On The Problems Of Listening To Radio Programmes And Why I Think Monty Don Is A Bit Of A Guru.

Last week, after dropping Harry off at school and whilst driving to Sainsbury's I heard a Radio 4 programme called Devout Skeptics. It was so interesting and so gripping for me since it was directly about something I had been thinking about for a while now that when I got to Sainsbury's I sat in the car park in my car for 25 minutes in order to hear the rest of the programme.

The guest on the programme was Monty Don, the gardener, a fairly unassuming slighlty famous person whom I have never paid a great deal of attention to other than the fact that I read his column in the sunday paper. But anyway. On the radio he was talking about how he felt about religion. Or rather irreligion. Or rather any conversation that encompasses being, eternity, oneness, reason and life.

And he said this:

"The problem is that in the Western world we are linguistically ill-equipped to describe what we mean."

Which really struck a chord with me.

Basically what he's saying is that we simply do not have the words. In Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism for example, concepts such as (having trouble finding the words here, hahahahaha) the 'eternal oneness that is all things' have proper descriptive words that enable students to discuss these things fully. In the Western world, because our concepts are generally reductivist, (i.e. we tend to try to reduce things down to a single meaning) it means we cannot translate those Eastern concepts succesfully, and the language barrier (in terms of character) makes transliteration difficult too.

So yes. I've been thinking about this for a bit, and then I happen to hear a programme on the radio where someone happens to suggest that the problem is the fact that Westerners are linguistically stuck, and well, it just made the connection with me.

So I want to find it again to quote him.

How does one find old radio programme transcripts? Or even download the actual programme itself? Is this possible? I believe it is, since I have a friend who appears to think so.

And can one do it on a 56k modem or will it cost thousands of pounds, cost hundreds of lives and take tens of hours?