological Streams of Integral Theory and Meta-Reality”
INTEGRAL REVIEW, March 2014, Vol. 10, No. 1 - “A Process Model of Integral Theory”
INTEGRAL REVIEW, December 2006, Issue 3 - “The Map, the Gap and the Territory”
INTEGRAL REVIEW, December 2006, Issue 3
- “Complex Potential States vs Complex Adaptive Systems”
- Also different.
- “A Source Code for Team Flow”
- “The Power Matrix”
- “To Trim the System, Tame the Mind”
- “How Self-Organization Happens”
- “How the Invisible and Improbable becomes the Obvious and Inevitable”
- “Resilience Reconsidered”
- "Village Learning"
- "Consumer Ed"
- "Corona: A Tale of Two Systems":
- “Leadership and the Horse: Bonnitta Roy and George Herget”
- Michael Levin, Matt Segal, B. Roy
Consciousness in the World and Universe | 2025 UTOK Conference - Iain McGilchrist & B. Roy
Are we unmaking the world? - The Integral Stage
"NEW EDUCATION: The 'Pop-Up School' w/ Bonnitta Roy" - Future Thinkers
"Human Flourishing in the Time of Turmoil" - Future Thinkers
"Ego & Group Practices" - The Jim Rutt Show
"EP17 – Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and Complexity" - Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next
"Bonnitta Roy – Six Ways to Go Meta" - The Stoa
"Collective Wisdom with Nora Bateson, Ria Baeck, and Bonnitta Roy"
- Integral European Conference
Process and Relational Philosophy - United Nations Global Schools & UN World Logic Forum 2024
Education for the Future of Us All - The Infinite Potential Institute
Exploring Complexity with Bonnitta Roy - Parallax Academy
Metamodern Philosophy with Bonnitta Roy
Faculty
The Faculty at The Divinity School are professional scholars and leaders with expertise in diverse fields relevant to our mission, including philosophy, cognitive science, biology, machine learning, and policy. Faculty members share cutting-edge insights from their fields. They bring expertise to develop the fields of Naturalizing Machine Agency and Horizons of Biological Intelligence. Working collaboratively, they define these fields' foundations and identify high-leverage opportunities for philosophical and scientific progress and their social and cultural implications. Faculty with experience influencing finance, cultural, and regulatory institutions help Students navigate institutional inertia. All Faculty ar invited to attend our annual 4-day immersion to provide feedback on Students' final presentations. Our Faculty are uniquely informed about The Divinity School's mission to cultivate mature, insightful leaders who can navigate and develop living complexity in our infrastructures, institutions, and cultures.
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Advisors
Our Advisors are thought leaders, innovators, and experts who provide strategic guidance and specialized knowledge to The Divinity School. Advisors contribute in multiple ways, including:
- Informing our direction and responding to challenges and opportunities.
- Referring Faculty and Students to join our program.
- Directly influencing the curriculum.
- Contributing to our prize program and serving as judges in the award process.
- Participating in our annual 4-day immersion to receive Students’ culminating work and provide targeted feedback.
- Supporting our graduates by including them in their respective institutions and connecting them with appropriate career pathways.
- Providing introductions to strategic partners for Student recruiting, funding, and collaborative opportunities
Our Advisors are uniquely positioned to shape The Divinity School’s overall vision and institutional development. Through their guidance, we strengthen our ability to forge leaders who can see deeper into reality, make decisions that benefit the whole, and align humanity with the natural intelligence of the universe.
Team
The Divinity School team is made of entrepreneurs and educators who have worked for decades across education, product design, research, finance, and policy. Our team is dedicated to transforming education by building new education institutions. We see it as the deepest and longest lasting intervention we can make, helping people become more courageous, insightful, and passionate, and setting the stage for ongoing learning and innovation. We understand the hard work and commitment required to actually create institutions that support increasing complexity and cultivate more life and are sharply focused on taking steps that make the mission more compelling to our growing coalition of partners.
Zachary Schlosser
Zachary Schlosser
Zach has founded several education and ed-tech companies and has a particular passion integrating character development with R&D on the most significant emerging scientific and technical fields. As Education Director at Endemic, he leads the definition and implementation of all training and research programs, including at The Divinity School. He has consulted for AI platforms focused on metascience and pro-democracy institutional reform. The Human Data Commons Foundation previously funded his research on nature-inspired approaches to supply chain resilience and he executive-produced a Protocol Labs-commissioned docuseries examining blockchain digital art's technology and culture. He also serves on the board of the Ohio Public Banking Coalition and as cofounder and Managing Director of Prosperity of the Commons International, he is responsible for training the next generation of developers, global financiers and investors, and government leaders on development structures and policies that promote sustainable wealth creation and equitable economic development.
Corey Cleland
Corey Cleland
Has founded multiple startups—both successful and unsuccessful—as a founder and strategist archetype. Most notably, he founded Thistle, a next-generation food and beverage company that has raised over $50M and delivered 5.3M healthy, affordable meals in 2023. Corey has managed hundreds of employees across dozens of departments simultaneously. Through his international development company, Prosperity of the Commons International, he collaborates with government bodies, global financial institutions, and large-scale developers to establish and strengthen frameworks, legal structures, and policies that promote sustainable wealth creation and equitable economic development. As Executive Director of Endemic, he leads a nonprofit community R&D ecosystem that develops pathways to rejuvenate society. Endemic develops and operates numerous projects, including The Divinity School and its efforts. Corey has extensive experience scaling health and wellness brands and creating markets that promote high-quality agriculture. He grew up farming and later developed his own small farm and work-trade program for Marines returning home from service.
Class of 2026
Graduates of The Divinity School become world-builders. They emerge as founders, researchers, engineers, and community and institutional leaders who combine technical capacity with deep insight to lead movements of free and willing participants. Our students understand that while individual projects contribute value, true success demands a cultural revolution that serves novelty and life.
Special Projects
Graduates of The Divinity School have learned to craft interventions that stay generative across contexts, scaling up or down without losing ecological, cultural, or spiritual integrity. If selected, they can continue their work with us in our special projects that create timeless opportunities for biological advancement and societal transformation. We forge leaders who can treat reality as a living, continuously-generated web of relations rather than a stockpile of fixed objects. Designing inside that ontology compels teams to ask not merely Can we build it? but Should this be built for every conceivable future?
Each project receives personalized mentorship, structure and fundraising support, and collaborative development within our innovation ecosystem. This support transforms visionary concepts into impactful realities that transcend conventional boundaries and create lasting positive change.
This is the extended ecosystem beyond Faculty and Students who bring their expertise to advance each project:
Partners
Partners support The Divinity School and make the cultural movement we’re in service to more legible and powerful through financial sponsorships, public advocacy, and strategic collaborations, and by creating meaningful career and investment pathways for graduates. These partners offer both immediate funding for educational and research initiatives and long-term strategic relationships that amplify the School's mission. Through these connections, The Divinity School expands its leadership position, strengthens its programs, and enables our Students, Faculty, and Advisors to influence existing institutions.