Original Seeing With a Focus On Life

Four weeks of nature study.

Wait, what is this thing?

This is a nature study course.

In May and June of 2021, I ran an online nature study course with about two dozen participants. I had three goals:

  1. Help people create or deepen a personal connection with nature.

  2. Learn how to run month-long online courses with over a dozen participants.

  3. Test some hunches about the rationality material I’d been working on.

This page contains all of the course materials. If you go through them in order on your own, I expect you’ll get almost the same experience as the original cohort of Spring 2021. For an experience even more in line with my vision for the course, recruit a few friends to do it with you, and meet up with them once a week to chat about your studies.

I conjecture that if you complete this course, you’ll find you’re able to study your own mind, or just about anything else, in the way a naturalist studies nature, with no further guidance.

Positive Feedback From Alumni

  • “I really liked the dual focus on seeking nature-on-the-object-level and seeking the abstract mindset of original seeing, curiosity, explore mode.”

  • “I feel like I have skills I didn't have before, affordances I didn't have before. I have the sense that I could construct my own similar exercises, and I just generally know more what ‘get in touch with the world’ looks like.”

  • “The exercises took me out of intellect mode and placed me in a posture of pure noticing. This, in turn, put me in contact with raw data I might have missed if my preconceived models had been firmly in place.”

  • “I feel a deeper connection to nature in a way that has me feeling less alone in the world. I have a greater understanding of how to stay open to curiosity and receive.”

Ready to be a naturalist?