Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For All Your Brothers And Sisters In Spirit. When We Focus Our Attention On Loving Thoughts And Live Our Lives Led By Our “Mighty I AM Presence” – The Spirit Of The Living God Within Us; There Comes A Stillness, A Freeing Of The Mind…Clear Thinking…Emerging From A Place Of Peace Within Us; A Place Of Peace That Much Of Mankind Never Knew Existed – Due To Ages Of Distractions And Conditionings! And Putting Love Into The World Should Not Be A Mental Or Emotional Struggle For Individuals…Cuz Our Essence is Love! Still Tho, For Many, It Is! But To Think Loving Thoughts Doesn’t Take Much; An Effortless Raising Of Our Vibration That Leads To Loving Actions….Powered By Our Loving Energy; And Which Benefits Not Only The Individual…But Also The Collective. This, When Our Attention Is Stayed Upon – And Our Being Is Radiating That Loving Energy – More Often Than Not! Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“In the earliest of the Old Charges we find fifteen “points” or rules set forth for the regulation of the conduct of the Fellow Craft; these were the “perfect points” of his entrance to the Order as well as in his transactions with mankind; and it is worthy of note that this code of ethics was far in advance of the standards of the fifteenth century. There is no need to analyze these requirements except to say that they consisted, in essence, of acting on the square, that is, the candidate was to deal squarely with the Craft, with his masters, his fellows, and with all men whomsoever.

In his relations with the Craft, he was expected above all else to keep an attentive ear to his instructors, to preserve carefully the secrets of his Order and his brethren in a faithful breast, and to be evermore ruled by the principle of virtue in his behavior. If such qualifications were demanded of Apprentices in an Operative trade, how much more may they be reasonably required of a Fellow Craft in a speculative, or moral, science!

In its original form virtue meant valor; today it means rectitude. But the rectitude which is virtue is more than a passive not-doing of evil; it is the courageous doing of right. “Virtue is but heroic bravery, to do the thing thought to be true, in spite of all enemies of flesh or spirit, in despite of all temptations or menaces.” The man of conventional morality is content not to steal, drink, gamble, swear, etc., but often it does not enter his head that there is an active, aggressive work to be done in cleaning up the world. Conventional morality is neuter; virtue is masculine; and the Craft that seeks to build the Temple of Humanity needs in its votaries, something more than passive morality.

Many of the most vital organs are in the breast. A man can go without water for days; he can do without food, if necessary, for a month or more; but without breath in his lungs or blood in his heart he cannot live an hour. The breast, accordingly, is the symbol of the most essential things in personality – love, faithfulness, purity, and character. If the square is applied to the breast, it is to compel us to realize that virtue must rule in the very deeps of us, in the springs of conduct, and the motives of action, as well as on the surface. The man whose morality is on the outside of his skin is held up by external restraints and will often fall into evil if they chance to be removed, as the deacon of a church or the pillar of a community will sometimes wallow in vice while among strangers.

But when virtue is the law of the hidden motives of the will, the man will walk as uprightly in the slum of a city as in the precincts of his home. Should Masonry trust to conventional morality alone, it would build on sands; by demanding virtue of its members, it lays its foundations in bedrock; and the storm may come, the winds blow, the rains fall, but its house will not be moved. And the same virtue that it requires in the lodge room, it expects in all a Mason’s transactions with mankind, else Masonic virtue itself becomes a lifeless conventionality.

The Greeks, as we recall from our discussion of circumambulation, chanted an ode as the worshipper moved about the altar from left to right, for their odes were the most sacred literature in their possession; but the Master of the Masonic lodge reads from the Holy Bible as the Fellow Craft makes his mystic rounds, and that for the same reason. He on whose life’s journey the Great Light sends its rays may walk confidently and cheerfully and not as those who stumble through the dark. And it is fitting that in this connection the rays come from the prophecy of Amos, for that seer sought to bring order and light into the workaday world of men, one of the chief tasks of the Fellow Craft, who receives knowledge that he may become a social builder.

Amos wrought his great work during the days of Jeroboam II, in whose reign, religion had grown hard and formal, pleasure had rotted into vice, luxury had become a disease, and the aristocracy fattened on the poor. Against these conditions Amos set himself, though he was “no prophet, nor the son of a prophet”, and he lashed the abuses of his people with such effective fury, that the high-ups had him banished from the kingdom. “The first great social reformer in history”, Amos, was no mere denunciator, but one who condemned things as they are, by setting before them, a picture of things as they should be.

In the graphic visions recorded in his book, Amos sets before us a picture of Israel being judged by a plague of locusts; then follows a fire that “devoured the great deep and had begun to devour the tilled land”; these visitations are stayed by the supplication of the prophet, and then Jehovah brings a new kind of judgment to bear on his people. As we may read in Amos’ own words; “Thus the Lord shewed me; and behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand. And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, a plumbline. Then said the Lord, behold, I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel; I will not pass by them anymore.”

This was no mere dramatic way of saying: The people had been bad; they must now be good. The lesson is no such banality as that but cuts deeper into things. It is really a vision of an entirely new kind of judgment, for consider: At first Jehovah chastised his people physically, as one may whip a child; later, he passed from external things into their hearts and said, “In your conscience you will be judged, and, in your conscience, you will be punished.” It was just the Lord’s method of plunging a sharp instrument into the naked left breast of Israel! External punishments came and passed, but when the inner standard was set up, it remained whatever came and went, and the Lord did “not pass by them anymore.”

Ever is this the truth of things, the law of life – that bad men are not always visited by physical evils, and that good men do not always receive material reward. This was a lesson learned by Jobe many centuries ago. But there is a harvest from wrongdoing that is always sure, as sure as the tides, and it is nothing other than inward corruption. To lie blunts the moral perception; to fall into impurity beclouds the heart; to live in selfishness puts out the eyes of love, for “the wages of sin is death.” Like the path of the eagle the ways of the punishment of transgression may be viewless, but they are sure, as sure as a plumbline; the universe is just, and in its laws, there is neither variableness nor turning, and he that is a skilled Fellow Craft in the building tasks of life, will be wise to govern himself accordingly.

…Death is no interloper in the universe, but at one with its laws and its life; in truth, it is itself the friend and servant of life, in that it keeps fresh the stream and removes the outworn and the old, “lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” The very act of death proves this, for, however much we shrink from its approach, we yield peacefully to it when it comes. Of this all our physicians testify, as witness these words from one of the noblest of them, Dr. Osier:

“I have careful notes of about five hundred death beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another; eleven showed mental apprehension; two positive terror; one expressed spiritual exaltation; one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or another; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.”

Natural as it is, however, death will ever remain solemn, and even sad, not only because of what comes after, or “because of the body’s masterful negation”, but because… the day of death is a kind of judgment day, for it brings to an end and sets a lasting seal upon the life of a man. The world with its problems, its imperious needs, its grey tragedies, and ancient heartbreaks, is left behind; the man’s career is ended, and the influences of his life, the harvest of his deeds – all these are now taken from his control. What he has done he has done, and death places it beyond his changing.

Surely, it must be an awful thing for a human being to realize at the last, that, so far as he has been concerned, there is less happiness, less love, less kindliness, and honor among men than before he entered life. To so live in the midst of this mystery-haunted world, to so work among the winged days that little children may be happier, youth more joyous, manhood more clean, and old age less lonely; to so live that men will hate less and love more, be honorable in public dealings as in private acts, create more than destroy; to so live that the great Kingdom of Brotherhood may be brought near and man be bound closer to man, and woman closer to woman; that it is, to be a Mason!”

Symbolical Masonry, by H.L. Haywood, 1923

El Secreto – Yung Logos