On Being with Krista Tippett

There lives more faith in honest doubt. Believe me, then in half the creeds.

Thomas Merton, seven story mountain, his autobiography was published when he was a young man in his middle 30s, 1948.

the New York Times refused to list the seven story mountain as a best seller which put it on its best seller list because it was a religious book like the Bible

I read the seventh story mountain after I had read some of his other work and I didn't really enjoy it.

I bought the Seven Story Mountain, one summer day, a couple of years later, in the middle of an internship. What year are we talking here? This is the mid-80s, that was in 1985. It took the book home, which has knocked out by it.

As so many people have been the power of the narrative, the genuineness of his searching, but especially for the Catholic reader. This sense of strangeness and recognition.

Here's this guy who comes from no belief at all, who becomes a Catholic, and then the next thing you know he's becoming a trapeze monk. And reading the book as a Catholic you think, is this really my religion? It sounds just so wonderfully strange and powerful.

I was just knocked out by it, and I tried to follow his path really for a year, so I made a little space in the library that was a kind of monastic meditation space with books all around.

In fact, in a book I wrote in 2000 called the Math G...Now I actually made a case based on the sort of rational reconstruction over human evolutionary developments. I made the case that actually mathematics on language are actually two sides of the same coin in terms of evolutionary development.

At the very beginning of my conscious life and my efforts to attain and grasp the solidity to which my innate demand for planetoid and pelg me. And I try to above all to capture the essence of matter by looking for it in its most closely defined and concentrated and heaviest forms.

Then it was that my newly born attraction to the world of rocks began to produce the beginning of what was to be a permanent broadening of the foundations of my interior life.

the truth is that he's never been able to feel at home even at the peak of his spiritual trajectory unless immersed in an ocean of matter.

Let empiricism once become associated with religion as hitherto through some strange misunderstanding. It has been associated with e-religion. And I believe that a new era of religion, as well as of philosophy, will be ready to begin.

But that essay is called The Heart of Matter. And that is really the spiritual autobiography of T.R. written in 1950.

At the very beginning of my conscious life and my efforts to attain and grasp the solidity to which my innate demand for planetoid impaled me. I try to above all to capture the essence of matter by looking for it in its most closely defined and concentrated and heaviest forms.

Later when I was studying geology, it might well have appeared that all I was doing was seriously and successfully to consider the chances of a career in science. In reality, however, during the whole of my life there was but one thing which would irresistibly bring me back to the study of the great eruptive masses and continental shelves. That was an insatiable desire to maintain contact with the sort of universal route or matrix of beings.

So these essays they really...you feel like the foundation and all his later ideas they already have the seeds in those essays.

What follows springs from an exuberance of life and a yearning to live...it is written to express an impassioned vision of the earth and in an attempt to find a solution for the doubts that beset my action because I love the universe its energies its secrets and its hopes. And because at the same time I am dedicated to God, the only origin, the only issue, the only term.

My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him.

Tia wrote at the beginning just before the second world war he wrote an essay let's save mankind...so far illuminating French let us save humanity you know and see more in Max Mave who used to type in cyclistile this is they produced ten thousand copies of this to distribute among their friends can you imagine ten thousand copies in 1939 right I mean it's really to influence people to try and be positive rather negative and to help moving forward rather than trying to just be passive you see what I mean

And I have a statement in Haitian Creole at the very beginning of one of my books for Agmeads of Bone. And when I came up with that statement 10 years ago, it had a set of meanings to me. And the other day I picked it up and read it again. I said, oh my God, I saw new meanings.

He sold more copies than the Bible. I mean, he had more money than God.

If anything what I'm sitting and what's happened since and a simply reinforced the feelings I had there and it was interesting the transformation that led me to write goodbye to your cart and it was very explicitly good by it to the sort of Cartesian logical based approach to life and in a sense I was finally renouncing my form of self because I went into mathematics I mean I thought I think I was ever sort of a total platenist but I went into mathematics seduced by the fact that of the fact of the power of the logic and the reasoning and in the 19th century mathematics rooms supreme it's a basis of physics, engineering, calculus, all other very economics and so forth so you know mathematics literally built the modern world so it's unbelievably powerful and it began by just astronomical reflections but it's power was phenomenal and we built in modern world using mathematics um to the degree where people in mathematics including myself began to think when we got this powerful mechanism we can take it into the realms of psychology, sociology, and linguistics and start to make sense of these soft sciences you know they're we can try to solve every problem no that had already been tried a few decades earlier by the people built child official intelligence systems and expert systems and in both cases they had limited but very limited success but not great success but you know undaunted by that I thought well we can maybe do it in natural language understanding language in processing so when Stanford founded it center for sort of language and information in 1983 I got very interested and came out as a visit in 85 came down and the cameras are an invited visitor for 85 to 87 became a member of CSLI and was doing all of this research and I came in thinking and all of this mathematics I've got really a lot to contribute to this this enterprise now what I didn't expect was that when I got to CSLI I would be brought face-to-face with all of these psychologists these linguists these psycholinguists these social linguists the sociologists the ethnomethanologist I was brought up with all of these people in what I used to call the soft sciences I suppose to the hard sciences and thinking you know I mean I wasn't so naive that I think I would be able to say here's some mathematics it will make your discipline more more robust or some of my colleagues seem to have that belief but what I I was prepared to sort of be taught new things what I wasn't prepared for but what I happened to me was I ended up realizing the huge limitations on mathematics in those domains I mean they are phenomenal limitations when we write down and this happened to Chomsky when he tried to sort of do the center of linguistics in the 50s it became clear that there were it was good stuff and lots of stuff has come out of it but it wasn't coming close it was like trying to reach the moon by building taller and taller ladders that was not the way did mean to say you wouldn't get to the moon but you were going to get there by building a ladder and building the ladder that got us to the moon certainly involved a lot of mathematics and building the ladder that will involve us to understanding the sort of to sort of really understanding people in society mathematics can certainly play a role but it's not the rule of the king and lord that it was in physics it's the rule of of a trusted worker who can provide stuff as and when it's needed and and I realized just how complex these the the problems that were being grappled up by the by the social and human sciences so part of my recognition of that was writing good body of cat trying to articulate why I thought it was we needed to stop trying to build mathematical ladders that would help us reach this moon of of understanding and of a human beings in society and simply view mathematics as a tool that could play a useful role in a more broad and holistic discipline of a study interdisciplinary study that would help us to understand it and and one by one and a lot of a lot of a lot but a substantial number of mathematicians have began to sort of make that recognition and along with that came in my case the final acknowledgement that mathematics isn't the discovery of an external platonic realm then it's actually the building and study of a realm within our own minds so it's a social construct

And it's, you know, towards the true conceivable faiths, how the world's religions can come together and again here, one of the powerful chapters in that book is the argument that despite all the diversity in the doctrinal beliefs and the metaphysical idea theories and the pinning those doctrinal beliefs, when it comes to the prescription of how to lead a good life in ethical life.

There is a tremendous convergence across all the major traditions and these traditions were divided across time, across geography, across culture, across language, and all of this prescriptions in the end comes down to compassion.