Monday, February 20, 2023

Random Building Thoughts - 2023-02-20

 

 -------------- BRAIN TEASE -------------- 

FILED UNDER:
 
 
Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric
 

 ...all because he has two!
 
 -------------- OP VS SPEC! --------------  
 

 Enjoy!
 
For Further Light:
 
 
 -------------- IGNITE! -------------- 
 

That heat you felt 
when you caught the Light Virus?
It was not a fever; 
it was merely 
your Charcoal Igniting!
 
-------------- MAP READING --------------


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 --------------
 

Ruffians Work with a Heavily Biased Plumb Line.
(You can tell by their leanings...)
 
For Further Light: 
 2) They Live Among us! 
 
 -------------- BLESSED -------------- 
 
 
A man who can self-correct 
is truly a blessed spirit!
 
 -------------- 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 -------------- 
 
 
FILED UNDER: 
Your First Relief!

The very first Relief offered 
to a Brother is the Opportunity
 to Divest himself of the Burdens
 he comes into the Lodge with 
and to do so 
long before he Passes to the Stage 
 where he must take on 
the Burden of Learning how to Learn.
 
 -------------- ASSESS! -------------- 
 
FILED UNDER: HONEST ASSESSMENTS
 
"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 -------------- 
 
 
"It's the price of leadership 
to do the thing you believe 
has to be done 
at the time it must be done." 
 -- Lyndon B. Johnson
 
 Are you willing to do what it takes?
 
 -------------- MYTH -------------- 

 "A love affair has to do with
 immediate personal satisfaction.
 But marriage is an ordeal; 
it means yielding, time and again. 
That's why it's a sacrament: 
you give up your personal simplicity 
to participate in a relationship. 
 
"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 ... 
 
"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!)
 
-------------- HELP! -------------- 
 
 
There are some people 
who are so Compelled to Help others, 
they can't Help themselves.
 
 -------------- THE PERKS! -------------- 
 

For Further Light:
PERKS!
 
 -------------- END --------------  

 Be Well and Travel Light!
-- Coach Nagy ;-)

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