#wilmshurst

The Meaning of Masonry, Revised Edition, W. L. Wilmshurst

The greater form of lnitiation, the "baptism of fire," is the awakening of the Spirit, the innermost essence, the "Vital and Immortal Principle" centrally resident in the soul, as the soul is resident in the sense-body.  Numbers of people attain the lesser baptism in the ordinary development of life and often without awareness of the fact. The greater baptism is of rarer occurrence, and to experience it is a crisis that cannot be mistaken, or pass unnoticed or forgotten.

The Search for the Lost Word-Part 3

The Search for the Lost Word-Part 2

"The quest after the lost word of [freemasonry] is declared...to have so far been abortive, and to have resulted in the discovery, not of that Reality, but the substitutional images of it.  All of which implies that, in the strength of merely his natural temporal intelligence, man can find and know nothing more in this world than shadows, images and phenomenal forms of realities which abide eternally and noumenally in the world of Spirit to which his temporal faculties are presently closed."

Plotinus offers a philosophical justification for such experiences. External objects, he tells us, present us only with appearances. The problem of true knowledge, on the other hand, deals with the ideal reality that exists behind these appearances. It follows, therefore, that the religion of truth is not to be investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly known. Rather, it is within us. Truth, therefore, he maintains, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself, but it is the agreement of the mind with itself. Hence, he contends, knowledge has three degrees: opinions, science, and illumination. The instrument of the first is sense, of the second dialectic, and of the third intuition. This third is the absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.

There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body. That we know. Is there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness? That there are in us phases of consciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily senses is a matter of daily experience. That we perceive and know things which are not conveyed to us by the bodily eyes and heard by our bodily ears is certain. That there arise in us waves of consciousness from those around us, from the people, the race to which we belong, is also certain. May there not then be in us the makings of a perception and knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is here and now, but which shall be good for all time and everywhere? Does there not exist in truth, as we have already hinted, an inner illumination of which what we call light in the outer world is the partial expression and manifestation, by which we can ultimately see things as they are, beholding all creation, not by any local act of perception, but by a cosmical intuition and prescience, identifying ourselves with what we see? Does there not exist a perfected sense of hearing as of the morning stars singing together, an understanding of the words that are spoken all through the universe, the hidden meaning of all things, a profound and far-pervading sense of which our ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and intuition?