-------------- BRAIN TEASE --------------
...all because he has two!
Freemasonry provides maps for improvement.
Most Jurisdictions require that these maps
be internalized at every level,
throughout the Blue Lodge Degrees.
Freemasonry cannot do anything more.
It is up to the man to follow these maps.
How do you read those maps?
The first steps require you to locate the Maps' Legends,
Recognize them as such
and then make earnest effort to Understand them
as they relate to the Territory they intend to describe.
-------------- CONDUCT APPROPRIATELY --------------
A
Brother cannot Reasonably Expect himself
to Understand a Train of
Thought
when he Jumps Blindly upon a Moving Caboose
and Conducts himself
Assumptively.
-------------- WATCH FOR BIASES --------------
(You can tell by their leanings...)
-------------- TRUTH --------------
One
man can cause more division
within a population of
die-hardened black or white thinkers
by insisting that his view is the only acceptable
one,
than an entire population of colorful thinkers
who insist that
their views
are not the only acceptable ones.
-------------- FIRST RELIEF --------------
-------------- IGNITE! --------------
-------------- ASSESS! --------------
"It
is the opprobrium of Freemasonry that its history has never yet been
written in a spirit of critical truth; that credulity, and not
incredulity, has been the foundation on which all Masonic historical
investigations have hitherto been built; that imagination has too often
"lent enchantment to the view;" that the missing links of a chain of
evidence have been frequently supplied by gratuitous invention; and that
statements of vast importance have been carelessly sustained by the
testimony of documents whose authenticity has not been proved.
And this leads me to the important question: How is the history of
Freemasonry to be written, so that the narrative shall win the respect
of its enemies, and secure the assent and approbation of its friends?
In the first place, we must begin by a strict definition of the word
Masonry. If we make it synonymous with Freemasonry, then must we confine
ourselves closely to the events that are connected with the Institution
in its present form and organization. We may then say that Masonry
received a new organization and a restoration in the beginning of the
eighteenth century. We may trace this very Institution, with an older
but not dissimilar form, in the Masonic gilds of Europe; in the
corporations of Stone-masons of Germany; in the travelling Freemasons of
the Middle Ages, and connect it with the Colleges of Architects of
Rome. Such a history will not want authentic memorials to substantiate
its truth, and there will be no difficulty in conferring upon the
Institution an enviable antiquity.
But if we confound the term Masonry with Geometry, with Architecture,
or with Moral Science, we shall beget in the mind, equally of the writer
and the reader, such a confusion of ideas as can never lead to any
practical result. And yet this has been the prevailing error of all the
great English writers on Masonry in the last, and, with a few
exceptions, even in the present century. At one moment they speak of
Masonry as a mystical institution which, in its then existing form, was
familiar to their readers. Soon afterwards, perhaps on the same page, a
long paragraph is found to refer, without any change of name, under the
identical term Masonry, to the rise of Architecture, to the progress of
Geometry ( or perhaps to the condition of the moral virtues.
...
No greater honor could accrue to any man than that of having been the
founder of a new school of Masonic history, in which the fictions and
loose statements of former writers would be rejected, and in which the
rule would be adopted that has been laid down as a vital maxim of all
inductive science, — in words that have been chosen as his motto by a
recent powerful investigator of historical truth:
'Not
to exceed and not to fall short of facts — not to add and not to take
away. To state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'"
Source: OCR from Bro. Albert Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 1917 edition pages 333-335
-------------- THE PRICE --------------
Are you willing to do what it takes?
-------------- MYTH --------------
"And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other
person: you're giving to the relationship.
"And if you realize you are in the relationship just as the other person is, then it becomes life building, a life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you're giving to somebody else ...
"And if you realize you are in the relationship just as the other person is, then it becomes life building, a life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you're giving to somebody else ...
"This is the
challenge of a marriage."
— from An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
( And it is the challenge faced in all long term committed relationships!)