The Way of the Hermit: My 40 years in the Scottish wilderness

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Gene: There were “Seven Laws”. Believe in and don’t blaspheme God. Don’t commit murder. Don’t engage in unlawful sex. Don’t steal. Don’t eat the flesh torn from a live animal. And establish a legal system to enforce the laws. David: Right. The Tower was a hedge against Divine Providence, which is doomed to failure because Divine Providence is inevitable by definition. And that’s what’s symbolized by the Tower’s destruction.

Gene: I mean the first thing is just that the Vehmgericht were basically a vigilante group. So they’re doing dark things in the dark, out of the light of scrutiny. They’re serving up dark justice to those that deserve it. But I started thinking about the timing of the Masonic meetings and whether they were related to the moon phases and that led me down a rabbit hole.Some people might find it surprising that you are a professor of religion and a political activist, as well as a hermit. How do you balance these two different sides of your life? David: Right. The first written laws which form a covenant that God puts his stamp on with the rainbow. Gene: The oath continues with - “Do you promise that you will be humble and contrite before the deity; and ever bear in mind the fate of Phaleg and his followers, who endeavored to build a tower whereby they might climb beyond the reach of another Deluge, and defy the omnipotence of God?” Gene: I noticed that there was an alternate Jewel that was gold instead of silver. It was in the shape of a triangle, with an arrow pointing downward. That made me think of the way the Vehmgericht signify that they’ve meted out justice. Mario Aguilar's personal homage to silence is eloquent, lucid, and simple. Not so much an argument for silence or against words which remain fundamental in every tradition, his meditations witness to his own instinct for silence and his growing solitude as a hermit in the world. The story of a soul, The Way of the Hermit joins the canon of spiritual autobiographies, akin to the monastic journeys of Thomas Merton, Henri Le Saux, and Bede Griffiths. It mirrors the broad interreligious wisdom of Raimon Panikkar, and stands in harmony with a multitude of Hindu and Buddhist experiences in today's world. A contemplative gift, The Way of the Hermit aids us in recovering quiet in today's noisy world.

David: Join us next time as we continue our exploration of “Morals and Dogma: The Annotated Edition”. David: Yeah, I hear you Walter. But it just makes me think that you don’t know where that line is until you step over it and get smited.Gene: Correct. And, a complication here is that the Count, who you are accusing, sits as one of the Freischoffen, which is what the judges of the Vehmgericht are called. Ken Smith’s advice for staying alive in inclement conditions could equally be applied to achieving hard-won dreams' – Geographical

It does not matter how slow you go – if you’ve got somewhere you must be before nightfall, and you are all alone in the wilderness, especially if the weather is bad. DO NOT STOP… The bridge between taking a rest and giving up entirely is a cruelly short one.’Gene: So, in a nutshell, if you’re talking about someone, you’re supposed to focus on the positive, and leave it to someone else to list all the negative, because everyone has both. David: As I said before, that posture is actually the shape of the Egyptian hieroglyph for “child” but it’s also obviously a gesture of hushing your own mouth, too. Seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as "the lonely loch," where he lives off the land. He fishes for his supper, chops his own wood and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit. Gene: Yeah, that’s Matthew 7:2 - “... with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

David: That makes sense for a time before electricity, but there’s also lore about the day of the full moon being significant energetically. David: Ooh… yeah. I’m sure it does denote that. The thing I noticed about both forms of the Jewel was that they both show representations of right triangles, with the shape formed by the arm and sword. and the two right triangles formed by the arrow bisecting the triangle in the second form of the Jewel. Gene: That’s uncanny. But we’re told that - “We need not enlarge upon these evils. They are apparent to all and lamented over by all, and it is the duty of a Mason to do all in his power to lessen, if not to remove them… There is no obligation resting on us to trumpet forth our disapproval of every wrongful or injudicious or improper act that every other man commits.” At first sight the lives of hermits, living in solitude and committed to a life of prayer and contemplation seems to be a world apart of the active practice of interfaith dialogue. Yet, there is a long tradition of seeking the divine together and thus making a contribution to better mutual understanding and an active contribution to peace between Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism in India. Paul Hedges, Associate Professor of Interreligious Studies at RSIS, NTU, Singapore and author of Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in Dialogue

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Gene: Keeping yourself in the dark, or refusing to be self-reflective, which the Lecture says leads to the sort of arrogance that caused the destruction of the “Tower of Babel”. The reader who has had experience of interfaith encounter will delight in this book. The reader whose experience of other traditions is more limited would find it a valuable introduction. Those of us who may feel oppressed by the noise and tumult of the world will find an invitation to an inner silence and an opportunity to explore our own cave of the heart, and the God who dwells therein. David: That’s right Sean. Monotheism is the formula being put forward. It says “Let him steer away from all those vain philosophies, which endeavor to account for all that is, without admitting that there is a God, separate and apart from the Universe which is his work: which erect Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone: which annihilate Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses: which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the actual, living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere logical formula.” Gene: It may be the archetypal “Star Chamber”. They also held initiation rituals and used secret language and signs.