Summary: Episode Description: In this episode, taken from the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012, Daniel Ingram talks about the ways that contemplatives could learn from the Naturalists. The Naturalists excelled in meticulous exploration, descriptive science, and classification. Their example can serve as the foundation for the next step in contemplative advancement, where the vast spectrum of inner experience, could be described and cataloged in an entirely new way. Episode Links: Daniel Ingram Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha Transcript: Daniel:Â Â Â Thanks everybody itâs great to be here. So itâs a jungle in there. Iâm going to totally geek out during this talk I hope thatâs okay with everybody. I hope this place can handle it. I hope I donât go too far geeky even beyond what this place can handle. So the naturalist. We got we got Chucky Dee here. These guys were amazing. They were amazing. In the 17th to 19th centuries, particularly the 1800s, we had a group of people who were totally brilliant and totally fascinated by the natural world and what they found there. And they suddenly had leisure time and they had ships and they had societies and they had microscopes and they had magnifying glasses and telescopes. And they had the time to really explore. And they had a dedication to seeing what was actually out there and an openness to exploring what was out there and just finding it and describing it in meticulous incredibly clear terms that is unparalleled in anything we see in the modern meditation world today. So this is just one beautiful example of the care they took to draw some of the little things they saw under a microscope. And you see the precision and the care with which they detailed each of these little magnificent structures. So thatâs what I hope to bring today is a spirit of that kind of exploration and explain why that is so important for moving contemplative studies and contemplative practice forward. So when the naturalists got to the jungle they encountered a whole lot of amazing creatures and amazing amount of stuff. And when they looked through their microscopes they saw zillions of teaming little interesting things in there. And they saw thousand and thousands of plants and tens of thousands of insects and mammals and fungus and all kinds of amazing things that they had simply never seen before in their native countries. And rather than say everything we see in the jungle is a tiger or everything we see in the jungle is a bug instead they got really really specific and ultra geeky about what all these little things were. So in the modern meditation world, unfortunately, a lot of what happens is that people tend to stay in their tents, their little own camps, with rifles at the ready and anything strange that comes by they tend to shoot at. Â They donât even have the courtesy to stuff it and put it on their wall later. They just try to pretend itâs over there and we donât like that animal over there cause weâre the animals over here and weâre just going to stay in a nice little tent and drink tea and pontificate. But the naturalist luckily yes they did shoot a lot of things unfortunately, you know, they were the British. Sorry. But they studied these things and they took them apart and they really explored and they took their skeletons and they mounted them in museums. And they really meticulously described them in a way that we have not done anything like with the world as subjective experience. So anyway hereâs another one. This is a German. Weâre talking about the precisions of the German earlier. And this is someone who really appreciated the intricacy of this particularly beautiful starfish and really elevated descriptive science to art. And it would have been easy when they saw the teaming mass of life and complexity in the jungle to just say thereâs no way we could possibly catalogue all that. But they actually did it. They actually did it.
