Guru Viking Podcast

In this episode I am joined by Dr Alexander Arguelles, linguist, world-renowned polyglot, and scholar of comparative religion. In this episode, Dr Arguelles recounts his unusual upbringing in counter-culture America, traces his academic career through institutions such as the Universities of Columbia and Chicago, and details his remarkable life as a scholar and teacher. Dr Arguelles illuminates the inner world of the polyglot, listing his dozens of ancient and modern languages and revealing his methods of study, his surprising daily routine, and how deep immersion in language families such as Germanic or Romantic, can unlock all related languages without the need for extensive study. Dr Arguelles also reflects on his own spiritual life, including his mystical conversion to Catholicism, the unravelling of his vocation as a Benedictine monk, his time in Buddhist meditation retreat, and the ways in which a life of study and language learning can be a profound spiritual path of meditation. … Video version: h