Chapter II --
Light
On The Way
" They went up with winding stairs into the middle chamber,
and out of the middle into the third ." i Kings vi, 8.
"Does the road wind up-hill all the way ?"
Yes, to the very end.
"Will the day's journey take the whole long day ?"
From morn to night, my friend!
"But is there for the night a resting-place ?
A roof for when the slow dark hours bcgin ?
May not the darkness hide it from my face ?"
You cannot miss that Inn. ---
(Christina Rossetti)
In
the previous paper we have spoken of the transition from darkness to
light made by those who seek to effect the reconstitution of their
natural being and to develop it, by the science and methods of
Initiation, to a higher and ultra natural level.
It has been made clear, that that transition must
necessarily be gradual and that, though ceremonially dramatised in three
Degrees, which can be taken in successive months, to realise the
implications of those Degrees in actual life experience may be a
lifetime's work, perhaps more than a lifetime's. The Apprentice, who has
entered himself to the business of rebuilding his own soul has much to
learn and to do before he becomes even a competent Craftsman in it. The
Craftsman, in turn, has much to do and far to journey before he can hope
for complete Mastership. The work of self transmutation is a strenuous
one, not suddenly or hurriedly to be performed and one needing hours of
refreshment and passivity as well as hours of active labour, to each of
which he will find himself duly summoned at the proper time. There is
much to be learned in regard to the secrets of his own nature and the
principles of intellectual science, which only gradually and as the
result of patience and experience, can become revealed to his view.
There is a superstructure to be raised, perfect in all its parts, a work
involving much more than is at first supposed. There are tests and
ordeals of a searching character to be undergone on the way.
A measure of Light, a first glimpse of the distant
Promised Land, may come to the eager sight of the properly prepared
candidate from the first moment of his entrance upon the work, but he
must not suppose, that he has yet fully captured it and made it
permanently his own. It is something, however, to have felt that a veil
has been suddenly withdrawn from his previously darkened sight and that
he has become able to distinguish between his former benightedness and
the goal lying before him.
We will entitle this present section, therefore, "Light on the Way," and
make it treat of a variety of matters calling for the aspirant's
attention as he pursues the way that intervenes between his first
glimpse of the Light and its ultimate realisation and in a subsequent
section we shall speak of Light in its fullness of attainment. We will
supplement our previous explanation of Masonic doctrine by dealing with
further symbols and passages in the rituals, with which every Mason is
familiar formally and by the outward ear, but the significance of which
too often passes unexplained and unobserved.
The expositions in this Section are offered on not
Light only for the private reflection of members of the Craft, but with
the suggestion that they may serve as material for collective meditation
by Brethren in open Lodge or at Lodges of
Instruction. For those upon the path to real Initiation, meditation is essential. For meditation
opens a window in the mind through which Light streams into the
understanding from the higher, spiritual principle in ourselves, which
window is symbolised by the dormer-window in the emblematic Temple of
Solomon, through which came light to those ascending the stairway that
wound inwardly to the middle chamber leading to the central sanctuary
where alone Light in its fullness was to be found.
The practice of meditation,
moreover, whether personal or collective, conduces
to that quietness and control of the normally restless, wandering mind,
which are indispensable for the apprehension of deep Truth.
Ancient Lodges, we are told, were wont to meet on the highest hills and
in the lowest valleys and in an old Instruction lecture it is
explained, that those expressions are meant to be figurative and relate
less to actual places than to the spiritual and mental condition of
those assembled. To meet in the valley, implied being in a
state of sheltered passiveness and tranquillity, when the minds of the
Brethren surrendered themselves to quiet collective thought on the
subject of their work and
thus, being "led beside still waters," they became, like the
limpid unruffled surface of a lake, a clear undistorting mirror for the
reflection and apprehension of such rays of light and truth as might
reach them from above. To meet on the high hills, on the other hand,
implied the more active work of the Lodge and the performance of it upon
the super physical planes the "hills" of the spirit, for the
real work of Initiation is only there accomplished and is no longer a
ceremonial formality.
There are times for work and times for repose in the
Craftsman's task times of labour and refreshment and to perform that
task efficiently both must be utilised. Modern Lodges, in the general
imperfect conception of Masonry, follow merely the rush and hustle
methods of the outside world, which, of course, inside the Lodge have no
place and ought no longer to be emulated. They are busy enough on the
active side, but they provide no opportunity for cultivating the equally
necessary passive aspect of the work. It would be found eminently
advantageous, therefore, if Lodges which desire to realise true Masonry
adopted the practice of collectively contemplating points of symbolism
and teaching, devoting certain meetings to this special purpose and
then, without more discussion than is necessary and helpful, quietly and
earnestly concentrating attention upon the significance of some symbol
or point of doctrine brought before them .
For those seriously engaged in the ascent of the
winding staircase, the following expositions may perhaps serve as
helpful rays of light from the dormer window. They are necessarily brief
and merely elementary introductions to phases of the science, which as
the aspirant proceeds, he will find inexhaustible and claiming not
cursory notice, but his constant deep attention. May they, however, be
as a lamp to his feet and a light upon the spiral path to ledge his own
middle chamber and help to guide him to that final central sanctuary
where the Light itself shines in fullness and waits to be found .
I.
"The Knowledge Of Yourself"
It has already been shown that the structure and
appointments of the Lodge are symbolic that
the Lodge is a
representation both of the Universe and of man himself as a Microcosm or
the Universe in miniature, that it is an image of his own complex
constitution, his heavens and his earth (his spirituality and
materiality) and all that therein is.
By contemplating that image, therefore, the Mason
learns to visualise himself, he is given a first lesson in that self
knowledge in the full attainment of which is promised the
understanding of all things. "Know
thyself," we have said, was written over the portals of the ancient
temples of Initiation, self knowledge being the aim of their intention
and the goal of their purpose. Masonry perpetuates
this maxim by recommending self knowledge as "the most interesting
of all human studies" It is the tersest, wisest of instructions,
yet little heeded nowadays and it is incapable of fulfilment, unless
undertaken in accordance with the ancient science and with a
concentration of one's whole energies upon the task.
It involves the deepest introspection into oneself
and perfect discrimination between what is real and permanent and what
is unreal and evanescent in ourselves.
As aspirants to the Mysteries could not learn the secrets of the Temple
without entering it, learning its lessons, undergoing its disciplines
and receiving its graduated initiations, so no one can attain self
knowledge save by entering into himself, distinguishing the false from the true, the
unreal from the real, the base metal from the fine gold, sublimating the
former into the latter and ignoring what is negligible or superfluous. The very word Initiation primarily derives from the Latin in ire, to go
within and thence, after learning the lessons of self-analysis, to make
a new beginning (initium) by reconstructing one's knowledge of life and
manner of living. The 43rd Psalm restates the
same instruction, Introibo ad altare Dei, " I will go in to the
divine altar". Similarly, the Masonic Initiation contemplates a
going within oneself, until one reaches the altar or centre, the Divine
Principle or ultimate hidden basis of our being can not be comprehended.
To know the anatomy and physiology of the mortal body
is not self knowledge. The
physical fabric of man is a perishing self, mere dust and shadow,
projected from vitalising forces within it and without permanence or
reality.
To understand the nature and mechanism of the mind,
emotions and desires, is useful and necessary, but is not self
knowledge, for they too, are transient and therefore, unreal aspects of
the deeper real self. The personality we present to the world is not
our real self. It is but a mask, a distorting veil, behind which the
true self abides hidden and often unknown to our unreal surface self,
unless and until it be brought forward into consciousness, displacing
and overriding the notions and tendencies of the natural, but benighted,
superficial self.
Until then its "light shineth in darkness and the darkness
comprehendeth it not". To bring it forward out of its veils of
darkness, to "comprehend" and establish it permanently in our
awareness is and has ever been, the purpose of all Initiation.
But this cannot be achieved until the outer bodily and mental vestures
have been purified and a voluntary dying or effacement of everything in
us alien to, or conflicting with, the real self has been suffered, all
which is implied by the teaching of our three Degrees respectively.
True self
knowledge is unobstructed conscious union of the human spirit
with God and the realisation of their identity.
In that identic union the unreal, superficial selves have become
obliterated. The sense of personality is lost, merged in the Impersonal
and Universal. The little Ego is assumed into the great All and
knows as It knows. Man realises his own
inherent ultimate Divinity and thenceforth lives and acts no longer as a
separate individual, with an independent will, but in integration with
the Divine Life and Will, whose instrument he becomes, whose purposes he
thenceforth serves. This is "the
great day of atonement," when the limited personal consciousness
becomes identified or made at one with one's own divine, omniscient,
vital and immortal Principle, which each must realise as the high priest
of his personal temple and after many washings and purifyings against
the contrary tendencies of his former unregenerate nature. This was the
secret supreme attainment hinted at in the cryptic maxim "Know
thyself !"--
Each of us may judge for himself whether he has yet reached it.
To find our own Centre, our real self,
involves, therefore, a turning inwards of our previously externalised
faculties of sense and thought and an introspective penetration of the
outlying circumferential elements of our nature, until the
“Centre" is found.
This task is figured by our ceremonial perambulations and by the path
of the winding staircase leading from the ante rooms and forecourts of
our nature to the Centre, up which the aspirant must ascend, asking,
seeking, knocking, all the way, being subjected from time to time to
tests of his progress and receiving, without scruple or diffidence, such
wages of good fortune or adversity as unseen Providences may know to be
his due.
The inmost sanctuary he will find closely
guarded. Nothing unclean can enter or approach that holy place.
Hence in the biblical description of the symbolic
Temple one finds that, in the forecourt, stood the great laver of water
for the cleansing of pollutions and the altar of fire for the
sacrificial burning up of one's impurities. The sword of the I. G.,
directed to those unqualified to enter the Lodge, is the Masonic way of
inculcating that peril exists to those who are not properly prepared to
approach the Centre or who would rush in where angels fear to tread, it
corresponds with the sword of the Cherubim in Genesis, which turned
every way to keep the way to the Tree of Life from the approaches of the
unfit.
Mental as well as physical purity is
indispensable to real Initiation, but the former is far more difficult
of the two to acquire. Modern psychology discloses not only how fractional
a part of our entire mentality functions above the threshold of our
normal awareness, but also what knots and twists, what mental lumber,
what latent horrors and accumulations of inner foulness, lie stored in
the sub consciousness of even those living ordinarily clean lives. They
are the deposits of the mind's past activities, forgotten often by the
conscious mind itself, yet automatically registered upon our impalpable
mind stuff by the recording pencil (mentioned among the Third Degree
working-tools) which at every moment of our lives posts up entries of
our thoughts, words and actions. For at the centre of ourselves is the All
Observant Eye, so that we ourselves constitute our own Judgment Book,
wherein each of us unwittingly inscribes his own history and formulates
his own destiny and its pages we have each to read ourselves.
With these mental deposits and consolidations those
skilled in Initiation science are well familiar. The modern psychologist
calls them "complexes". In the old treatises on the subject
they are termed foul ethers, congelations of impure mental matter. They
are the "base metals" of Masonry. Each of us has been an
artificer of those metals and worked them into all manners of grotesque
designs in his mental nature and hence the conferment upon the
candidate, at a certain stage, of a name attributed to the first of such
artificers and signifying him to be still incompletely purged of worldly
possessions of this kind. These "base metals" require to be
discharged from the system by a long process of corrective purifying
thought and aspiration and to be transmuted into gold or pure mind
stuff, before real Initiation is possible. No inward fog must intervene
between the outer and innermost organs of consciousness, when the time
comes for these to be unified.
The Light of Truth cannot penetrate a mind crammed with pernicious
thought and with opinions to which it clings tenaciously. It must empty
itself of all preacquired knowledge and prejudices and then rise on the
wings of its own genius into the realm of independent Thought and there
learn Truth at first hand by directly beholding it.
The
incident of attaining Light and self knowledge is dramatically
emphasised in Masonic ceremonial. It is represented by that important
moment in the ritual of the Third Degree when darkness suddenly gives
way to bewildering light, in which light the candidate gazes back for
the first" time upon the remains of his own past and beholds the emblems of his
own mortality. He has now (at least in ceremony) surmounted the great
transitional crisis involved in becoming raised from a natural to a
higher order of humanity. He perceives his temporal organism to have
been the "tomb of transformation," in which the great change
has been wrought. He has risen from that tomb and for him the old grave
of the natural body has lost its sting and that spiritual
unconsciousness, which is termed "death," has been swallowed
up in the victory won at last by his higher eternal principle over his
lower temporal one. The mystical sprig of acacia has bloomed at the head
of his grave, by the efflorescence of the Vital and Immortal Principle
in his purified mind and neural system.
Thus
is portrayed for us, in Masonic ceremony, the moment of attainment of
knowledge of one's true self. The incident, let it be emphasised, does
not involve the physical death of the body and its faculties, for to
"the companions of his former toils" the, purified mind will
thereafter be reunited . But thenceforth they will be his docile,
plastic, obedient servants and no longer his master. He will continue to
live in the world for the remainder of his appointed span, no longer for
his own sake, but for the uplifting and advancement of his fellowmen to
his own high degree. His expansion of consciousness and wisdom will
become part of his equipment for practical work in the world. His own
spiritual evolution is complete, so far as the educative experience of
this world can take it, he lives now to help on that of humanity.
A
great and good Brother, reviewing his long connection with Masonic
sanctuaries more than a century ago, wrote thus about Initiation.
"The
only initiation which I preach and seek with all the ardour of my soul
is that by which we may enter into the heart of God and make God's heart
enter into us, there to form an indissoluble marriage which will make us
the friend, brother and spouse of our Divine Redeemer". This
attainment is the self knowledge pointed to by the Craft teaching
and to which that teaching seeks to guide the reflections of
every brother. (Louis Claude de
Saint Martin ; Theosophic Correspondence, with Baron Kirchberger ; a
work of great value and disclosing the nature of Masonic work in French
Lodges prior to the Revolution of 1789)
Masonic Initiation has no other end than this
conscious union between the individual soul and the Universal Divine
Spirit. This union is symbolised by the familiar conjunction of the square and
the compasses. The square is the emblem of the soul, the compasses of
the Spirit which indwells in that soul. At first the Mason sees the
points of the compasses concealed behind the square and as he
progresses, their points emerge from that concealment until both become
superimposed upon the square. Thus is indicated the progressive
subordination of the soul and the corresponding coming forward of the
ultimate Spirit into personal consciousness, so that the Mason can
" work with both those points," thus becoming an efficient
builder in the spirit and rendering the circle of his own being complete
by attaining conscious alliance with his ultimate and only true self.
2.
The "G"
Centrally, in the ceiling of each Lodge, is exhibited
this striking symbol. It is the emblem of the Divine Presence in the
Lodge. It is also the emblem of that Presence at the spiritual centre of
the individual Mason. Its correspondence in the Christian Church is the
perpetual light burning before the high altar.
In the First and Second Craft Degrees the symbol is
visible in the heavens of Lodge. In the Third Degree it has become
invisible, but its presence is still manifested, being reflected in the
small light in the East which, in correspondence with the Divine
Presence is as every Mason knows inextinguishable even in one's darkest
moments. In the Royal Arch Degree, it again becomes visible, but in
another form and in another position, on the floor of the Temple and at
its centre and in the form of a cubical altar, a white stone, bearing
the Sacred Name. In the course of the Degrees, it has come down from heaven to earth.
Spirit has descended to the plane of purified Matter. The Divine and the
human have been brought together and made one. God has become Man. Man
has been unified with God and has found the Divine Name written upon the
altar of his own heart.
In
the significance of this symbol and its transpositions during the four
Degrees may, therefore, be discerned the whole purpose and end of
Initiation, the union of the personal soul with its Divine Principle.
Masonry has no other objective than this. All other matters of interest
connected with it are but details subsidiary to this supreme
achievement.
When the Lodge is opened, the mind and heart of every
Brother composing it should be deemed as also being opened to the
"G" and all that it implies, to the intent that those
implications may eventually become realised facts of experience. When
the Lodge is closed, the memory of the "G" symbol and its
implications should be the chief one to be retained and pondered over in
the repository of the heart.
Further, great significance lies in the
centrality of the "G". The Lodge is grouped around it, not
assembled immediately below it. It is as though this Blazing Star or
Glory in the centre burned with too fierce a light for anything less
pure and bright than itself to withstand the descent of its direct rays
and accordingly, the floor of the Lodge is left open and unoccupied and
only at its extremities do the assembled Brethren sit, removed from its
direct rays.
Directly beneath it lies the chequer work floor, the symbol of the
manifested creation, where the one White Light from above becomes
differentiated into perpetual duality and opposites of light and
darkness, good and evil, positive and negative, male and female, as
evidenced by the black and white squares, yet the whole held together in
a unity as is denoted by the symbolic skirt work around the same.
The "G" therefore denotes the
Universal Spirit of God, permeating and unifying all things.
It is a substitute for the Hebrew letter Yod, the tenth letter of the
Hebrew alphabet and out of which all the other letters of that alphabet
are constructed in correspondence with the truth that all created things
are modifications of the one primal Spirit. In the Instruction lecture
of a Degree outside our present constitutions, the "G" is
explained as having a threefold reference, (i) the Glory of God, or
glory in the centre, (2) Grandeur, or the greatness of perfection to
which man may become raised by initiation into union with God at his
centre and (3) Gom-El, a Hebrew word of praise for the Divine power and
goodness in designing, that perfection and that union between the
Creator and the creature. There is also a Hebrew tradition, that Gom-El
was the word uttered by Adam on first beholding the beauty of Eve and
perceiving the ultimate destiny of humanity.
The "G" had its equivalent in the
Egyptian Mysteries in the solar symbol of Ra, the spiritual Sun.
In the great temple of the Greek
Mysteries at Delphi, where the Eleusinian initiations took place
for seventeen centuries, it was represented by the
fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, the E (or Eta), five being a
numerical symbol of man in the Pythagorean system, as evidenced by his
five senses, the five fold extension of his hands and feet and in
accordance with considerations of a more abstruse nature. Hence the five
pointed star (or pentagram) is also a symbol of man and expresses a
variety of truths concerning him. In
the rituals in the Book of the Dead the candidate is
described as a "keeper of five".
Operative fellowcraft Masons worked in batches of five and a
Speculative fellowcraft Lodge today consists of five brethren, all these
allusions having a deeper significance than can be explained here, but
bearing upon the present state of human evolutional development.
Plutarch
records that the "E" was regarded as a symbol of the greatest
importance and instructiveness and was exhibited in three forms
(corresponding with our three Degrees), first in wood, afterwards in
bronze and finally in gold. The progression signified a corresponding
advance of the candidate's moral and spiritual nature under the
discipline of Initiation. He is likened at first to soft
perishable wood, hardening into the durability of bronze, which
impure, alloyed metal finally becomes sublimated into gold,the symbol of
the attainment of purity, wisdom and perfection to which Initiation
leads.
Beyond this, however, the central symbol had another
deep meaning. The great Initiation temples of antiquity, as
also certain Christian Churches of historic interest (such as those of
Iona and Glastonbury, from which Britain became Christianised), were
erected at certain focal points of the earth's surface known to the
Initiates of the time as being magnetic centres or nodal points of
spiritual force peculiarly favourable for the influx into this world of
currents of Divine Power
and for their irradiation thence to surrounding regions . Each such
place was called an Omphalos, a navel, or mystical centre and the Temple
at Delphi is related to have been built, where it was under divine
guidance and for that purpose and we know, that it became the centre of
light and religion to the then civilised Western world for seventeen
centuries.
This historical fact and this
occult principle are now reproduced in Masonry.
Every Lodge, every place of Initiation, is in theory (though not nowadays in practice) held at a centre or physical focus
point selected as being favourable both to the initiation of those, who
enter it and to the spiritual advancement of the uninitiated popular
world resident in its vicinity. "A city set on a hill cannot be
hid". A Temple or Lodge of Brethren intelligently
performing its work is not only engaged in a work of spiritual building
as regards its own members, it is though perhaps unconsciously, at the
same time, generating and throwing off vibrations of spiritual energy to
all around it. Its occult influence extends and its radiations are of
efficacy, to a greater range than one dreams of.
If then, the Lodge be a spiritual focus point, the centre of the Lodge, where the "G" is exhibited, is its
most vital and sacred point, the point at which Divine Energy may be
thought of as concentrated and specially powerful. And the reason will
become clear for placing the candidate at that point at a certain moment
in the ceremony.
Why is he then placed in the centre?
Previously he has been placed, not there, but in certain more removed
places in the Lodge, in the N.E. or the S.E. corners, where the
intensity of the central Light is theoretically less powerful, where it
is tempered and adjusted to his as yet unperfected organism and where
charges and instruction appropriate to his then state of advancement are
imparted to him. But when directed to be placed in the Lodge centre, he is called upon
to stand, as it were, in direct alignment with the descending ray of the
Supernal Light and to bear the stress of its full current. The intensity
of that current can only be borne and withstood by one, who is perfect
in all his parts and in whom the sensual, emotional and mental natures
have been purified, rectified and brought into harmony and to an
alignment corresponding with the physical and moral erectness of a just
and upright man.
An unpurified man would run the peril of having his organism injured or
shattered by a current of that fiery Power, by which every soul must
sooner or later be tested, but which consumes everything not assimilable
with itself. The three Hebrew "children" (i.e., initiates) who
withstood unscathed the fiery furnace into which they were plunged,
typify the truth testified to.
When, therefore, a candidate is placed in the centre
of the Lodge, beneath the "G" symbol, let those assembled
around him try to realise the intention of what is thereby implied. Let them reflect that at that important moment, more perhaps than at
any other in the ceremonies, it is possible for the celestial Light to
descend upon the duly prepared candidate, to flood his heart and expand
his mind and so to open his understanding to the instruction then
communicated to him, that he may realise the spirit as well as hear the
letter of it, whilst standing in that sacred position. And let them at
that moment silently and earnestly invoke the Light of the centre, that
it may then consciously arise in both him and them, so that what is done
ceremonially may become for them both, a great fact of spiritual
experience.
The
point is emphasised here with earnestness, because the Masonic procedure
of placing the candidate in the centre of the Lodge at an important
stage of his progress not only perpetuates a traditional and purposeful
ancient practice, but also accords with what occurs in Initiations of a
much more advanced and real character than it is possible to speak of
here, as those who become duly qualified will one day come to find.
By understanding and being faithful in the small things of even an
elementary and ceremonial system, one becomes educated for and prepared to be entrusted with greater ones, when the time for
acquiring them arrives.
3.
The Ladder.
A most important part of the curriculum of the
Ancient Mysteries was instruction in Cosmology, the science of the
Universe .The intention of that instruction was to disclose to
candidates, the physical and meta physical constitution of the world and
the place and destiny of man in it. They were shown how the
complex human organism reproduces the great World and summarises it in
small, so that man may see himself to be a microcosm or miniature copy
of it. They were enlightened not only upon the external visible aspect,
but also upon the physically unseen and impalpable aspect, both of the
Universe and themselves. They learned truths concerning the material and
the ultra material sides of the world and were taught, that
corresponding features were present in themselves. They learned of the continual flux of matter, of the
transiency of bodily forms and of the abiding permanence of the one Life
or Spirit, which has descended and embodied itself in matter and has
there distributed and clothed itself in an endless, but progressive
variety of forms from the mineral up to the human, with the purpose of
generating eventually a finished perfected product as the result of the
mighty process. There was demonstrated to them the dual cosmic method of
Involution and Evolution, by which the universally diffused Life force
involves and circumscribes itself within material limitations and
physical conditions and thence evolves and arises out of them, enriched
by the experience. They
were taught of the different levels and graduations of the Universe of
which some of them are material and some ethereal, the planes and sub
planes of it, upon which the great scheme is being carried out, which
levels and planes, all progressively linked together, constitute as it
were one vast ladder of many rounds, staves, or rungs, a ladder which
Tennyson once well described as
The world's great altar-stairs
Which slope through darkness up to God.
Candidates in the old systems were instructed
in these matters before being admitted to Initiation. The knowledge
served to explain to them their own nature and constitution and their
place in the World system. It demonstrated to them their own evolutionary
possibilities and made clear to them why Initiation science had been
instituted and how Initiation itself was an intensive means of
accelerating the spiritual evolution of individuals, who were ripe for
it, and capable of intelligently cooperating with and expediting the
cosmic process. With this knowledge they were then free either to proceed to actual
Initiation and undertake its obligations, sacrifices and discipline, or
to stand down and go no farther, if they found themselves unwilling, or
without the courage, to undertake the arduous task involved. Freedom of
the personal will in this momentous choice was always essential to
admission to Initiation and the same absence of constraint still
attaches to admission to modern Masonry .
The modern Mason, however, is left entirely
without any cosmologic instruction and
to such hazy notions on the subject
as he may happen to hold. It becomes difficult,
therefore, in regard to this and many other matters of Masonic moment,
to speak of the disciplina arcani to those who may be either not
interested in it or who would treat the information with incredulity as
something about which nothing certain is known or perhaps knowable.
Scepticism, freedom and independence of
thought about matters of a more or less occult nature
have their undoubted place and value in the outer ways of the world. But
they are foreign to and inconsistent with the mental
attitude appropriate to those who, on entering a hall of Initiation, are
supposed to tyle the door to the outside world and its conceptions, and
divesting themselves of all
ideas there preacquired, to offer themselves as humble teachable pupils
of a new and authoritative order of knowledge.
Where every one claims to be already possessed of a sufficiently
satisfactory explanation of the Universe and his place in it, or is
content to get along without one and in either case prefers his private
judgment to any other, that may be offered him, the soil for making
Initiates in any real sense is distinctly unfavourable.
For such, however, these pages are not written. They are offered
only to the minority of Brethren eager to learn what Masonry has to
teach them upon matters in which they earnestly seek knowledge and
guidance.
Masonry, then, in exhibiting to them a simple ladder
offers them a symbol the significance of which is calculated to open
widely the eyes of their imagination. It is true that in
the Instruction lecture the ladder is expressly referred to that of
Jacob in the familiar biblical episode and that, that ladder is then
given a moral significance and made to suggest the way by which man may
ascend from earth to heaven by climbing its symbolic rungs and
especially by utilising its three chief ones representing the virtues
Faith, Hope and Charity. This moral interpretation is warranted and salutary. But it is far from exhaustive and conceals rather than reveals what
"Jacob's ladder" was really intended to convey to the
perspicuous when the compilers of our system gave it the prominence they
did. We may be assured they had a much deeper purpose than merely
reminding us of the Pauline triad of theological virtues.
The ladder, then,
covertly emphasises the old cosmological teaching
before referred to. It is a symbol of the Universe and of its
succession of step like planes reaching from the heights to the depths.
It is written elsewhere that the Father's House has many mansions, many
levels and resting places for His creatures in their different
conditions and degrees of progress. It is these levels, these planes and
sub planes, that are denoted by the rungs and staves of the ladder.
And of these there are, for us in our present state of evolutionary
unfoldment, three principal ones, the physical plane, the plane of
desire and emotion and the mental plane or that of the abstract
intelligence, which links up to the still higher plane of the spirit.
These three levels of the world are reproduced in man. The
first corresponds with his material physique, his sense body, the second
with his desire and emotional nature, which is a mixed element resulting
from the interaction of his physical senses and his ultra physical mind,
the third with his mentality, which is still farther removed from his
physical nature and forms the link between the latter and his spiritual
being.
The ladder and its three principal staves, may be
seen everywhere in Nature. It appears in the septenary scale of musical
sound with its three dominants, in the prismatic scale of light with its
three primary colours, in our seven
day scale of weekly time, in the septenary physiological changes
of our bodily organism and the similar periodicities known to physics
and indeed to every branch of science. The perfect Lodge has seven
members, including three principal Officers. The advancement of the
Third Degree candidate to the East is by seven steps, the first three of
which, it will be remembered, are given special significance.
Thus the Universe and man himself are
constructed ladder wise, in an orderly organised sequence of steps.
The one universal substance composing the differentiated parts of the
Universe "descends" from a state of the utmost ethereality by successive
steps of increasing densification until gross materialisation is reached
and thence "ascends" through a similarly ordered gradation of
planes to its original place, but enriched by the experience gained by
its activities during the process.
It was this cosmic process which was the
subject of the dream or vision of Jacob and which accounts for
"Jacob's ladder" being given prominence in our symbolism. What
was "dreamed" or beheld by him with super sensual vision, is
equally perceptible today by any one whose inner eyes have been opened.
Every real Initiate is one, who has attained an expansion of
consciousness and faculty enabling him to behold the ethereal worlds
revealed to the Hebrew patriarch, as easily as the uninitiated man
beholds the phenomenal world with his outer eyes. The Initiate is able to "see the angels
of God ascending and descending", that is, he can directly behold
the great stairway of the Universe and watch the intricate, but orderly
mechanism of involution, differentiation, evolution and resynthesis,
constituting the Life process. He can witness the descent of human essences or
souls through planes of increasing density and decreasing vibratory
rate, gathering around them as they come veils of matter from each,
until finally this lowest level of complete materialisation is reached,
where the great struggle for supremacy between the inner and the outer
man, between the spirit and the flesh, between the real self and the
unreal selves and veils built round it, has to be fought out on the
chequer work floor of our present existence, among the black and white
opposites of good and evil, light and darkness, prosperity and adversity
. And he can watch the upward return of those who conquer in the strife
and attaining their regeneration and casting off or transmuting the
"worldly possessions" acquired during their descent, ascend to
their Source, pure and unpolluted from the stains of this imperfect
world. But to no man comes such vision as this unless he too be a Jacob,
who flees from the clash and hurly of secular activities into the
solitude of his own soul and in that barren wilderness interrogates
himself and struggles agonisingly to penetrate the mystery of his
existence, to read its purpose and tear out the last secret of his own
being. So, perchance, he may fall asleep, his head at last quietly
pillowed upon that hard stone, against which hitherto he has been
blindly dashing it. And then by the surrender of his own will and mental
activities and in the silence and quietude of the senses, his own inmost
great Light may break and from that new found centre he will see and
know and find the answer to all his needs. For, in the words of an ancient record of
Initiation, "the sleep of the body becomes the awaking of the soul
and the closing of the eyes true vision, and silence becomes impregnated
with God. This happened to me when I received the
supreme authentic Word. I became God-inspired. I arrived at Truth.
Wherefore I give from my soul and whole strength, blessing to the
Father." (Hermes, Poemandres, I. 30).
Jacob's vision and ladder, therefore,
exemplify the attainment of Initiation, the expansion of consciousness
that comes when the Light of the centre is found, and the cosmic vision
that then becomes possible. The same truth is taught in
a little treatise, of great instructiveness to every Mason, written by the initiate philosopher Porphyry in the third century and
entitled On the Cave of the Nymphs. It is an exposition of a passage in
Homer's Odyssey, which he shows likewise to be a veiled story of the
soul's wanderings, of its crossing the rough seas of life and enduring
the tempests and trials of this world, and finally perfecting itself and
escaping into the haven of peace. The passage describes a certain dark cave, above
which grew an olive-tree, and into which certain nymphs entered at one
end and became busy in weaving purple garments for themselves and it was
not possible to leave the cave save by a gate at the other end and after
having ceased to be satisfied with the pleasure of inhabiting that
agreeable but benighted place and sought a way of escape. Porphyry
thus explains the allegory. The dark cave is that of the body into which
the soul (a "nymph" or spiritual being) enters and weaves
around itself a garment of flesh and blood, and indulges in sense
gratification alien to its real nature. The nymph-soul has descended
through the planes of the Cosmos until it has entered this cave by the
"gate of man" (i.e) by evolving to human status and it can
only leave it by passing out through the opposite gate, the "gate
of the gods" (i.e) by becoming perfected and divinised. This it
cannot do save with the help of oil from the olive planted at the top of
the cavern, the oil of Wisdom, which shall initiate the soul and guide
it to the way out to the higher worlds and the regions of the blessed.
Porphyry's
exposition continues thus. "In this cave, therefore, says Homer,
all external worldly possessions must be deposited. Here, naked and as a
suppliant, afflicted, in body, casting aside everything superfluous and
renouncing all sensual energies, one must sit at the foot of the olive
and consult with Minerva (Wisdom) by what means we may effectually
destroy that hostile rout of passions which lurk insidiously in the
secret recesses of the soul.It will not be a simple task to become
liberated from this sensible life, but he who dares to do this must
transmute himself, so that being at length divested of the torn
garments, by which his true self is concealed, he may recover the ruined
empire of his soul"
The
Mason, who reads this parable will not fail to see in it the allusion to
the preparation of candidates for initiation, or to recognise that the
cave and the olive tree growing above it correspond precisely with the
grave of Hiram Abiff and the sprig of acacia planted at its head.
Both of these allude, of course, to the human body in which the true
spiritual self of man lies buried and imprisoned and from the bondage of
which it can only be freed by cultivating and lighting the oil of wisdom
(or, alternatively, of causing the sprig of acacia to blossom) which
will enlarge his consciousness and reveal to him his path, through the
Universe.
We have each descended into this world by the steps
of Jacob's ladder, we have each to ascend from it by the same steps. In
some Masonic diagrams and tracing boards, upon the ladder is exhibited a
small cross in a tilted, unstable position as if ascending it. That
cross represents all who are engaged in mounting the ladder to the
heights and who
Rise by stepping-stones
From their dead selves to higher things .
Each carries his cross, his own cruciform body, as he
ascends, the material vesture, whose tendencies are ever at cross
purposes with the desire of his spirit and militate against the ascent.
Thus weighted, each must climb and climb alone, yet reaching out, as the
secret tradition teaches and the arms of the tilted cross signify, one
hand to invisible helpers above, and the other to assist the ascent of
feebler brethren below. For as the sides acid separate rungs of the
ladder constitute a unity, so all life and all lives are fundamentally
one, and none lives to himself
alone.
Indeed Life, and the ladder it climbs, are one and
indissociable. The summit of both reaches to and disappears out of ken
into the heavens, the base of both rests upon the earth, but these two
terminals that of spirit and that of matter are but opposite poles of a
single reality which cannot be known as a unity or otherwise than in its
differentiated aspects of many planes, many mansions, many rounds or
staves, except by him, who has unified them in himself and become able
to ascend and descend upon the ladder at will. But this is the privilege
only of the Initiate skilled in that science of lif, which teaches how
to mount the Scala Perfectionis, as a famous classical work of the this
century terms the ladder of initiation, known to Masons under the glyph
of "Jacob's Ladder."
4. The Superstructure
The
novitiate Mason is taught to regard his normal, natural personality as
but a foundation stone, upon which he commended to erect a
superstructure, perfect in all its parts and honourable to the builder.
To how many does this instruction mean anything more
than a general pious counsel to become merely a man of strong moral
character and virtue? It is something, of course, to fulfill that
elementary standard, which needs, however, no membership of a Secret
Order for its accomplishment, but the recommendation implies a very
different meaning from that, as a little reflection will show. It is not a
recommendation merely to improve the condition of the already existing
foundation stone (the personality), but to erect upon that foundation
something which previously did not exist, something which will transcend
and outrange it, although built upon it.
For the reader who is unversed in the deeper side of Masonic
significance and is unaware of the hidden nature of it as thoroughly
known to the original exponents of the science, the subject may prove
difficult. It
must therefore be explained at the outset that the superstructure to be
erected is the organisation of an ethereal or spiritual body in which
the skilled Mason can function in independence of his physical body and
natural personality.
The theory of Masonry presupposes that man is a
fallen creature, that his natural personality is a transient and unreal
expression of his true self as conceived in the Divine Mind and that,
under appropriate tuition and self
discipline, he may become rebuilt and reorganised into the
original condition from which he has fallen. The
present natural personality, however, is the basis or foundation- stone
out of which that reorganisation 'can proceed, and within it already
exists, though in a condition of chaos and disorder, all the material
requisite to the purpose.
Building
a superstructure upon one's present self involves much more than merely
improving one's moral character. It is not a novice's task, although the
advice to perform it is rightly given in the Apprentice stage. It is a work of occult science, only to be undertaken by those educated
and skilled in that science.
It is the science to which 'the Christian Master referred in the words,
"Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first
and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest,
after he hath laid the foundation and is not able to finish it, all that
behold begin to mock, saying, `This man began to build but was not able
to finish!".
Accordingly the Mason desirous of building a tower or superstructure
should "sit down first and count the cost" by acquiring a
thorough understanding of what is involved and before he is able even to
begin the erection of such a building, he will find a good deal
of rough labourer's work has first to be done upon himself in clearing
the ground for the intended structure.
There is an old Masonic Degree, not comprised in our
present Constitutions, devoted specially to this subject. It is called the Degree of Grand Architect and throws great light on
the intention of those who, well understanding the secret science, made
reference in our Ritual to the building of a superstructure.
In
that Degree, the reference is to "building structures in the air"
and it is taught that this is the work only of Grand Architects,
"being too great for inferior craftsmen, who only know by admiring
theme at a distance when done".
"Structures
in the air"! All structures, save subterranean ones, rise into the
air the average reader will say, yet not buildings of brick or stone are
here meant. Again, building castles in the air is a familiar term for
indulgence in day dreaming and fanciful speculation, but, whilst all
thought energy is constructive and creates objective form upon the plane
of mind, we may be assured that the sages, who perpetuated Masonic
science were innocent of recommending the practice of anything so futile
and unpractical. The airy structure to which they allude is the formation of a super
physical ethereal body, a "body of mist" as Hesiod and other
Greek classics describe it, in which the adept Mason may consciously
function in the finer planes of life and apart from his gross physical
organism and in which he will continue to live, when the latter has
become permanently discarded. It is spoken of by Origen,
the Christian Father of the second century, as follows, "Another
body, a spiritual and ethereal one, is promised us, a body not subject
to physical touch, nor seen by physical eyes, nor burdened with weight
and which shall be metamorphosed according to the different regions in
which it shall be. In that spiritual body the whole of it will be an
eye, the whole of it an ear, the whole serve as hands, the whole as
feet", implying that all the now distributed faculties will be
unified in that body into one, as was the case with man before the fall
and descent into matter and multiplicity .
Let us justify these observations by some pertinent
references to the subject in the great
text book of Initiation Science, the Volume of the Sacred Law,
though they might be abundantly supplemented from other sources. Like the famous Orphic Hymns of the Pythagorean and Eleusinian Schools
of the Mysteries, the Psalms of our Bible are an anthology of hymns of
the Hebrew Initiates and are full of Masonic allusion and
instructiveness.
In the 48th Psalm, the disciple of spiritual science is directed to take
a walk round the symbolic City of Jerusalem, he was told to mark well
its bulwarks, to observe its palaces and particularly to pay attention
to the great tower of the Temple, which, like a modern cathedral spire,
rose into the air above all other buildings, so that he might not only
himself appreciate the symbolism of what he saw, but might be in a
position to interpret its significance to "them that come
after", that is, to junior students of the science.
He thus received a striking object lesson in the
analogy of material buildings to spiritual ones. In the massive
defensive walls of the city he was to recognise the strength, permanence
and resisting power of the spiritual organism of "holy city"
which he must build for himself in exchange for, but upon the foundation
of, the frail perishable temporal body. In the palaces of the mighty,
with their gorgeous interiors and stores of costly furnishings and
precious objects of art, he was to perceive that his own interior must
become correspondingly beautified and enriched with spiritual treasures.
But in the great heaven pointing tower, to which his attention was specially directed, he was
to see the symbol of a structure as far transcending his present
temporal organism as the Temple spire outranged the adjacent buildings
at its feet. From this he was to deduce the necessity of building and
projecting upwards from his lower organisation, a "tower", a
superior spiritual body, rising into and capable of functioning in the
"air" or more tenuous and ethereal worlds than this physical
one.
This is the "structure in the air" which only "Grand
Architects" are competent to raise,
this is the "superstructure" which our Entered Apprentices are
enjoined to aspire to building.
Let us turn next to the further pertinent information
on the subject given by the Apostle Initiate to his Corinthian pupils.
He instructs them on this subject of superstructures. How is it possible
to rear them? "How are the dead raised up and with what body do
they come?" (He is not speaking of the physically defunct, but of
that condition of atrophied spiritual consciousness characterising the
normal animal man, which is always described as a state of
"death" in the biblical and other writings on the subject) .
He proceeds to explain that the physical body itself cannot be raised,
since corruption cannot inherit incorruption, but that nevertheless
there can be a "resurrection from the dead" through a
sublimation of its vital essences, which can be reorganised and
reconstituted into a new body of subtle matter on a supra physical level
. First comes the natural body we all wear to begin with, but out of it
can be evolved a psychical body. The former is an entirely earthy
vesture exhibiting an illusory unreal self to the world, the latter is
the body of our true spiritual self or "lord from heaven",
which hitherto has remained masked and buried within that temporal
vesture, "sown" in it as a seed, but capable of bursting its
sheath and being raised from its former impotence to "power"
(activity and conscious function). He properly speaks of it as one of
the secrets and mysteries of Initiation and his familiar words may thus
be paraphrased, "I am expounding to you a mystery, one of the arcana of Initiation.”. We are not designed to remain always asleep in
this drugged, deadened state of consciousness in which we are plunged,
where we suffer the illusion, that we are really alive, but are not. In
the course of our evolution the due time comes for each of us to awake
out of that sleep and to become changed, transmuted, for our
consciousness to be transposed to a higher level. We have borne the
earthly human image, we have now to exchange it for an ethereal one of
finer texture and purer quality. The change, the transposition of
consciousness from the old to the new centre, comes suddenly (though it
may take long to prepare and purify ourselves for its coming). When it
occurs it comes with an inwardly heard crash, like a trumpet blast, as
the nervous system and brain structures react to the stress upon them
involved in the transition.(It
must be explained that the "trumpet" and "last
trumpet" are technical terms among Initiates for the spiral,
trumpet shaped, whorls or vortices occurring in subtle matter under
stresses, audible to those in whom the change occurs. The reference to
the "sound of the last trumpet" stands for a physiological
experience as the last fine physical strands of the old nature are, as
it were, snapped and the nervous system reelectrified. In the East this
experience is called the "end of the world," since for the
Initiate it means the termination of his old worldly consciousness and
its replacement by one of a much more vivid and intense quality)
The Apostle further explains that for this newly
evolved Ego or conscious centre there is an appropriate body, for there
are celestial as well as terrestrial bodies. There cannot be
consciousness apart from a formal vehicle for it and as the old earthy
body has served (and will so continue to serve) for ordinary mundane
purposes, so will the newly evolved consciousness possess its own
separate appropriate psychic or spiritual body for function upon
supraphysical levels. The Initiate of this high degree, therefore, will
possess a twofold organisation, his ordinary physical one (the
"companion of his former toils") and his supra physical one
and will be able to utilise and function in each. He will have built his
"tower" his "superstructure in the air".
The superstructure must be perfect in all its
structure parts and so be honourable to the builder. What are its parts?
Man, even in his natural, unregenerate, imperfectly evolved state, is a
highly composite creature. Blended with his purely physical frame are
three other supra physical, but quasi physical, bodies, his etheric body
(the "double"), his emotional or desire body and his mental
organisation or body, whilst over and beyond these and not necessarily,
in functional alignment with them, exists his ultimate spiritual self,
which distinguishes him from the subhuman creatures. These are his
"parts" and they are but too often extremely ill organised,
uncoordinated and unbalanced. If they be imperfectly organised in the
lower natural man, how can they be expected to be able to contribute
requisite sublimations of themselves for the upbuilding of a body upon a
higher level? All bodily and mental disease and infirmity originates in
disorder in these inner bodies, which disorder thereupon becomes
reflected forwards and manifested in the physical husk. Unless the inner
natures be disciplined and organised before the gross mortal vesture is
shed at physical death, how can one enter the ethereal kingdoms
otherwise than "maimed," without a "wedding
garment," and in a distorted shape, not perfect in all its parts
and anything but honourable to the builder?
But, as we have long since seen, the first
duty of every spiritual Craftsman is the purification and discipline of
these bodies and the elimination from himself of all base metals therein
of which he has himself been an artificer. Only
in proportion to the achievement of this arduous task can he hope to
bring these "parts" into order, into subjection to his will
and into coordinated function and alignment and so in the fullest sense
stand erect, a just and upright man and Mason. He need not trouble to know how his
superstructure will develop or to what extent or measure of perfection
he may have built it. For it will become automatically built in his
heights proportionately as he schools himself in his depths and tests
his work by the continual application to it of the cross (which is the
square, level and plumb rule in combination).
When the time comes for
his consciousness to be raised to that superior level and he
hears the call "Friend, come up higher!" he will find the
superstructure he has been building in the darkness below, perfect in
all its parts and honourable to himself. He will have climbed a section of the life
ladder, he will himself have built, dedicated and
consecrated King Solomon's Temple and through the result of his own
labour upon himself, that resplendent
body will appear to him more like the work of the Great Architect
of the Universe than that of human hands.
There
are, however, farther sections of the infinite ladder to be climbed,
even when this high level has been won. From thence there remains still
further building to be done, a body to be fabricated manifesting still
loftier wisdom, strength and beauty. For was not the first symbolic
Temple to be destroyed and become replaced by a second, of which it is
written that "the glory of the former house is not to be compared
with that of the latter?"
But
this still loftier work need not now be treated of. Let it suffice if
what has already been said assists any reader to the building of his
first super structural Temple.
5. The Cable Tow
These expositions are being offered in their present
order with a purpose. That purpose is to outline, as nearly and
systematically as may be, the due sequence and progressive stages of the
work of spiritual Craftsmanship or
self building. We have traced that work from its inception in the
heart's desire to pass from darkness to light and attain a higher order
of life and mode of being, through its stages of the outer and inward
purification essential to that attainment and through the crisis of a
deeper gloom, a voluntary abnegation of and dying to all the attributes
that go to constitute the natural personality, until the aspirant who
endures all these to the end is finally rewarded by receiving his
"crown of life", as the biblical metaphor very fittingly terms
that exalted order of conscious being which marks the fulfilment of
human spiritual evolution. And we have shown how, in winning that high
degree of consciousness, he has simultaneously built for himself out of
the sublimations of his original nature a new super structural body
appropriate to it and in which it can function. In the abounding wealth
of the symbols and veiled verbal references in our rituals and
instruction lectures to the details of this truly scientific work, there
remain, however, many others needing explanation, some of which can now
be considered more advantageously than at our earlier stage and with
better chance of being understood.
One of these is the cable tow. In my previous book it
was explained that its use in the E .A. Degree taught the beginner the
useful lesson that he who has once felt within him the impulses of the
central Light and been moved to seek it should never recede from his
quest and indeed, cannot do so without doing violence to the highest
within him, a violence equivalent to moral suicide. At the same time, he
is also enjoined not to be unduly precipitate, not ignorantly and rashly
to rush forward in an unprepared inward state to grasp the secrets of
his own being, in which case peril of another kind threatens him; but to
proceed humbly, meekly, cautiously and under instructed guidance. The
ancient maxim "Know thyself," was coupled with another, Ne
quid nimis, "Nothing in excess", for the science can only be
learned and applied gradually. It will unfold itself more and more as it is
diligently studied and pursued.
The foregoing explanation of the cable tow is but a
very partial one and inculcates a salutary, but purely moral, piece of
advice. The deeper significance is a
psycho-physiological one and has to do with the mysteries of the human
organism. It should not be overlooked that the cable tow is
given prominence only in the First Degree. It
is again mentioned in the obligation in the Third Degree, whilst it
appears under another guise in that working tool of the Master Mason,
which acts upon a centre-pin. And finally it reappears in the Royal Arch
Degree as a cord or life line. It is requisite to understand what is
involved in something to which such recurring prominence is given.
Let us first recall what has been already stated
about the human organism being a composite structure of several natures
or bodies (physical, etheric, emotional, and mental), fixated in a unity
or synthesis, each of such bodies being constituted of gross or subtle
matter, of differing density and vibratory rate and the whole
coordinated by the central divine Principle (which may or may not yet
have come forward into the formal conscious mind, although there are few
in whose awareness it is not lurkingly present and more or less active
as "conscience.".)
Thus the human constitution may be likened to a
number of glass tumblers placed one within the other and with, say, a
night light (representing the central Principle) inserted in the inmost
one . The glass of the tumblers may be imagined as of progressive
thickness and coarseness, from within outwards and some of them as
coloured, dirty, or not closely fitting in with the others. The
coarser, dirtier, and more opaque the glasses, the less able will be the
central light to shine through them, a single glass may be so opaque as
to prevent the passage of the light through all the rest. Here, then, is
an object lesson in the need for the inward purification of our various
constituent sheaths and for becoming "perfect in all our
parts."
As William Blake said very truly, "If the gates of human perception
were thoroughly cleansed, we should perceive everything as it is
infinite, but man has closed himself up till he sees all things only
through the narrow chinks of his own cavern".
Another illustration. Human compositeness may be
compared with the concentric skins or sheaths of a vegetable bulb (an
onion, or hyacinth). Here the sheaths are all equally pure and
coordinated and because the bulb is perfect in all its parts or sheaths
and when planted, fulfils the whole law of its nature, its life force
bursts its natural bonds, throws up a self built superstructure into the
air and there effloresces into the bloom, which is its "crown of
life" or fullness of development. Man should do this and as we have
shown, this is what .the Mason is taught to do. But man having, what the
bulb has not, freedom of will to fulfil or to violate .the law of his
nature, has chosen the latter course and consequently by indulgence in
perverse desire and wrongly directed thought, has fouled and
disorganised his sheaths. Hence his spiritual darkness and his liability
to all forms of disease. The central Principle cannot shine through his
opacity, lighting up his mind and governing his desires and actions. It
remains imprisoned within him. He sees, thinks and knows only from his
self darkened outer sheaths and is misguided accordingly.
For a final example, let us turn to the instructive
familiar episode in the Gospels of the storm overtaking a boat
containing a number of men, of whom the Chief was "asleep in the
hinder part of the boat." The boat typifies the human organism, its
occupants, its various parts and faculties, including the as yet
unawakened Master Principle resident in its depths or "hinder
part". An emotional upheaval occurs, the rough waves of passion
threaten to wreck the whole party. A brain storm arises, intemperate
gusts of fright, wrong headedness and mental uncontrol, make the
position still worse. The extremity is sufficiently acute to awaken the
Master Principle into activity whose beneficent power is able instantly
to still those unruly winds and waves, which suddenly are reduced to a
great peace.
Every Master Mason, who is a real and not merely a
titular one, is able to perform this "miracle" in himself,
perhaps in others also. There is nothing super natural about it to him.
It is possible to him, because he "has the Mason Word and second
sight”, he both understands the composite structure of the human
organism, can visually discern the disordered part or parts and can
apply healing, harmonising, vibratory power from his own corresponding
part to the seat of mischief, saying to this disordered mental part or
that unruly emotional sheath, "Peace, be still !" Every
Master-Mason is therefore also a Master Physician, able to benefit
patients in a medical sense and also to visualise the inner condition of
those, who look to him for instruction and initiation in a Masonic
sense, to advise upon their interior needs and moral ailments and help
them to purify and align their disordered natures. But this is not
possible save to one who himself has become pure and rectified in all
his parts, the physician must first heal himself before he can
communicate either physical or moral health to others.
This
promise about the compositeness of the human structure and the existence
in us of a series of independent, yet coordinated "parts" or
sheaths, has been necessary before we can speak directly of the cable
tow. What is it that connects these parts? And are these parts
dissociable from one another?
We
know that they are normally in close association and to this association
applies the enjoinder that what God hath joined, man shall not put
asunder. What the age long process of evolution has built up with
infinite patience and care is not to be tampered with for improper
purposes, or even by well meaning but, as yet, unenlightened experiment
in the supposed interests of science, a point upon which the old Masters
and teachers of our science are specially insistent, for reasons which
now need not be entered upon.
Nevertheless, a measure of dissociation does occur
naturally in even the most healthy and well organised
people (and of cases of abnormal psychic looseness of
constitution we need not speak). It occurs in sleep, when the
consciousness may be vividly active, whether in an orderly or disorderly
manner, people "travel" in their sleep. It occurs at times of
illness or violent shock. It may be induced by alcohol or drugs, the
"anesthetic revelation" is a well recognised phenomenon. Under
any of these conditions there may be a complete ecstasis, or conscious
standing out or away of the Ego from the physical body. Apparitions and
even action at a distance are well accredited facts. Such phenomena are
explicable only upon the suppositions of the existence of a subtler
vehicle than the gross body, of the fact that consciousness becomes
temporarily transferred from the latter to the former and that the two
are capable of conjoint function in complete independence of the
physical brain and body.
What preserves the connection between the two
"parts" thus disjoined and makes possible their subsequent
recoalescence, is the "cable tow". It is a connective thread
of matter of extreme tenuousness and elasticity issuing from the
physical abdominal region and maintaining the same kind of connection
with the extended subtle body as the string with which a boy flies a
kite. As the boy can pull in the kite by the string, so does the
extruded subtle body become drawn back to its physical base. Were the
kite string severed during the kite's flight, the kite would collapse or
be blown away. Similarly, were the human "cable tow"
permanently severed, death would ensue and each of the severed parts go
to its own place.
Biblically this human "cable tow" is called
the "silver cord" in the well known passage, "or ever the silver cord is loosed and the golden bowl is broken,
then shall the body return to the earth and the spirit to God who gave
it". "Silver" is the technical esoteric term for
psychical substance, as gold is for spiritual and iron or brass for
physical.
Its physiological correspondence is the umbilical cord connecting the
child with its mother. Its analogue in ecclesiastical vestments is
the girdle worn by the high priests of the Hebrew and by the priests and
monastics of the Christian Church.
Everyone unconsciously possesses the cable tow and it
comes into use during sleep, when a less or greater measure of
involuntary dissociation of our parts occurs. A
Master, however, is one who has outgrown the incapacities to which the
undeveloped average man is subject. Unlike the latter, he is in full
knowledge and control of all his parts, whether his physical body be
awake or wrapped in sleep, he maintains unbroken consciousness.
He is able at will to shut off consciousness of temporal affairs and
apply it to supra physical ones. He can thus function at a distance from his
physical body, whether upon the mundane or upon, higher planes of the
cosmic ladder. His cable tow, of infinite expansiveness, unwinds from
his centre pin and stretching like the kite string, enables him to
travel where he will in his subtle body and to rejoin and reanimate his
physical one at will. Hence it is that the Master Mason is pledged to
answer and obey all signs and summonses from any Master Mason's lodge if
within the reach of his cable tow and such assemblies, it should be
remembered, are contemplated therefore as taking place not at any
physical location, but upon an ethereal plane.
For corroboration of what is possible in this respect to a Master, one
should reflect upon the instances of bilocation, passing through closed
walls and manifesting at a distance, recorded of the Great Exemplar in
the Gospels. These are representative of what is feasible to anyone
attaining Mastership.
The
cable tow, therefore, is given prominence to the reflective Craftsman as
a help towards understanding his own constitution and to foreshadow to
him work that lies before him, when is he fitted to undertake it, work
which now may seem to him impossible and incredible. For as the skirret
(which is the cable-tow in another form) is intended for the skilful
architect to draw forth a line to mark out the ground for the intended
structure, so the competent builder of the spiritual body will unwind
his own "silver cord", when he learns how to function
consciously on the ascending ladder of supraphysical planes and to
perceive the nature of the superstructure, he himself intends to
construct.
Further importance attaches to the significance of
the cable tow from the fact testified to at the admission to our Order
of every new candidate for ceremonial initiation. For
all real Initiation involves the use of the actual "silver
cord" or life line, since such Initiation always occurs, when the
physical body is in a state of trance or sleep and when the temporarily
liberated consciousness has been transferred to a higher level. It
subsequently is brought back to the physical organism, the cerebral and
nerve centres of which become illumined, revitalised and raised to a
higher pitch of faculty than was previously possible. The perspicacious
Royal Arch Mason will not fail to perceive, how this truth is
dramatically exemplified in that Degree.
This subject might be considerably extended, for
whilst in a ceremonial system like the Masonic, only one initiation is
portrayed (or, rather where initiation only occurs once), yet in the
actual experience of soul architecture Initiation succeeds Initiation
upon increasingly higher levels of the ladder as the individual becomes
correspondingly ripe for them, able to bear their strain and to
assimilate their revelations. What the Craft teaching and
symbols inculcate is a principle common to every degree of real
Initiation that one may prove worthy to attain. For each upward step the
candidate for the heights must be prepared as he is in the E.A.Degree at
each there will be the same peril in turning back and at each the same
menace directed against rashly rushing forward.
6.The Apron
So
much was said in my former volume, The Meaning of Masonry,
in explanation of the Masonic Apron, that it seems needless to speak at
length of it again. Yet, to maintain continuity of thought, it seems
desirable once more to refer to its symbolism at this point, since we
have been closely considering the manner in which consciousness becomes
expanded and enveloped in bodies or vehicles appropriate to that
expansion and we have been dealing with the Arcanum or
"mystery" propounded by St. Paul as to how the
"dead", the as yet uninitiated and spiritually unquickened,
are raised up to a new order of life and the new kind of embodiment they
take on, or automatically fabricate, in the process.
Consciousness cannot exist without body.
"To every seed (or conscious unit) its own body", says the
Apostle Initiate or, as we Masons may paraphrase it, to every Degree of
life is allotted the appropriate Apron, proclaiming the wearer's
spiritual rank. As no one can enter the Lodge unclothed with the Apron,
so no one can enter any of the unseen worlds without wearing a body
appropriate. There are bodies terrestrial, adapted to the use on the
lower planes of life and bodies celestial or ethereal, adapted to
functioning on higher ones. Man is a composite of many bodies, one
within the other, though ordinarily he is unaware of it and has not yet
organised them and come to know them separately, as the Initiate is
expected to do.
The
physical body is but one and the grossest, of the terrestrial bodies. It
is but a plaster of organised chemical particles, within and around
which his subtler bodies exist and for which it forms a nexus or
fixation point. When totally discarded at death it disintegrates, when
partially abandoned in sleep or anaesthesia its energies persist
passively and connection with it is kept by the cable tow or
"silver cord". In each case the Ego, whether aware of it or
not, stands minus its physical sheath and enclosed in its remaining
ones. And a similar divesting of each successive body may take place
until only the ultimate Ego remains.
That
Ego, the ultimate Divine Principle in man, is represented by the
triangular flap of the Masonic Apron. The triangle (or pyramid form) is
the geometrical symbol for Spirit or Fire and the ultimate Spirit of man
may be likened to a pointed flame or tongue of fire. (The word
"pyramid" derives from the Greek word pur, fire).
The body or form (or rather the succession of
bodies or forms), which that Ego assumes
on descending into manifestation through the ladder like planes of the
Universe, aggregating to itself and organising around itself material
from each, is represented by the lower quadrangular part of the Apron. The
quadrangle, square, or superfice, is the geometrical symbol for Body,
Form, Physicalisation. The quadrangle is further appropriate because (i)
all Body is constituted of four elements, earth, water, air, fire (2)
because the human organism is fourfold, a complex of four distinct
departments, physical, etheric, emotional and mental, and (3) because in
man the three sub human kingdoms (mineral, vegetable and animal) are
unified into the human synthesis.
The
candidate's first investiture with the Apron is symbolic therefore of
his Ego's entrance into this world and becoming clothed with form or
body. He is meant to realise himself as a sevenfold being, perfectly
constituted originally in the Divine Mirid, his triangle of Spirit
combining with the quadrangle of materialised form to make up the
perfect number seven. He is meant to realise that he has descended to a
condition of embodiment and limitation of consciousness for the purpose
of acquiring experience in those conditions and of performing certain
work upon himself which shall raise him to full realisation of his own
ultimate nature and of the Divine purpose in him and that though his
present state or form is one of restrictedness and humiliation, it will
never disgrace him, if he never disgraces it
In the First Degree, the triangular flap of
the Apron is kept erect. In the Second it is lowered. Thereby is denoted
the physiological truth that the Ego or human Spirit on entering this
world at birth does not immediately attain full embodiment, but at first
is, as it were, an over hovering presence, organically connected with
the body, but only The gradually taking possession of it.
We recognise this Apron truth in practical life. Moral and legal
responsibility is never attributed to a child under seven years of age, for the moral sense has not yet
developed. Important physiological changes connected with
puberty occur at the age of fourteen. Civic
responsibility is denied until twentyone is reached. The basic reason
for all this is the occult truth that the Ego does not attain its
maximum of incarnation until twentyone. Accordingly it is not until age
is reached that a man is presumed competent to enter the Craft and
undertake the science of himself.
As the Ego immerses itself in its body and works upon
it, it creates changes in it, whether for good or evil. It either
organises or disorganises its vehicles according to its will and
desires. It becomes an artificer in metals, whether base or precious, it
either stores itself with ornaments and jewels and the invaluable
furniture of self knowledge, or with useless trumperies and grotesque
contrivances of which sooner or later it must get rid. Assuming its
activities to have been wisely directed, they are evidenced in the Apron
by the blue rosettes imposed upon it in the Second Degree, if they are
persisted in and the Spirit more and more subjugates and controls the
Form, that increasing domination and the further progress made in the
science are testified to by the additional elaborations found in the
Apron in the Third Degree. Still more advanced progress is evidenced by
further changes and beautification of the Apron in the Royal Arch
Degrees, and in the Grand Lodges of provinces, and of the nation.
The
Tau displayed upon the Apron worn by those of Master rank is a form of
the Cross and also of the Hammer of Thor, of Scandinavian religion. It
is displayed triply, to signify that the wearer has brought his three
lower natures (physical, emotional, and mental) under complete control,
that he has crucified them and keeps them repressed by the hammer of a
strong will.
The
further important point should be noticed that the Apron covers the
creative, generative organ of the body and it is especially to these
that the significance of the Tau attaches. Spiritual self
building and the
erection of the "superstructure" are dependent upon the supply
of creative energy available from the generative nervous centre, the
"power-house" of the human organism. Thence that energy passes
upwards through other ganglionic "transformers" and reaching
the brain, becomes finally sublimated and transformed to consciousness.
Conservation of that energy is therefore indispensable both for
generating consciousness and providing the material for the finer
vehicle or "superstructure" in which that consciousness may
function, the life-energy is always creative, either in the direction of
physical propagation or in that of super physical up building. Hence the
importance attached in religious spheres to celibacy.
It
should also be noted that in the three Craft Degrees, the investiture
with the Apron is made in the West and not by the Master, but by his
principal officer, who is deputed to bestow it. The meaning behind this
important detail is that while the human Ego is resident in this
temporal world ("the West"), Nature, as the chief officer and
deputy of Providence, supplies it with bodies of her own material and
temporal substance. But in all cases beyond those three, the investiture
takes place in the "East" the realm of spirit and from the
hands of the Master himself. For the progressed soul receives a clothing
beyond Nature's power to supply and without intermediate hands,
"God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him" and to every such
soul its own body, according to its measure of progress and
consciousness.
7.
The Wind
The
Instruction Lectures of the First Degree (unfortunately not used in some
Lodges) contain a curious reference to the blowing of the wind, which
must puzzle a good many minds. What has the wind to do with Masonic work and
why should it be particularly favourable to that work when blowing from
East to West or vice versa?
Again
we must look below the letter of the reference. The subject has not been
introduced without purpose and instructiveness, to discern which will
once more reveal the wisdom of the compilers and the crypticism with
which they purposely shielded it when preparing our system for more or
less promiscuous use.
The
wind referred to is not the atmospheric breeze. It is that Wind (Pneuma)
which "bloweth where it listeth", the Wind of the Spirit, the
currents of Divine Energy.
The
"East" and the "West" are not our ordinary
geographical directions of space. In Initiate and Biblical language, as
in the quarters of the Lodge, the East is the realm of Spirit and Light,
the West that of Matter and Darkness, the place of the disappearing sun.
Man partakes of both, he is polarised east west, as Spirit Matter in
one.
When,
mystically, the wind blows east west, a current of Divine Energy has set
in towards the west, stimulating, vitalising and enlightening it. When
it blows west east, man has himself directed a current of aspiration
from his own spirit eastwards to God.
The
wind is therefore said to be specially favourable to Masonic work when
blowing from either of those points of the mystical compass. When the
Mason sends up his aspirations to the heights, as he should perpetually
be doing, he is as a dynamo generating and transmitting an electric
current upwards, that is, eastwards. When the Divine Fire descends upon
himself, a similar current has set in westwards. It is written elsewhere
and in the same sense, "As the lightning shineth from the east unto
the west, so is the coming of the Son of Man" into the personal
consciousness.
Prayer, upward aspiration in the above sense, is a
practical scientific necessity for the work of the spiritual Craftsman.
He himself is but as the leaden weight swinging at the lower end of the
string of the plumb rule. The string itself is as the connecting wire
between that weight and the top of the plumb rule, a wire through which
a current may pass up or down. Until that instrument is held erect and
the leaden weight brought to stillness and steadiness, it is ineffective
for any form of work . So
long as man is spiritually unaligned and out of plumb with his The
spiritual pole, directness of current between them Wind is impossible.
When that current is established the lead of darkness and ignorance may
become transmuted into the gold of conscious light and wisdom by the
alchemy of the Spirit.
Real Initiates have always known there to be
both special times and seasons and special localities favourable to
inducing the flow of currents of Divine Energy, but of these the modern
Mason has not yet come to learn, though there are references to
them in his system.
The two solstices and equinoxes are such times and others are known in
the greater Churches whose calendar of feasts and fasts have been based
upon this principle. The Festivals of the two
Masonic patron saints, St. John Baptist at midsummer and St. John the
Divine at midwinter, have special bearing upon favourable times for
spiritual Craftsmanship, but the former is now ignored, and the latter
profaned.
The matter may be left to the reflection of Brethren. When the Craft
comes better to realise its purpose and science, these times and seasons
will be taken advantage of for the furtherance of both individual and
collective Masonic work.
The teaching in the Instruction Lecture upon
the wind is supplemented by a reference to the escape of the Israelites
from Egyptian bondage under their Master Moses, who caused a mighty east
wind to blow, dividing the waters of the Red Sea to permit of their safe
passage, which waters then rolled back and overwhelmed Pharaoh and his
pursuing army.
Again, the bearing of this episode is lost upon the average Brother, who
for want of a key fails to see its relevance to any form of Masonry. And indeed, it carries us into much deeper water than the average mind
bathes in, although to those versed in Initiation science, the striking
biblical incident masks and prefigures an equally momentous one in the
individual life of everyone, who seeks to fulfil his own spiritual
evolution.
The allusion is to the important crisis, which
occurs when the personal soul of the aspirant ardently aspires for
complete liberation from the tyranny of the flesh.
It is then possible, in proper cases
and this was part of the office of the old Mysteries for one, who is a
real Master, so to act upon and separate his disciple's interior organic structures
as to effect a permanent liberation of the latter's consciousness from
sensual bondage. The
"waters" that are then "divided" are what have
previously been explained as those of the fluidic subtle body of desire
and emotion, which normally constitute an untraversable barrier between
the highest and the lowest elements in our nature.
"Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of
death?" exclaimed one who afterwards attained delivery. For the
"body of death" is made up of all those lower natures in us
which inhibit consciousness in the spirit and as we have elsewhere
stated, it is dissociable by a competent adept Master, who holds the
keys of life and death (i.e., consciousness and unconsciousness in the
spirit). The higher nature of
the disciple is then liberated from the bondage of the lower, his waters
are divided, he passes through them into permanent safety from the
Pharaoh like tyranny of his material vesture, the still pursuing
tendencies Seeking of which are checked, overwhelmed and shut off, when
the temporarily held up waters are permitted Master to roll back to
their former channel, to the extreme joy of the now liberated disciple.
This is an incident of real Initiation and it is
achievable only under the guidance of the equivalent of a Moses, a real
Master. To those unversed in the deeper aspects of Initiation science,
what cannot here be more than briefly explained may appear incredible,
as would much more that lies concealed beneath the symbols and the text
of the Masonic system. But those responsible for compiling or inspiring
that system were clearly deeply versed in much that they permitted
themselves to do no more than hint at and it remains for reflective
Masons to penetrate their disguises by their own research, intuition and
perspicacity.
8.
Seeking A Master
The
junior Brother learns that, as a Mason, his duty is to seek a Master and
from him gain instruction and usually supposes that by making
acquaintance with the W .M. of his Lodge, and learning by rote the
rituals and lectures, he is fulfilling that duty. If he desires nothing
more than ceremonial Masonry, he is doubtless doing all that need be
expected of him. But if he be in earnest quest of that to which
ceremonial Masonry is but an entrance portal, he May be interested in
the following considerations.
It is axiomatic in the traditional secret wisdom that
real Initiation is not to be looked for save at the hands of one, who
has himself experienced it. And it is equally axiomatic
that "when the disciple is ready, the Master will be found
waiting". The modern Masonic student will be well advised to
accept both these axioms as being as valid today as they have ever been
in the past.
A Master is not easily found. But neither is he often
properly sought. "Ask, seek, knock," are simple words to say
with the tongue. Their putting into effective operation is a task
involving persistent and concentrated will. Under no circumstances does
a Master ever proclaim himself as such, he must be sought, must be
clearly recognised and wholeheartedly accepted as one and you may have
grave doubts of his status and your own judgment about him before
according him that confidence. You might live in close contact with a
Master for years without suspecting the fact. Recognition being due to
spiritual rapport, to vibratory harmony and to intuitional certainty
until you possess these a Master's physical personality will convey no
more to you than any other man's. But of one thing be assured the Master
will know you through and
through long before you recognise him, or perhaps even realise that you
are seeking him.
Exoterically, in the Operative Mason's trade, the
youth proposing to enter a Building Guild had first to find a Master
Mason, who would accept him as his apprentice and to whom he became
bound for seven years, the Master making himself responsible for his
maintenance and training. In spiritual Craftsmanship precisely the same
method applies. The Master has first to be sought and found and if the
disciple be accepted, he must be served and implicitly obeyed for a
similar probationary period, the Master assuming a real (not a nominal)
spiritual sponsorship for the pupil. The association not being for any
temporal advantage but for purely selfless spiritual advancement, the
intimacy is of the closest, as the responsibility is of the gravest,
character. For the apprentice is to become spiritually integrated with
the Master. To use the beautiful
touching simile of the greatest of Masters, as a hen gathers her
chickens under her wing, so is the pupil to become gathered and built
into the very being of his teacher. The real Initiation (or rather
sequence of Initiations) the pupil hopes in due course to attain cannot
be achieved until this intimate relationship exists.
In the days of the Ancient Mysteries, Masters were to
be found resident in the seclusion of the Temples, for Initiation
science was then an organised institution, publicly recognised. In the
Orient, no such formal organisation has obtained, but the practice, both
in the past and to-day, is for the aspirant to seek and find his
appropriate Master, the onus of searching being upon the former, and
serving as a test of his earnestness and perspicuity. The Master is there
termed a Guru (defined as "one who removes the veil of darkness
from the spiritual eyes of the pupil") and the accepted pupil a
Chela or spiritual child, in the same sense that St. John addresses his
pupils as "little children". The ancient Sanskrit word Guru
passed from India to Asia Minor and Greece and reappears in the latter
part of the name of such ancient Initiates as Protagoras, Anaxagoras,
Pythagoras. The last mentioned of these literally means the Pitta (or
Pater) Guru, the Master or Father Teacher, as in fact he was in his day
and the continuity of both the science and of the title Guru is further
evidenced by the fact that, that title is preserved both in Hebrew and
in Masonry in the name of Hiram Abiff (spelt also in the Scriptures as
Huram and Churam Abiff. Hiram Abiff
has precisely the same meaning as Pythagoras, the Father-Teacher,
or alternatively the Teacher from the Father. The Egyptian form of the
name Hiram is Hermes, the teacher of the secret or "hermetic"
science and wisdom and the student is strongly urged to study those two
important ancient treatises of Initiation-science, the Divine Pymander
of Hermes and "The Shepherd of Hermas."
("Shepherd" is the ancient and biblical
word signifying "Initiator" or "Hierophant" Hence,
"the Good Shepherd," "the Great Shepherd of the
sheep," "The Lord is my Shepherd " The "Shepherds
watching their flocks" at the time of the Nativity were not rustics
or farmers, but
spiritual adepts in charge of groups of initiate pupils.)
A Master, while rejoiced to find a suitable
pupil, does not accept him without subjecting him to severe preliminary
tests. He "knows what is in man." No hypocrisy deceives him. He
discerns the thoughts and desires of the heart of the intending
candidate and sees whether the latter is properly prepared there and
really anxious and ready for the work involved. Of this, an example
came to my knowledge, which it may be useful to record and to
remember in connection with the acceptance of Masonic candidates. It was as follows. "A young man in India sought out a venerable Master
there and asked to be accepted as a pupil and trained for initiation. He
professed to want to find the Light, to know God at first hand. The old
sage, after a searching glance into the aspirant's inward condition,
discerned that the latter, while not insincere, was still a long way
from readiness and far from being sufficiently detached in desire for
worldly possessions and sensual enjoyments and, explaining this, he
firmly but kindly sent him away to exhaust or merge himself of these
attractions, but with the suggestion that he might present himself again
in two years' time. After two years, the young man returned, found the
old Master bathing in the river at the foot of his garden and from the
river-bank renewed his application. Again the old man read his visitor's
heart to its depths and perceived how divided it still was between the
claims of the outer and the inner life, but, calling him down into the
river, he laid his hand upon the young one's head and gently pressed and
held it below the surface of the water. Presently the young man forced
it above the surface. "Why did you do that ?" he was asked.
"I was obliged to do so to find breath". Then came the
Master's answer, "When you want God and the inward light as badly
as you just now wanted breath, you may come back to me and you shall
have your desire. But for the present you want other things as much and
you can't have both". Like the other young man in the Gospels, the
applicant went away sorrowful, but he had found his eventual Master and
gained from him the instruction suitable to him at the moment"
How, where, is one to seek one's Master, if he be so
secluded, so hard to find? He may be sought both without and within
oneself. He should first be sought in every event of the daily life, in
the person of everyone you meet. Finding him depends on the intensity of
your search "Seek and ye shall find" is not a vain promise.
Look not to meet immediately with some learned or impressive personality
capable of giving you all truth in tabloid form in a few hours. Final
truth cannot be communicated at all from one person to another orally.
It exists already within yourself and needs only to be dug out and
liberated. Socrates, himself a Master, though the son of a poor midwife
used to joke, that he had inherited something of his mother's profession
in that his task was to help others to bring truth to birth out of
themselves and in the same sense the mediaeval teachers speak of using
"the obstetric hand" in eliciting truth from their pupils
rather than of instilling it into them . For the pupil has first to
learn to clear away his own falsities and unrealities, so that what is
already central in himself may no longer be obscured, but shine out, in
its own self conscious Light.
When the time is ripe and the pupil in a deep sense
ready, he may come to meet a Master literally and in personal wise. But
a Master, being one who has evolved in his spirit, is no longer to be
thought of as a separate independent person, although displaying a
separate personality and presence to the world. He is integrated with
others of the same rank, he is part of a group, all the members of which
are conscious on the plane of Spirit. And Spirit is universal, not
fettered by place, time, or space. What the group perceives, each of its
parts sees and vice versa. Remember the All-seeing Eye, the universal
Watchman, that perceives you and knows the quality of your spirit,
though you yourself know nothing of it.
Until, then, a Master is met with personally, the
search should persist in confidence, that he will be found. Responses,
justifying your confidence and demonstrating that the Eye is watching
you, will come in unsuspected ways to the earnest seeker, perhaps from a
chance passage in an apparently quite irrelevant book you may be led to
pick up, perhaps from a casual meeting with a stranger, an offhand
remark, the conversation of a friend, who speaks more wisely and
pointedly to you than he himself realises. Through such and other ways
may the veiled Master look or speak to you and proportionately to the
ardour of your search will you find evidences of his presence and
watchfulness. A saintly woman, a great British poetess, so keenly sought
a Master in the details of daily life that she would pick up torn scraps
of paper in the street on the chance that they might reveal his name or
yield some evidence of him. Another seeker travelled across the world in
blind faith that somewhere the unknown Master would be found. One day in
the street of a foreign city the recognition came suddenly, before a
stranger in the crowd the seeker stopped, saying "Master, teach
me!" and the search was ended.
"The Master" to be sought, then, is a
comprehensive term, abstract and mystical, if you will, but standing for
a reality embracing many personal Masters integrated in it. In seeking a
personal Master, one seeks also the group of which he is a member. In
seeking the impersonal Master one may be brought into personal contact
with one of that group. Life in the realm of Spirit is a unity, not a
diversity and for Masonic seekers the wide world over, of whatever
nation or creed, there is but one Grand Master and Hierophant, but He
can manifest and deputise through divers channels. As in the Craft Lodge
there is but one Master, yet many of equal rank capable of representing
him and doing his work, so has the world's Grand Master in the heights,
His associates and deputies here in its dark depths.
So far we have spoken only of seeking exteriorly, for
an outward personal Master. But the search can and should also be made
interiorly, within oneself, for what is sought subjectively and
spiritually can then more readily come to be realised and found
objectively. The great Indian manual of Initiation (the Bhagavad-Gita)
therefore teaches:
There
lives a Master in the hearts of men
Who makes their deeds, by subtle-pulling strings.
Dance
to what time He will . With all thy soul
Trust Him, and take Him for thy succour .
So shalt thou gain,
By grace of Him, the uttermost repose,
The Eternal Peace.
Seek therefore to realise the Master in the heart.
Conceive him imaginatively. Build up in your constant thought a mental
image of him, invested with the nature and qualities of that master soul
to whom you look to raise you from your present deadness, to remove the
stone from your sepulchre, and to utter to your inmost self that vibrant
word of liberating power, "Lazarus, come forth!" For until you have in yourself something in common with
him, points of fellowship with him, be it but a bare desire for
resemblance, how shall you expect to be raised into fullness of identic
relationship with him, to be "gathered as a chicken under his
wing?"
Our Science in its universality
limits our conception of the Master to no one exemplar. Take, it says,
the nearest and most familiar to you, the one under whose aegis you were
racially born and who therefore may serve you best, for each is able to
bring you to the centre, though each may have his separate method. To
the Jewish Brother it says, take the Father of the faithful and realise
what being gathered to his bosom means. To the Christian Brother, it
points to Him upon whose breast lay
the beloved disciple and urges him to reflect upon what that
implies. To the Hindu Brother it points to Krishna, who came and rode in
the same chariot with Arjuna and bids him look to a similar intimate
union . To the Buddhist it points to the Maitreya of universal
compassion and bids him reflect upon him till he become drawn beneath
his bo-tree and to the Moslem it points to his Prophet and the
significance of being clothed with the latter's mantle .
Let the earnest Craftsman, then, seek a Master where
and how he will. He cannot experto crede fail to find. Failure to find
will be due to his having failed, rightly and from his heart, to seek .
9. Wages
Initiates of the secret science in the past,
"our ancient Brethren", are said to have been paid wages. The
wages, we are told, were paid in the porchway of the Temple
and much or little, they were accepted without demur, because of
the recipients' complete confidence in their employers and the
recognition, that only so much would be received as their work was
actually worth. The Masonic tradition asserts that the wages were not
paid in cash. Cash was of no use to those, who had already learned to do
without money and metals, but in corn, wine, and oil. (Note the
threefold form of the wages)
Wages of the same kind are still paid to real
Craftsmen in the same place and in the same mode. The
porchway of the Temple figures the outer natural life, which forms a
portal to an inner supernatural life at the central sanctuary, which we
have not yet consciously reached, but to which we labour to ascend by an
in-winding stairway, gradually rebuilding body and mind on the way with
a view to acquiring a new reconstituted organism appropriate and adapted
to that sublime degree of life.
Such
a new body and mind require sustenance to build them and the food we
consume becomes built into our organism. What we eat, we become. Corn
goes to body building, the fashioning of substantiality and structural
form . Wine goes to the vitalising and stimulating of the mind,
strengthening the intellect, deepening the inner vision. Oil is a
lubricant for the system, enabling its parts to run smoothly and without
friction.
In
their higher symbolism Corn or Bread and Wine relate to those of the
Altar and were Eucharistic elements in the Mysteries long before the
Christian Master in a certain "upper room" or higher level of
application took over and gave a new application to the wheat of Ceres
and the wine of Bacchus-Dionysus, while Oil, the crushed out and refined
product of the olive, refers to that Wisdom, which is the ultimate
essence of experience and knowledge and which has been associated, in
the different Mystery teachings, with Minerva, with Solomon, and with
the Mount of Olives.
The spiritual Craftsman not only earns his own wages
proportionately to his work, his own labours automatically supply them.
God, as his employer, has already lodged them within him in advance. He
has only to appropriate them as he becomes justly entitled to them by
his own labours, as the sons of Jacob found their money restored to them
in their corn sacks.
The
Mason is himself likened to an ear of corn, nourished by a fall of the
Water of Life . In virtue of the animal element in his nature he is
himself "the ox that treadeth out the corn", separating his
own golden grain from the stalk that bore it. He is himself the
"threshing floor of Araunah", winnowing his own chaff from his
own wheat. He treads his own wine press alone, in singleness of effort
and in the solitude of his own thought distilling his own vintage, until
the cup of his mind runs over with the wine of a new order of
intelligence. He is his own oil press and out of his own experience and
self realisation extracts wisdom, that oil which anoints him with a joy
and an ability above his fellows and that runs down to the "skirts
of his clothing", manifesting itself in his personality and in all
his activities.
Corn,
wine and oil, are therefore laid upon the altar at the consecration of
every Masonic Lodge. They are the emblems of a Craftsman's wages. Upon
the collar of Grand Lodge Officers are displayed ears of wheat and
sprays of olive, the symbolic indication that those who arrive at the
summit of their profession possess that which they exhibit and are able
to minister bread and wine and oil to those below them in the Order.
There are less agreeable forms of wages, however, but
such as also are to be received without scruple or mistrust, for they
are both disciplinary and signs of progress. A
man cannot set up to reform his old nature and readjust his interior
constitution without feeling it, or without unsettling the fabric of his
emotional and mental sheaths. Accordingly, it is a common experience with those who take themselves seriously in hand in the task of self
rebuilding, that unexpected obstacles suddenly arise, the wages that
come to them are those of adversity in temporal affairs, sickness, the
turning away of former friends and the like. There is good reason for this. Within ourselves are sown the seeds of all our past activities and
emotional tendencies, good or evil. Within ourselves are stored all our
old mind forms and fabrications of base metal. To try to disturb the
former or to divest ourselves of
the latter, promotes immediate reaction from them.
He who deliberately invokes the Light upon
himself, as the earnest Masonic aspirant does, ipso facto utters, with
corresponding intensity, a challenge to his own bad past, his own unreal
self. And if his invocation be effective, the Light streaming into him
from his own dormer window, whilst giving him illumination, will also
play upon and stimulate in him all that is undesirable, as sunlight
stirs to activity the unpleasant insects dwelling in darkness beneath a
stone that is suddenly removed from an old position. Light impartially
affects both the good and evil in oneself, as the sunshine causes a rose
to bloom and a lump of carrion by its side to putrefy. It induces new
growth in a spiritual sense, but it also, and at the same time,
accelerates the germination of seeds implanted in us, which, but for it,
would continue to lie dormant and unmatured until a more favourable
time. Under the discipline of Initiation the
seeds or compressed results of one's own past, the potential reactions
from one's own former actions and inaction, all that goes to make up a
man's fate and that, if unchecked, will shape his future destiny, are
brought to a sudden head and crisis, the normal slower development they
would have undergone, if not so interfered with, becomes interrupted,
expedited. It is often as though vials of undeserved wrath break upon the devoted
head of him, who at last has struck the road to salvation and is
resolved at all costs to follow it. And yet these are
the wages he receives for his laudable enterprise! Lacking self
knowledge as yet, ignorant of what is latent in him, not realising that
the path of Initiation is one of intensive culture and accelerated
evolution, he may become dismayed from further pursuing his quest,
unless he be made aware that these wages are actually due to him, that
they represent his past earnings, that he is justly entitled to them and
that the sooner the debit and credit sides of his own self written
judgment ledger are balanced, the freer will he be to proceed with his
newly undertaken building work.
"The
wages of sin are death", death in the sense of being spiritually
unconscious, however vigorously alive in other ways.
"Sin" in all or any of its forms is, in its final analysis,
disharmony induced by the assertion of the unreal personal self in
unalignment with the impersonal Universal Self, the Holy Spirit. But the Path of Initiation involves the
obliteration of all sense of the personal self. The just and perfect man
and Mason is therefore one who is utterly selfless, being selfless he is
sinless and being sinless he stands in, consciously shares, and becomes
the instrument of, the divine Kingdom, Power and Glory.
10. The Law Of
The Mount
In Masonry,
as in the Scriptures and every other ancient expression of mystical
teaching, there is frequent allusion to mountains and bills and to the
work of Lodges and Chapters being, conducted upon them.
Let it be understood at once that in no case
is the allusion to any physical mountain or geographical position, but
to the spiritual elevation of the work undertaken by some particular
group or school of Initiates. Spiritual science has nothing to do with material
things or places, save in so far as the latter serve as a foundation
stone or point of departure for achieving spiritual results.
From
immemorial time the Vedists of India have spoken of their sacred Mount
Meru, which, later in history, becomes reproduced among the Hebrews as
Mount Moriah. The Greeks had their Mounts Olympus and Parnassus, on the
summits of which dwelt the Gods. The Israelites obtained their law from
Divine hands on Mount Sinai, the Christians theirs from the Mount of
Olives. The woodwork for Solomon's Temple came from the Mountains of
Lebanon. The Gospels tell of the "exceeding high mountain" of
Temptation and of the Mount of Transfiguration. Prometheus was immolated
upon a mountain of the Caucasus (or Ko-Kajon, i.e., "ethereal
space"), and Christ upon the Hill Calvary. Mediaeval Christian
mystical tradition tells of the hidden sanctuary of the mysteries and
the holy Grail built upon Mont Salvatch (the mount of safety or
salvation) in the Pyrenees (which is another form of "Parnassus
")
None of these mountains are situate in this
world, in time or place. The names are mystical names associated with
super physical heights to which man in his spiritual consciousness may
ascend.
Mountains bearing those names, or some of them, do exist on the map,
but their names and the ideas they connote existed long before they were
given a local association for symbolic purposes. There is scarcely a
country without its sacred mountain that reminds its inhabitants of the
heavenly heights and to which sacred traditions are not attached. The
snow clad Himalayas have always typified the eternal heavens to the
East. Fujiyama is the sacred mountain of Japan, as Snowdon is of Britain
and if such places have been, as indeed they have, the scenes of
religious practices, their sanctity derives less from what has occurred
there than from the ideas that resulted in those practices. The names of these
sacred mountains are drawn almost always from ideas representative of
the religion of the district and constitute a sort of spiritual
geography which nations of great spiritual genius, such as the Indians,
the Greeks and the Hebrews, have been faithful in preserving.
Subsequently the materialising tendencies of the human mind literalise
and localise what originally existed as a purely spiritual idea.
When Initiates of the past are said to have
held Lodges and performed their work upon this or that hill or mountain,
the meaning is that they were engaged in work of a high spiritual order
and efficacy work entirely beyond the conception of the average modern
and merely ceremonial Mason. The actual place at which they met for such work may
or may not have been upon a physical eminence. Often it was not, as
abundant evidence might be brought to show. The
entirely super physical nature of their work may be deduced from an old
Scottish Degree of advanced Masonry, which speaks, with a dry humour
that to the inexpert eye will seem grotesque and irreverent, of their
Lodge having originally been held upon a hill in the North of Scotland,
a place "where a cock never crowed, a lion never roared and a woman
never tattled." Now in traditional esoteric terminology, as also in
the Bible, the "North" signifies that which is spiritual and
ever unmanifested, as the other three cardinal points of space indicate
varying degrees of spiritual manifestation.
The allusion to cock crow is to the guilty conscience of Peter, which
could only exist in the world of time and in one who is spiritually
imperfect . The allusion to the lion is to the Evil One "going
about as a roaring lion" in the lower world, but unable to enter
the Paradisal world, whilst the third reference is to the contemplative
silence of the soul (the "woman") upon that high plane of life
of which the Psalmist says that "there is neither speech
nor language but their voices are heard among them".
In the Odyssey, Homer testifies
to the same truth when Ulysses is told in regard to certain mysteries, "Be silent, repress your intellect and do not speak, such is the
method of the Gods upon Olympus".
It must be left to the reader's own research and
reflection to deduce the nature of the spiritual work undertaken by real
Initiates. He will discover that it is work that is not performed in the
physical body or with that body's faculties, but upon the ethereal
planes and with a higher order of faculty than the average man of today
has learned to cultivate. For a striking instance of the kind of work
implied, reference can be made to the narrative contained in the 19th
and 24th chapters of Exodus, describing a Lodge of the elders or Adept
Initiates of Israel upon "Mount Sinai", though for the
instructed reader many other passages of like information are to be
found in both sections of the Sacred Law, as also elsewhere.
To pass to a less abstruse and more elementary point,
those who seek to become real Initiates and aspire to the work upon the
mountain tops that is feasible only to such,
must first conform themselves to the Law of the Mount . That law may be
so called because it involves a loftier teaching and a totally different
order of conduct from those to which the unititiated popular world
conforms.
We have a reference to this in the direction that a
Mason's conduct ought to be such as will "distinguish and set him
above the ranks of other men" and not merely leave him at their level. Hence the instruction given by the Great Master to his initiate
disciples, which is called the "Sermon on the Mount" and is
popularly supposed to have been delivered upon a hill side.
There exist, however, many great pieces of
Initiation teaching going by that name, notably the great and eloquent
discourses known as The Divine Poemander of Hermes and all of them are called "sermons on the
mount," not because of having necessarily been delivered upon any
actual mountain, but because they relate to spiritualities and to the
loftier plane of thought and action upon which every Initiate must live
.
The "Mount" is that of Initiation, where alone, in the
silence of the senses, the spirit of man can learn the things of the
spirit.
That the standard of thought and conduct for
Initiates is always beyond the capacity of the popular world is
evidenced by the fact that society, however advanced in civilisation,
find itself quite unable to act up to it. Even the Churches find the
Sermon on the Mount impracticable doctrine for general social
observance.
It is regarded as a counsel of perfection and eminent clerics are found
declaring that it was never meant to apply to the unforeseen, complex
social conditions of today and declare that, whilst sound as a theoretic
ideal, it must be compromised with in practice . From their low level
of outlook they are right. The popular world is truly quite unable to
act up to the terms of the Law of the Mount. But it is overlooked that
that high doctrine was not meant for the popular world nor addressed to
it. It was delivered to and intended for, those few who have outgrown
and renounced the ideals of the outer world and who seek initiation into
a new and higher order of life, which contradicts the wisdom of that
world at every point.
But the real Initiate must observe it at all cost and
conflict to himself and is told that unless his righteousness exceeds
that of popular orthodoxy and convention, he cannot hope to realise the
goal at which he aims. The whole life of the real Initiate and of those
aiming to become such, will be at cross purposes with the standards and
methods of the rest of the world, which will be as it were in conspiracy
against him for not conforming to its ways and as with Hiram Abiff, at
every attempt to leave the gates of his temple and come into contact
with the outer world, he will find himself opposed by persecuting
"ruffians," by objections to his refusal to fall in with
popular conventions and by demands to know the secrets of his
superiority to them. Hence
one of the reasons for the silence and obscurity of real Initiates, as
also for Masonic secrecy, is self protection, which the Christian Master
gave as a justification for not casting pearls before those incapable of
appreciating them "lest they turn and rend you".
The way of the natural uninitiated man is that of
self assertion and material acquisitiveness. He is bent upon securing
all he can get from this world and wisdom, knowledge, and power, are
what seem to be such in his own eyes. He is not wrong or blameworthy. He
is simply fulfilling the law of his present nature, which is the only
law he as yet knows. He is merely ignorant and self blinded to any
higher nature and law. The initiated man is one to whom a higher nature and law have become
revealed and who, conscious of their compulsion upon himself, has
abjured all the ideals of his less advanced fellows. He lives upon the
Mount and fulfils the law of the Mount and therefore to him come wisdom,
grace and power transcending anything his uninitiated fellowmen can as
yet conceive. Initiates were termed by the Great Master the "salt
of the earth," for, without their leavening presence in it, the
world would descend to greater corruption than it at present suffers.
"Ten just men (i.e., Initiates) shall save the city," as was
said of those "cities of the plain" which are a figure of
civilisation at large.
It is not, however, for his personal
aggrandisement or salvation that a man seeks, or should seek, Initiation
into the higher order of life, or should aspire for the wisdom and power
that therewith come. To do so from this motive would be merely to imitate
the ways of the outer world, apart from the fact, that it would
neutralise the whole purpose of Initiation. His
real purpose is to help on the world's advancement, to become one of its
saviours, at the sacrifice of himself.
For the real Initiate is selfless, he has abandoned all personal
claims and the "rights" to which lesser men claim to be
entitled and having crucified his own personality, is able to look upon
human life impersonally and to offer himself as an instrument for its
redemption.
When wisdom and power come to him, they are not for his own use but for
the help of the whole race. He is a Master among men, because he is a
universal servant. He is the most effective spokesman in the world,
because of his utter silence.
Masonic secrecy and silence are inculcated for
this very reason, for all spiritual power is generated in silence. In
silence the aspirant must concentrate his own energies and climb from
his own earth into his own heavens, rendering
to the Caesar of the outer world the things that are his, but in other respects fulfilling the law of the Mount in a way that
will "distinguish and set him above the ranks of other men"
who are not yet ready or prepared to follow him.
If the Masonic Brotherhood has not yet risen to full appreciation of the
meaning of its own system, it nevertheless stands provided with all the
information needful to lead it to Initiation in the high sense indicated
throughout these pages, to which each of its members may aspire, if he
were to follow the Ancient Sage in Tennyson's poem and
Leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness,
A cloud between the Nameless and thyself ;
And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel
And climb the Mount of Blessing ; whence, if thou
Look higher, then perchance thou mays't-beyond
A hundred ever-rising mountain-lines,
And past the range of Night and Shadow-see
The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day
Strike
on the Mount of Vision !
11.
"From Labour To Refreshment"
The
Masonic reader who recognises that every reference in Speculative
Masonry is figurative and carries a symbolic significance behind the
literal sense of the words, will at once dismiss from his mind any
suggestion that the formula of adjourning the Lodge from labour to
refreshment and of recalling it from refreshment to labour, relates to
the customary practice of passing from the formal work of the Lodge to
the informalities of the dining table.
The familiar formula of dismissing the Lodge
after seeing that every Brother has received his due, no doubt came over
into the present system from Operative usage when Guild masons
periodically received their material wages. But it has now become the
Ite, Missa est ! of spiritual Masonry and carries a sacramental meaning.
We have to consider what labour, refreshment and dues, are in their
higher and concealed sense.
First as to Labour. The allusion is less to the
temporary ceremonial work of the Lodge than to the work the earnest
Light seeker is continually to be engaged upon in his task of
self perfecting. Let it be realised that this is labour indeed,
to be undertaken with earnestness and vigour, "Hic labor , hoc opus
est," wrote Virgil of it. "The Gods sell their arts only to those who sweat for them"
runs another ancient adage of the science.
Purification of the bodily senses and reformation of personal defects
are but part, the simpler and grosser part, of the work, the redirection
of one's mind and will to the ideal involved, the requisite research and
study conducing to that end and the necessary control and concentration
of thought and desire upon the end in view, are not child's play nor
matters of casual, superficial interest.
Intellectual and spiritual labour necessitate rest
and refreshment, equally with physical, that the harvest of that labour
may be assimilated. Wise activity (Boaz) must be balanced with an
equally wise passivity (Jachin) if one is to become established in
immortal strength and to stand firm, spiritually consolidated and
perfect in all one's parts. Nor is it a work to be hurried, those build most surely, who build slowly. Festina lente!, hasten
slowly, is an old maxim of the work addressed to those who would
"lay great bases for eternity". "Ne quid nimis !" is
another, "let nothing be done in excess".
Now it is not easy to
combine work of this nature with that which the exigencies of one's
normal duties and responsibilities entail. But to those who are in
earnest, the co adaptation and harmonising of all one's duties will form
part of the work itself, one's present position and avocation will be
discerned to be precisely those suited to making advancement and to
provide opportunities for doing so. Doubtless difficulty and opposition
will be encountered in abundance, but these again are parts of the
process and tests of fidelity. No growth is possible without resistance
to draw out latent power. The aspirant must steadily and conscientiously
persevere along the path to what he seeks, just as each candidate
engages himself to do so in respect of its ceremonial portrayal and
every Brother may be assured of receiving his exact dues for the labour
he expends. "There is a time to work and a time to
sleep." Respite from labour is as contributive an element to
progress as labour itself, for the mind must digest and the whole nature
assimilate, what it absorbs. More may be learned from the Teacher in the
heart than from what is gathered by the head, when that Teacher, the
principle at the Centre is once awakened. Meditation and reflection are
of greater instructiveness than book reading and information acquired
from without oneself.
Thinks't thou among the mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
That we must still be seeking?
For the care and nourishment of the outer body,
Nature provides a passive, sympathetic system, which arranges digestion,
distributes energy, builds up the body and discharges its functions for
us without interference with our formal consciousness. In like manner,
in our higher being, resides a corresponding principle, which winnows
out thought, clarifies and arranges ideas and settles problems and
difficulties for us, in entire independence of our formal awareness. It
is this higher principle that must be found, trusted and relied upon to
participate in the work of interior up building. The old writers call it
the Archaeus, or the hidden Mercury, which garners and utilises the
fruit of our conscious efforts, building them up into a
"superstructure" or subtle body. As ages have gone to the
organisation of the physical body, so also long periods are requisite
for that of the super physical structure, the building of which is true
Masonry. But the process can be expedited by those, who possess the
science of it, as Masons are presumed to do. The process itself is the
real Masonic "labour" and as we have shown, it has its active
and its passive aspects.
This is a difficult subject to treat briefly. Its
nature is merely indicated here and its fuller study must be left to
individual research and where possible, to personal tuition, for this
work is precisely that about which a Master Mason is presumed to be able
to give private instruction to Brethren in the inferior degrees.
Let the reader reflect that Masonic "labour"
involves the making of his being whole and perfect, that it is intended
to "render the circle of it complete". His complete being is
likened, in geometrical terms, to a circle, the symbol of wholeness,
entirety, selfcontainedness. But let him remember
that as he knows himself at present, he is not a circle, but a square,
which is but the fourth part of a circle.
Where are the other three fourths of himself, for until he knows these
as well as the fourth part which he does know, he can never make the
circle of his being complete, nor truly know himself.
This is the point at which Masonry becomes mystical
Geometry, the important science of which Plato affirmed that no one
should enter the Academy, where true philosophy and ontology were to be
learned, until he already was well versed in that science. For in former
times these deeper problems of being were the subject of geometrical
expression and echoes of the science remain to us in our references to
squares, triangles and circles and particularly in the 47th problem of
the first book of Euclid, which is now the distinctive emblem of those,
who have won to Mastership. How many of those who now wear that emblem,
one wonders, have any conception of its significance? It is a
mathematical symbol representing, for those who can read it, the highest
measure of human attainment in the science of reconstructing the human
soul into the Divine image from which it has fallen away. No wonder the
great Initiate who composed this symbol was raised to an ecstasy of joy
on realising in his own being all that it implies, depicts and
demonstrates and that upon that fortunate occasion he "sacrificed a
hecatomb of oxen", an expression the meaning of which, like the
symbol itself, must be left to the reader's reflection, for these
matters cannot be summarily or superficially explained . Pythagoras
himself is said to have refused to explain them to his own pupils until
they had undergone five years' silence and meditation upon them. Those
five years represent the period that is still theoretically allotted to
the work of the Fellow Craft Degree, in regard to which the modern Mason
is instructed to devote himself to reflecting upon the secrets of nature
(i.e., his own nature) and the principles of intellectual truth, until
they gradually disclose themselves to his view and reveal his own
affiliation to the Deity. In declining to explain these geometrical
truths to students until they had familiarised themselves with them for
five years, the meaning of the great teacher of Crotona was that, by
that time, the earnest disciple would have discerned their import and
gone far to realise it, for himself.
Labour, understood in the sense here defined, and
Refreshment after it, constitute a rhythm of activity and passivity, a
rhythm similar to that which we daily experience in respect of waking
and sleeping, working and resting. To speak of Refreshment, however, in
the deeper sense implied in Masonry is even more difficult than to speak
of the philosophic Labour, for it involves a subject to which few devote
deep thought, the subjective side of the soul's life as distinct from
the objective side which, for most men, is the only one at present known
to them. In that deeper sense, Refreshment implies what Spenser speaks of in the
lines:
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, doth greatly please .
To
the wise, the study of the subjective half of life is as important as
that of the objective half and without it he cannot make the circle of
his self knowledge complete. Even the observant Masonic student is made aware by
the formula used at Lodge closing, that by some great Warden of life and
death, each soul is called into this objective world to labour upon
itself and is in due course summoned from it to rest from its labours
and enter into subjective celestial refreshment, until once again it is
recalled to labour. For each the
"day," the opportunity for work at self perfecting, is duly
given, for each the "night" cometh, when no man can work at
that task, which morning and evening constitute, but one creative day of
the soul's life, each portion of that day being a necessary complement
to the other. Perfect man has to unify these opposites in himself, so that for him,
as for his Maker, the darkness and the light become both alike.
The world old secret teaching upon this subject,
common to the whole of the East, to Egypt, the Pythagoreans and
Platonists and every College of the Mysteries, is to be found summed up
as clearly and tersely as one could wish in the Phedo of Plato, to which
the Masonic seeker is referred as one of the most instructive of
treatises upon the deeper side of the science. It testifies to the great
rhythm of life and death above spoken of and demonstrates how that the
soul in the course of its career weaves and wears out many bodies and is
continually migrating between objective and subjective conditions,
passing from labour to refreshment and back again many times in its
great task of self fulfilment. And if Plato was, as was once truly said
of him, but Moses speaking Attic Greek, we shall not be surprised at
finding the same initiate teaching disclosed in the words of Moses
himself. Does not the familiar Psalm of Moses declare that man is
continually "brought to destruction", that subsequently a
voice goes forth saying "Come again, ye children of men " and
that the subjective spiritual world is his refuge from one objective
manifestation to another ? What else than a paraphrase of this great
word of comfort is the Masonic pronouncement that, in the course of its
task of self perfecting, the soul is periodically summoned to
alternating periods of labour and refreshment? It must labour and it
must rest from its labours, its works will follow it and in the
subjective world every Brother's soul will receive its due for its work
in the objective one, until such time as its work is completed and it is
"made a pillar in the House of God and no more goes out" as a
journeyman builder into this sublunary workshop. "Did I not agree
with thee for a penny?" said the Great Master parabolically. Now
the round disc of the coin was meant to be an emblem of that
completeness, wholeness and self containedness, which is denoted by the
Circle and which every Mason is enjoined to effect in himself. When the
Mason has made the circle of his own being complete, he will not only
have earned his penny and received his dues, the circle of his then
glorious being will be as the sun, shining in his strength and he will
be able to say with the Initiates of Egypt, as they contemplated the sun
ascending from the desert into the heavens, "I am Ra in his
rising!"
12. The Grand Lodge Above
Express
reference is made in the Order rituals to the existence of a Grand Lodge
Above, having its Grand Master and Officers. Doubtless the allusion is
often regarded as but a pious sentiment expressing the belief that,
after their death, worthy Masons combine to constitute such a Lodge or
assembly in the heavens.
With such a belief no one would wish to interfere,
but there are good grounds for suggesting that the reference was
intended to carry a quite different meaning. It is meant to
testify to the fact, which forms part of the long stream of esoteric
tradition throughout the ages, that a supernal Masonic Assembly not only
exists, but that it preceded, in point of time and constitution, the
Masonic Order on earth. Had it not so existed and preceded the terrestrial
Order, that Order itself would not have existed, for
the hypothesis is that the latter is the shadow and projection upon the
physical world of a corresponding hierarchical Order in the super
physical. In other words, the Masonic Order on earth is the reflex and
effect, not the generating cause, of the Grand Lodge Above.
The latter is not necessarily recruited from the former, since death of
the body does not constitute per se a title to admission to the Grand
Lodge Above, which, according to the tradition, possesses its own
qualifications and passports for admission ,but neither, according to
the same tradition, does life in the earthly body preclude the duly
qualified Mason from reception into and conscious cooperation with, the
Supernal Lodge, while he is still in the flesh .
A
certain resemblance will be noticed between this doctrine and the
corresponding theological one of the complementary relations between the
Church Militant on earth and the Church Triumphant in the heavens, the
doctrine of the Communion possible between all Saints upon whichever
side of the veil. Neither in the case of the Church nor of Masonry does
the claim imply, what is obviously not the fact, that every member of
either community has actual knowledge or first hand experience of the
truth of this doctrine. But it does imply that there have been and still
are, members possessing it.
Farther
on in these pages more will be said of the Grand Lodge Above and in a
way which perhaps will suggest to the reflective reader a fuller idea
than one can convey upon such a subject than by expository methods. It
is a theme deserving of larger consideration than the Craft accords it
and one about which no little literary evidence is available for those
with sufficient interest to look for it. One such important piece of
evidence shall be mentioned here.
It
consists of a remarkable series of communications of the highest
spiritual value and instructiveness to every Brother seeking to realise
the spiritual essence of the Masonic system, issued by a saintly man and
advanced initiate, Karl von Eckartshausen, to a group of pupils in the
secret science in Germany, at roughly about the same period as that in
which the English Masonic Order was becoming established. The
synchronism is not without significance and in conjunction with other
evidences, which exigencies of space prevent being now adduced, of
spiritual activity at work at that time behind the events of public
history, points to efforts to put forward a great movement for human
enlightenment, a movement conceived from behind the veil by the Grand
Lodge Above and projected into the world through some of its members in
the flesh.
The communications or letters deal with the subject
of the need for human regeneration and the rationale of Initiation. In
the first of them, the author asserts that "the great and true work
of building the Temple consists solely in destroying this miserable
Adamic hut and in erecting in its place a divine temple, this means, in
other words, to develop in us the interior sensorium or the organ to
receive God. After this process, the metaphysical and incorruptible
principle rules over the terrestrial and man begins to live, not any
longer in the principle of self love, but in the spirit and in the
truth, of which he is the Temple. The most exalted aim of religion is
the intimate union of man with God. This union is possible here below,
but it can only take place by the opening of our inner sensorium, which
enables our hearts to become receptive of God. Therein are those great
mysteries of which human philosophy does not dream, the key to which is
not to be found in scholastic science". He then proceeds to state
that "a more advanced school has always existed to which the
deposition of all spiritual science has been confided, which has
continued from the first day of creation to the present time. Its
members are scattered all over the world, but they have always been
united by one spirit and one truth. They have had but one science, a
single source of truth, one Lord, one Doctor, one Master, in whom
resides substantially the whole Divine plentitude, who also alone
initiates them into the high mysteries of Nature and the Spiritual
World".
In the second letter it is explained (I compress the
substance) that, "This community possesses a school in which all
who thirst for knowledge are instructed by the Spirit of Wisdom itself,
and all the mysteries of God and of Nature are preserved therein for the
children of light. It is thence that all truths penetrate into the
world. It is the most hidden of communities. It possesses members
gathered from many Orders. From all time there has been an exterior
school based on this interior one, of which it is but the outer
expression. The community has been engaged from the earliest ages in
building the grand Temple for the regeneration of humanity, by which the
kingdom of God will become manifest. It consists in the communion of
those who have most capacity for light. It has three Degrees and these
are conferred on suitable candidates still in the flesh. The first is
inspirationally imparted. The second opens up the human rational
intellectuality and understanding and ensures interior illumination. The
third and highest is the entire opening of the inner sensorium, by which
the inner man attains objective vision of real and metaphysical
verities".
The instruction goes on to explain that this Society
does not resemble temporal organisations that meet at certain times and
elect their own officers. It knows none of these formalities, but
proceeds in other ways. The Divine Power is always present. The Master
of it himself does not invariably know all the members, but the moment a
member's presence or services are needed he can be found. If a member is
called to office, he presents himself among the others without
presumption and is received by them without jealousy. If it be necessary
that members should meet, they find and recognise each other with
perfect certainty. No disguise, hypocrisy, or dissimulation, can hide
their true characteristics. No one member can choose another. Unanimous
choice is required. All men are called to join this hidden community.
The called may be chosen, if they become ripe for entrance. Any one can
look for entrance, any man who is within can teach another to seek it,
but only he who is ripe can arrive inside. Worldly intelligence seeks
this Sanctuary in vain. All is undecipherable to the unprepared, he
can see nothing, read nothing, in its interior. He who is ripe is joined
to the chain, perhaps often where he thought least likely and at a point
of which he knew nothing himself. Seeking to become ripe should be the
effort of him who loves wisdom. But there are methods by which ripeness
is attained, for in this holy communion is the primitive storehouse of
the most ancient and original science of the human race, with the
primitive mysteries also of all science. It is the unique and
illuminated Community, which possesses the key to all mystery, which
knows the centre and source of nature and creation. It unites superior
power to its own and includes members from more than one world. It is
the Society whose members form a theocratic republic, which one day will
be the Regent Mother of the whole world. Upon this description of the
Grand Lodge Above, by one who, even in the days of his flesh,
claims to have been a member of it, it is not proposed here to descant.
That it may provoke surprise and doubt as to its veraciousness in those
to whom such ideas may now come for the first time, is probable. This
must be hazarded in giving voice to those ideas here and the subject
left to such responsiveness as may come from the heart of the individual
reader, for obviously no proof can either here be offered or given to
even the most sympathetic querist upon a matter which in its nature is
incapable of verification otherwise than by direct personal experience.
But
with an earnest counsel to accept its accuracy and to seek confirmation
of it in the only way in which such confirmation is possible, it must be
left to the deep and protracted reflection of those to whom the idea of
the existence of a Grand Lodge in the heavens, watching over the Masonic
Israel on earth and superintending its development, is at least a matter
of probability and a subject for faith. They will at least perceive in
the description of it given above, that the Masonic Order faithfully
reproduces, in point of form and hierarchical progression, its alleged
supernal prototype and if they recognise that invisible things are in
some measure knowable by perceiving things that are made, the
contemplation of their own three-graded Order, with its ascending
sequence of Grand Lodges of districts, provinces, and finally of the
nation, will perhaps help them on to the conception of an unseen Grander
Lodge beyond all these, one to membership of which any duly qualified
Brother may hope to be called to take progressive Initiations no longer
ceremonial and symbolic, but as facts of spiritual experience at the
hands of the Universal Master and Initiator, whose officers are still
Brethren of our own, though risen to the stature of holy angels .
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