Freemason Discovers the True Working Tools

By: Ramón Mestas

We are often told, in the language of our ancient Craft, that: “Far beyond the concerns of material life, the vast realm of thought and action opens up for the Freemason.”

This is a profound charge, a key that unlocks one of the great portals of our esoteric work. Yet, a worthy Brother might pause upon the threshold and ask: Why this separation? Are we to believe that the sublime labour of the soul is wholly divorced from the quarry of our daily existence? Must the Initiate, to truly progress, sever himself from the very world he is charged to improve?

I submit to you, Brethren, that this is a misunderstanding of the Architect’s design. The realms of Thought and Action are not a distant country to which we must emigrate, but rather the two great pillars, the Jachin and Boaz of our inner temple, between which the whole of our existence—material and spiritual—must pass to find its true and upright orientation.

They are not destinations, but principles of balance. The work of the Mason is not to escape the world, but to learn to stand firm and true between these pillars, guiding the chariot of his life, pulled by the twin steeds of Contemplation and Deed, with a steady hand upon the reins of Will.

Let us trace the designs upon our Trestle Board and delve into the heart of this mystery.

We are all born into the world from the darkness of the womb, and so are we all destined to pass through the Western gate to the Eternal East. This is the common lot of man.

But we, as Freemasons, have made a choice of a different order. Through the sacred drama of Initiation, we have willingly submitted to a symbolic death.

We have laid down in the figurative grave of the past to erase the old man—the rough and unhewn stone of our profane self—so that we may be reborn. Reborn, as the ritual instructs, into a new state of being, one intended to be wiser, stronger, and more fit for the Builder’s use.

This initiatory rebirth, however, is not a passive event. Its success is conditioned entirely upon the harmonious and skillful use of our two great spiritual working tools: Thought and Action.

Let us extend this metaphor of rebirth to its full measure. Let us place ourselves once more in the skin of the new born babe, for in its journey from darkness to light, we find a perfect allegory for our own.

In the first moments of life, the world is a blur, a great, undifferentiated whole. Our five senses, the very channels through which we perceive reality, are as yet untuned instruments.

In this state, the infant knows no distinction between self and other. The breast that gives suck, the arms that cradle, the voice that soothes—all are perceived as extensions of its own being.

Everything is “I.” The concept of “Thou” has not yet dawned. This is the primordial state of unity, a world without division, but it is the unity of ignorance, not of wisdom.

It is through the gradual sharpening of the five points of fellowship with the world—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—that the infant becomes aware of the other. And this, my Brethren, is a profound and terrible revelation.

It is a true cataclysm of the soul to realise that the source of one’s comfort and sustenance is not a part of oneself! It is a labour of immense psychological weight to distinguish the hand that is part of the self from the rattle it grasps, which is not.

It is the first great loss, the first experience of mortality in a sense, to mourn the mother as a separate being. This suffering, this separation, is the crucible in which the self is forged.

From this friction between pleasure and frustration, comfort and want, the first sparks of thought are struck.

As it has been wisely observed, it is through the human order that the child first forms an idea of the self, differentiating between the ego and the non-ego, and thus establishes the first great polarity: the Self and the Other. Our very capacity for thought arises in response to this division.

Here we can draw a clear parallel on our tracing board. The profane man, the uninitiated, lives in a state akin to that of the infant. He is the centre of his own universe, a rough ashlar, jagged with the projections of his own ego.

Events are significant only insofar as they relate to him. Having long since mastered his physical senses, he has allowed them to grow dull to the world beyond his immediate concerns.

He has enclosed himself in a bubble of selfhood, impervious to any true exchange, isolated from the light of other perspectives.

Yet, from this slumbering mass, some are stirred by a noble discontent. They feel the insufficiency of the self, the dimness of their own isolated lamp.

They begin to desire an opening to the world of the other, to cease making the cosmos revolve around their own axis. These are the men who are ready to knock upon the door of the Lodge.

They are seekers of Light, and they understand, perhaps only intuitively at first, that this Light is not to be found solely within, but is reflected in the eyes of their Brothers.

Thus, the new initiate, divested of the glittering metals of his ego and pride, takes up the staff of the pilgrim and begins the great journey inward, by first journeying outward.

Observe, however, a subtle but crucial distinction in the paths. The new born divides his world: from one, he passes to two—the self and the other. The initiate, having already made this division, has often retreated into the fortress of the self.

His task is not to create the division, but to bridge it. He has understood that to truly square the stone of his own being, he must know how its faces are seen from every angle. He must open himself to the territory of the other, and in so doing, he rediscovers the world in its wholeness—a harmony of self and other.

The great work of initiation, therefore, may be understood as the sacred art of establishing a just and perfect equilibrium between these two poles.

Having passed this first gate, our development is guided by what we call Experience. But what is this thing, this master craftsman to whom we apprentice our lives? Let us place it under the Mason’s square and examine its properties. We shall find that Experience itself is a construct built from the interplay of Thought and Action.

In our daily labours, every action we perform is followed by a consequence. The plumb line, when dropped, falls true to the centre of the earth. Fire, when touched, imparts a sensation of heat. By repeating an action, we memorise the reaction.

This is the foundation of empirical knowledge. It is simple, yet it forms the bedrock of our understanding, not just of the physical world, in the manner of our Operative forefathers, but of the complex social and moral world we inhabit as Speculative Masons.

Repeated interactions with our Brethren, our families, and our society nourish the memory, inform the thought, and chisel the stone of our character.

But let us look closer at the logic of this so-called Experience. The philosopher David Hume, a man who hovered near the porch of our Temple though he may never have entered, correctly identified its great weakness.

The logic we use is empirical, relying solely on repetition and habit. As Hume noted, all our inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning.

His famous example is that of the rooster who crows each morning before the sunrise. The primitive mind, observing this constant conjunction, concludes that the rooster’s crow causesthe sun to rise.

We may smile at this folly, but are our own convictions built on any surer foundation? The moral codes, the traditions, the very notions of “good” and “bad” we inherit from our culture, are, as Hume would argue, no more rationally grounded than the caveman’s belief in the solar rooster.

They are valid only within the context of the habits and customs that support them. This explains the profound difficulty we have in truly understanding other cultures; their customs are not ours, and so their virtues can seem to us as vices, their wisdom as foolishness.

Hume’s devastating conclusion was that thought is supposed to guide everyone, yet, in reality, almost no one thinks. We align ourselves with the prevailing opinion, and our individual judgment is subsumed into the collective. The social man is subject to a conformism of which he is blissfully unaware.

Consider a striking experiment conducted in the profane world. A man, our test subject, is placed in a room with a group of actors whom he believes to be fellow volunteers.

He is shown a simple visual test—three lines of varying lengths—and asked to identify the longest. The answer is obvious. The middle line is clearly twice the length of the others.

Our subject records his correct answer. But then, one by one, the actors aloud declare the shortest line to be the longest, stating it with absolute confidence.

When it is our subject’s turn to speak, he hears the unanimous, yet clearly false, judgment of the group. Under this pressure, my Brethren, a staggering two out of three men will abandon the evidence of their own senses and conform to the error of the majority.

This is the subtle poison of the profane world. Techniques of mass persuasion, from commercial advertising to political propaganda, are built upon this very principle.

The man who perfected these methods for corporate and political powers, Edward Bernays, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

He understood how to manipulate the unconscious desires of the herd. It is a chilling testament to the power of these forces that his work was admired and studied by the dark architects of tyranny in the 20th century.

To this flawed reasoning, rooted in habit and warped by conformity, we must add a third distortion: the fallibility of our own perception. The signals from our five senses are not reality itself; they are raw data interpreted by the brain.

Our thoughts then operate upon this interpretationas if it were unshakeable truth. Yet, as any student of optics or psychology knows, this interpretation can be profoundly misleading. We see three faces of a cube and our brain constructs the whole, unseen object.

We forget that we are not seeing the cube, but a model of a cube built within our own minds. The art of the stage magician is founded entirely on exploiting this gap between sensation and perception.

It was the great thinker René Descartes who, in his own Chamber of Reflection, sought to find a foundation that could not be shaken.

By employing rational doubt—not the sterile, systematic doubt that questions everything for its own sake, but a constructive, rational inquiry—he swept away every belief founded on sensory illusion and inherited custom.

He was left with a single, unassailable truth, the very cornerstone of the individual temple: Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” This, combined with his maxim, “Where there is doubt, there is reason,” gives us two solid pillars upon which to erect the new man, the true Initiate.

Herein lies the sublime purpose of the Lodge. The new Initiate, having consented to be reborn, must now relearn how to see, how to hear, how to think. The Lodge is a school of perception, a laboratory for the soul.

The trials of initiation are designed to be disorienting, to warn the candidate that his unexamined interpretations of the world will lead him astray.

He is implicitly asked to abandon the egocentric world of the “I” and open himself to the world of the “Other,” employing his senses with a newfound acuity, whilst seasoning his conclusions with a healthy, rational doubt.

Within the tiled confines of the Lodge, custom is not king. Only the Ritual reigns—a timeless, universal constant, set amidst a constellation of symbols that challenge our vision and provoke our thought.

To work with the Square is not merely to see it, but to contemplate the meaning of rectitude. To behold the Compasses is to ponder the relationship between the finite self and the infinite expanse of creation.

This symbolic work engages the whole man—senses, intellect, and spirit—and slowly, degree by degree, makes us aware of another reality, far from the clamour and influence of the profane world.

The repetition of the Ritual is not the mindless habit of Hume’s rooster; it is the conscious, rhythmic chipping away at the rough ashlar, each blow struck with intention, bringing the stone closer to its perfect form.

From this labour, we seek a harmony between Thought and Action, a union that results in a perfect creation, a “Masterpiece” that is in balance with its environment and in alignment with the will of the Creator.

The Great Architect of the Universe Himself exemplifies this perfect union. His Thought and His Action are one, expressed through the creative power of the Word, the Divine Logos.

Unlike us, He comprehends the whole design. The Initiate, no matter how far he has travelled to the East, works with but a small portion of the blueprint.

His domain of thought and action, however vast it may seem, is inherently limited. Let us never forget: thought, however powerful, cannot instruct the unknown.

Pure thought, as practised in silent meditation, prepares the soul for harmonious action. And pure action, the transformation of matter, whether it be stone or spirit, brings its own form of enlightenment.

Here we see that the Operative and the Speculative are not two separate paths, but the two hands of the same Craftsman.

The perfect fusion of Thought and Action results in a work we describe as beautiful, or more accurately, elegant—a creation that exhibits Wisdom in its design, Strength in its execution, and Beauty in its harmonious result. This is the Great Work.

Of all the forms of action, none is more distinctly human, none more potent, than the faculty of Speech. It is the ultimate synthesis of our theme.

The thought is conceived in the silent chambers of the mind; the action is the complex and subtle movement of the muscles of the larynx, tongue, and lips.

The result is the Word. But speaking is no ordinary action. It is the tool by which we transmit our inmost thoughts and emotions. It bridges the chasm between one mind and another.

It allows us to commune with the past through the reading of our histories and sacred texts, to shape the present through debate and instruction, and to build the future by the promises we make and the plans we lay.

And yet, my Brethren, what is more easily performed, and more often ill-considered, than a word? We may hesitate before a physical act, instinctively weighing its immediate consequences.

But we often release words from our lips with a heedless freedom, forgetting that they too are actions with profound effects.

Words can wound more deeply than any blade; they can build up a man’s spirit or tear it down; they can enlighten or deceive. They act upon the self-image, the very soul, of both the speaker and the hearer.

Let us examine the very fabric of our language. The words we use, as the philosopher Henri Bergson observed, can become a veil between our minds and reality. “Our thought,” he said, “does not see things; it is content to read the labels attached to them.”

We live in an intermediate zone, outside of things, and even outside of ourselves. This connects to our inherent limitation: only that which has a name truly exists for us in a conceptual sense.

If a thing or an idea is nameless to us, we cannot grasp it, measure it, or incorporate it into our world. This is why, in the ancient Egyptian mysteries, the namewas an essential component of the soul, necessary for eternal life.

It is why, in our own Volume of the Sacred Law, the Creator brings the beasts of the field to Adam to be named, thereby giving man a share in the ordering of creation.

In the profane world, language is debased, used as a tool of division, persuasion, and control. In the Lodge, the Initiate learns to value Speech anew, precisely because he must first learn the discipline of Silence.

During our sacred assemblies, speech is not a chaotic babble, but a structured current that circulates with order and purpose, contributing to the egregore, the collective spiritual consciousness of the Lodge.

It arises from a desire to share Light and it is received in a sacred space of mutual trust, where every word is weighed. The thoughts of all the Brethren nourish the words that are exchanged, passed from one to another like a symbolic flame.

Therefore, my Brethren, let our watchwords be these: Think Well, Speak Well, Do Well.

This is the three-fold cord that is not easily broken. It is the application of the Rule to our thoughts, the Square to our words, and the Compasses to our actions.

With these tools, we are equipped to draw not merely diagrams in the sand, but the living blueprints of a more noble life, to the glory of the Great Architect of the Universe.

To transcend the mundane, we must be ever vigilant, not misled by the illusions of our senses, nor by the tyranny of the crowd, nor by the very words we use to build our world.

Let us then leave this place and return to our labours with this question graven upon our hearts and minds: Are we building a Temple with our thoughts, words, and deeds?

Or are we merely speaking of its blueprints? The answer, my Brethren, lies not in further speculation, but in the work itself.

So mote it be.

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