Welcome to the symbolic Lodge of conversation where Consciousness and curiosity enter weave into to discussion this is all square podcast I’m your host RL Franks and today’s guest has been a Mason for over 30 years he’s a practicing lawyer in the area and his take on masonry is very insightful over
The decades that he’s been serving the craft we’re going to get to know illustrious brother Doug King Doug thank you for being on all square podcast hey Robbie thanks for having me on here uh I think this is what you’re 18 podcast and I read I’ve watched quite a few of them
And it’s been exciting to watch this grow and and I’m very glad to be here in this environment with you you know Doug I’ve always appreciated our friendship your your words of advice for me as I’ve been now embarking on almost 11 years in the fraternity this Friday Doug you’ve
Seen a lot you’ve been a part of a lot of different branches in masonry but how did you get involved in this fraternity well I uh yeah I’ve been in around a little bit over 30 years and uh uh I I got involved in the fraternity really
Without knowing anything about it uh my uh girlfriend at the time my now wife of 30 some years uh her father was a director of the little red car unit at The Shrine so it was pretty much unspoken that I would also be driving those little red cars as part of
Admission to the family and uh so they said well I uh to join to get in those red cars to join the shrine you have to be a Mason first and I had what’s what’s that and so I joined and went through very quickly in 1992 for the sole purpose of being able
To go into the shrine and get into those red cars uh I had remember looking up an article on Freemasonry I had no idea what it was uh and I thought okay it’s kind of old it’s kind of conservative or whatever it seems benign I I can I can
Get through this and uh I went through it and then um it was uh that summer of ’92 and I went to Florida and talked to my aunt and she said I have some things for you from your grandfather uh I didn’t know that my grandfather was the master of Sania
Lodge in 1967 she brought his apron his both of his Rings his past Master’s ring and his members ring and gave those to me and then it kind of lights went on that oh I’m in a masonic family now uh I’ve got it the on both sides uh and uh
And then I started getting into it and and I fortunately knew a lot of Great Men Who mentored me and talked to me and uh I was able to advance into different bodies fairly quickly for my age uh because they had trust in me and I tried
Not to disappoint any of them uh at any time and uh so things develop the way they developed U I’ve been a past Master twice I’ve held other offices throughout uh the fraternity uh and the greatest thing about the fraternity is I’ve been involved in some of the newer
Organizations that have been formed in the last decade or so and that’s the most excitement because they’re populated by young men uh by and large you have who are un unfettered by traditional concepts of Brotherhood they bring their own Brotherhood with them and they build on that and it’s a
Wonderful and heartening thing to see so you joined in 1992 right yes what were the Dynamics like in the field of in the fraternity of masonry well it by in the 1990s you still had kind of the old traditional corporate kind of masonry um and what I
Mean is that you had a lot of masonic bodies you had a lot of masonic activities a lot of social activities a lot of new members coming in all the time it was like a machine that was the the analogy um there wasn’t much education going on
There wasn’t much emphasis on you know self-development introspection those kind of things that came along later um and when you first joined something like that for the first 10 years or so masonry is what you’re told it is it is what you see in your Lodge it is what
Your Past Masters and mentors tell you it is and only after a certain period of time can you look back and say okay that’s what I see it is but I also see uh masonry throughout the World thanks to the internet you could look and see
Masonry in other parts of the world you could also look and see masonry in the past Glo it’s a global Enterprise and you start saying gee they do things like that that we don’t do here and this looks very interesting but I don’t see it here and then you realize wait a
Minute this is just our version of it here uh and that you can create a new version of it for yourself you can create a new version of it for those around you and that’s kind of the the path that that happened but um no it was
A very um it was a well-developed uh machine okay okay and and although I would say that between the time I joined my my Lodge and the time I was Master I saw some Decay setting in in the Machinery uh and you simply didn’t have men coming like you had before you
Didn’t have you had issues filling out the officer lines I saw that during that first 10 years and that’s really what made me concerned about where where do we go as a fraternity I love this group I love these men uh I I don’t want to be
What on What appears to be the declining slope so what do you do about that and I knew that we’d had ups and downs before in the fraternity over its lifetime and we’ve certainly had times when we had very strong opposition in the world we were banned many countries and still are
So I knew that it wasn’t so bad here but I was concerned about a decline and wanting to get things turned around um because I thought Masonry head mission was a solution for so many problems you know um if you have a religious struggle you have an organization that doesn’t
Care about the religion in particular if you want poor men wealthy men middle class to be together in the same group then you eliminate social standing and wealth as a as a qualifier it’s not even discussed it’s an equalizer among men uh that allows men to be men and push aside
All the stuff they have to deal with during their work lives and during their family lives they get to focus on quintessential manliness in an environment that’s safe their men listen and they care and love them but how do you turn that Narrative of decline around or is it necessary for
This fraternity to shrink or de or be in this declining fashion right now because over two we’ve talked in the past on episodes there was two world wars that really turn the Society of the fraternity into or Society into a worldwide fraternity people wanted to find that Brotherhood they were more
About the fellowship and camaraderie education kind of took a backseat how do you turn that around in today’s society with everything going on in people’s lives yeah that’s a great question uh you’ve probably heard of this the old uh uh story about the uh the uh English uh uh
Uh artillery uh Squad out in the desert in World War II and uh I have not they’re they’re they’ve got their all set up it’s a 12-man crew and everybody’s doing something right loading aiming whatever and there’s the 12th man standing there just standing off to the side by himself and the
Colonel comes up and says hey what um I see you’re setting this up and you’re doing well what’s this 12th guy for he’s there to hold the horses well there were no horses anymore to pull gun carriages around the tradition just kept rolling along we need that guy he’s the horse guy we
Can’t get rid of him and it doesn’t cost us anything to keep him there so there he is so so when you get to the point where you’ve running decade after decade of the same kind of thing I think what I thought was let’s go back to First
Principles let’s go all the way back to 1717 or farther back and look and see what the creators of The Craft wanted it to be who did they want it to be for so let’s return to the past and reinvent and ReDiscover who we are and then we
Can look at what we do now and say okay this is in line with ancient things this is a carry we’re doing this exactly the way they did it hundreds of years ago wonderful but this thing over here that we do this is something somebody cooked up some other time and it’s doesn’t
Really fit so we can probably let that go so you have to be able to um you know divide the the chaff from the wheat masonically uh because everything you do isn’t necessarily good even if it doesn’t appear to burden you if it doesn’t support your mission and your
Core values you probably want to get rid of it so the process for me was let’s examine what’s core about masonry that we need to keep and then the other stuff we can you know push aside and deal with later but let’s strengthen those core values because masonry is all about core
Values it’s essentially tenets core values for life and if you just revisit them and put them first uh you’re going to they’re going to they’re going to expand and grow in application and they’re going to push aside all these you know unnecessary tertiary things that have kind of glom themselves onto
The Hall of your ship so that’s what we did I was let’s go back to First principles what are we all about that led to the question about as I said before the interview why are we still around why does this organization persist after 3 or 400 years yeah
Exactly I mean is doesn’t anybody wonder about that I mean uh We’ve outlived many political um movements Many religious sects and denominations um there’s very few things that are older than we are we certainly outlived every social organization uh that’s out there well why is that what
Are we unique uh why are would why are we unique if we were unique well I think it comes with our philosophies and our principles and our Traditions that we hold so closely it’s those going through those same steps that men before I mean I think that’s what brings us together
We both unfortunately non-masons won’t understand that but we both understand our journey and what our journey has entailed MH some Logics failed in that but the Masons who are involved the passionate Masons understand that I mean you’ve been AC in other states probably other countries and met me men and you already
Know who they are once you’re able to talk to them in a way where he is a legit Mason MH right right yeah you talked about this concept of the organism of masonry you want to go into that more yeah it’s just a kind of a
Concept I’ve been trying to kind of work with and it’s not a completed idea anything but but it seems to me that um you know the the lodge is an organism it has lodges uh this may be heresy but they are like anything living if it
Doesn’t die how do you know it was ever alive that organizations of every kind have have arcs and cycles of beginning ends Etc and hopefully rebirth uh but they have to have a if they’re static nothing’s static so if they think they’re static um then they’re probably not they’re probably actually in a
Downward decline that’s the static kind of idea I was talking about with a lot of lodges when I joined they did the same things every year and did them fairly well but um um in in the organism concept for the lodge applies also to the individuals in the
Lodge so the lodge is just a simp of the members and vice versa microcosm Etc so um if you want to say okay a lodge can’t be static it has to have it has to be developing and trying new things it has to keep growing same thing with the members
Um um we have a chamber of reflection we’ve been using in our lodge for a number of years and one of the components is that is that the member before he starts his work before he takes his first degree he goes goes into this and he’s prepared and part of the
Preparation is that he has to answer questions it’s a testament he has to answer questions that we give him to write out that um reveal where his thoughts are what kind of person he is at that time at that moment and we we keep those questions now in five or 10
Years we’ll we’ll bring those out and we’ll ask him again five years ago before you were Mason these were your answers to these important questions uh would you change any of those answers now uh so it’s a way of measuring The Arc in your own
Development uh and I tell guys uh if you really want to get an honest appraisal of whether masonry has made a difference to you ask your wife ask your wife ask your wife or your your significant other someone who sees you 247 The Good the Bad the Ugly uh who
Sees you at your worst and at your best and then ask them am I better man because of my becoming a Mason I think that’s sometimes I think you can with some women you can hit that or significant others you can hit that right on the head and they’ll see it by
The actions that this fraternity preaches on in other ways especially in today’s society um I think a lot of women are not educated on our fraternity because we may have lacked in having our members be able to talk to their wives because they feel like they
Got to keep everything a secret how I bet you’ve heard that after somebody went through their Entered Apprentice degree they went home their wife asked them what happened I can’t talk about it not the best approach when dealing with this new thing of the fraternity with your
Significant other so I think we need to work on more with educating and articulating what is masonry and what we can can talk about with our significant others because there’s not a there’s not a lot we can’t talk about oh I agree and and and with your significant other your spouse is your
Family generally you need to talk about the Fraternal experience to them uh otherwise um if you say I I join this great organization and we do this charitable work we believe in the you know we believe in how men can be great leaders and fathers and all this stuff
If you come and talking to them about that then they may hold you to it maybe men don’t want to be held to it necessarily you’re you’re putting yourself out there by saying I’m accepting a challenge to be better than I what I am now through the organization
So they will make a judgment about you uh as to are you still the same L you were before and they’ll say I don’t think your Lodge is worth anything your your fraternity is just just a bunch of goofy guys and hats because you didn’t
Change any how do why would I think that they’re capable of changing men so there’s risk there they doing that but I still think the need to measure your own arc your own Improvement your own development as a man outweighs those risks oh um I totally agree with you on
All that let’s go back to that chamber of reflection the so you talked about you get some questions that you need to answer and you’ll re-evaluate those at a later time but let’s talk about the Sy the symbolism of the Chamber of reflection and why that’s such an
Important first step into your journey right right right the the the Chamber of reflection is derived from what we believe was a practice of the the Greek the ancient Greek mysteries of Greece now we don’t have a lot of hard information on the mystery schools but
We know enough about them to know that part of that was in a preparation was that the individual man goes into some place where he’s removed from everything he’s familiar with he’s alone uh he’s uh somehow in a very uh uh cold very dark very unyielding place and then he comes
Out from that to the light of his new experience some people say that it’s represents a psychological death and then he’s reborn into the fraternity in a psychological fashion it could be that uh and and anyway it at at at least uh it takes the man who’s worked
All day and you bring him to the lodge and you put him in that quiet room and you tell him forget your day forget everything you did today just focus on these things in front of you focus on the question just draw your mind together quietly is a preparation for
What he’s going to go through uh that exercise of Simply withdrawing into your own self qu in the quiet of your own mind we don’t do much of that it’s a meditative thing we don’t do much of that but I think that that’s a great benefit at that moment and maybe he’ll
Adopt the meditation practice throughout his life for at least a moment per day just to draw in himself quietly and and and structure his thoughts and relax uh but but that’s the point it’s a psychological symbolical reminder of a process that’s beginning with you in the
Earth and then you born into this new psychological world of the fraternity could one make parallels with Plato’s allegory of the cave with that in Plato’s Republic I believe right well I you might be able to because on its face it looks like it’s got the components it’s got the Topography of
The cave in it uh but the cave is a lot more going on in it under Plato’s guys it’s not just a dark space that you come out of and seek light there’s uh you are you are while in the the cave you’re viewing what you think is light what you
Think is life in the cave and then you come out and you realize that’s not really it I was I’ve been watching Shadows of life and now I see real life that really doesn’t have a correspondence with the the with the experience there okay um but um who
Knows it they they were both the the the cave U allegory and the Mystery Schools operated in the same time period the same region of of the Mediterranean so it’s very likely there was some correspondence there between them and maybe one was influencing the other but
I don’t get much into the cave allegory I’ve never been satisfied fully with my explanations or understandings of it to my own mind but uh let’s talk about education your Lodge is Phoenix 123 we’ve had another one of your brothers on our podcast Kevin Fuller I see from our friendship from
From attending your LOD you guys really take a stance on education and providing that to men who are looking for that in today’s society in a place where they can dwell and talk and have conversations create presentations tell me more about your Lodge’s Dynamics and what you guys are
Doing in Phoenix we uh we were blessed with a lot of young men who are willing in in the past 15 years or so a lot of young men who were willing to take that up and we willing to do the work uh that education requires uh and and our
Education isn’t necessarily uh uh lectures or formal papers is more like hey this is this is an article I brought in I’ve read it these are my thoughts what are your thoughts and then you have a conversation and that’s what most of this most of our education is it’s it is
Coupled with the Grand Lodge programs on the structures and things like that basic symbolism but the goal of Education I think is I want to know what you’re thinking and and you may say I don’t know anything about the subject matter but I said just listen listen to
It and then in the in your mind you’re a Mason now there’s something in your mind that you’ve picked up even as a young mason that’ll allow you to respond to this genuinely so just think about it and do it and no one’s right no one’s
Wrong um we come out with um something that’s unplanned but it’s a wonderful takeaway um education to my mind uhu is we We Gather in lodges we have to have a group effort you have to have a group of officers to open a lodge one officer
Can’t do it why is that why do we have a collective effort to open the lodge well there’s lots of reasons for that but there’s also in my mind a collective group for education and a group of men who are different in backgrounds and personal uh preferences uh they all come
Together as is on the level so to speak and and in that environment uh I think that’s a perfect environment for learning from the guy who knows it all to the you the newest guy really doesn’t even know what’s what I think that environment of acceptance and love
Between those men is the best teaching environment there is and uh we’re not talking about mathematics or hard science we’re talking about my understanding of myself and my world it’s a very very Hands-On topic uh every body everyone has an opinion about themselves everyone has an opinion about
Whether they’re the person they should be or their shortcomings or how do I how do I live a life that makes sense those are Eternal questions and those are essentially the we try to give the answers to those questions through the various education topics so men coming in into your Lodge
Or into lodges should take a very individualistic approach to themselves and how to apply this yeah it’s as I said it’s a masonry is an is a project of self-interest primarily not group or Collective effort I think properly understood in my opinion it’s a it’s an mechanism for the Improvement of
The individual and everything the improved individual does from that point on collectively family Society marriage government um that’s a derivative of his own development so we focused on that that’s why it’s always what do you think I’m not going to lecture you and have
You what spit it back at me I just said these Concepts how does that ring with you how do you relate to that how what’s your response to something I’ve said that’s what I want and that’s how they grow and they start to um not only hear
Other people’s and respond to it but at some point they start hearing that voice in their head that they haven’t heard before and they say oh I I didn’t realize that fit or oh this makes sense yeah yeah reflect ing critically thinking on C these topics of conversations is important you know WR
Worful Roberto Sanchez I often quote him on the show you know we don’t need a bunch of talking parrots who are just saying it to say it but doesn’t understand the meaning to convey it right right right and I I see that with these new Masons coming in because
They’re not about the titles and sitting in a chair it’s all about self-improvement and what can I do for myself and how can I after I better myself also contribute to humanity to my local community right to my family that’s so important so you go through these
Degrees you now have members you have these engaging conversations you have them contemplating with themselves what’s next for a modern Mason what should they be looking for what should they be a part of in the fraternity you’re talking about what where they should go within the fraternity itself
Yeah or should they just stay focused on their blue Lodge yeah yeah um American masonry seems to U it’s babati in other words it’s the more things you join the more uh campaigns you join the more instrum musical instruments you bang and play the better the more noise you make
The better that’s American masonry and so men join the fraternity and if they’re at all active they belong to every part of it okay every both the rights etc etc and they’re involved in all of that stuff but they’re probably their involvement is uh a mile wide but
Only an inch deep and I the problem with that is that’s a kind of a superficial approach each one of those organizations have deep water to explore but if you’re always on the surface uh you never get down to the depths of it so we always encourage our new members that the blue
Lodge itself is the core uh there’s more there’s more in the symbolisms and philosophy of the blue LOD degrees there’s more there than you’ll ever need in a lifetime you mean it’s more than just another business meeting and it can be more than that or could be more than
That yeah it um again if if you’re static the business meeting is uh you promote the business part of it the paying of bills and things like that uh because it fills the time because God help us if you have 20 minutes left over between cake and donut between donuts
And coffee with nothing to do well let’s get the education guy in here for 10 minutes you know it’s it just becomes a kind of a rote mechanism to do that and at one time a lot of Masons were fine with that but the younger Masons have too many competing too many things
Competing for their time and their attention and they’re not going to sit for that because it it it’s it’s a business meeting it’s utilitarian it’s what we have to do uh they want what the extra stuff that we choose to do the rich stuff the education the
Socialization uh aspects of it uh that’s what they want so the business meetings are necessary in Phoenix we we really don’t have much of a business meeting everything is done is approved beforehand so that the meetings are as wide open for new members ritual work
But also the education part of it uh and I think that that brings people back um your Lodge has much greater attendance at an average meeting than ours does uh we just kind of have a certain amount but I I’m I’m comfortable with that because what goes on among
Those dozen or 15 Brothers is pretty magical stuff you know there is uh some interpretations of the ritual that when you open your meeting ritualistically that you’re kind of uh symbolically standing in in heaven heaven yeah there is there’s no East or there’s no East or West there’s
No North or South even time itself there’s no time in this space uh and so when you create this special environment where where everyone’s a brother where there’s nothing there’s no Strife there’s no Discord there’s pure Harmony like heaven might be we create that space for every meeting that’s not the
Business part that’s just the we create that space because we’re going to bring new members in we’re going to have education in this rarified air of this uh of the special spot and is it just psychological is it spiritual that’s for each member to decide what he thinks is
Going on there but that’s what we were given the process of creating these spaces twice a month yep and uh we we we still do that that has not faded that’s not been skipped I would submit a lot of men don’t understand why we open and
Close the way we did do but if you think of it as a psychological preparation like a flower opening itself up to the sun uh a lot of allegories like that that then you say oh this I should be preparing my mind right now not on my
Phone I should be preparing myself for the experience of being in a room in a space among brothers who I love and respect where something very special can happen to us we’re we’re of like minds and the world is all outside the bills the job the wife they’re outside for a
Few hours and here’s peace you know we talk about before the podcast you said there’s two doors in a masonic lodge room one’s that chamber of reflection where you’re where you walk out of and you never go back in yeah yeah and then there’s the door to the
Lodge where the members come in and it’s guarded by the Tyler right right right and you talked about how you know he’s out there to protect that that space I mean if I had it my way I would rip the clock right out of the uh LOD room
Because I don’t want to focus on the time yeah I want to focus on the experience I’m getting here you can really lodges have missed making that space into something truly special I know you and I have been a part of other appendant organizations in the fraternity and we’ve experienc that with
That Brotherhood with that camaraderie with that education with that ritual it all comes Binding Together it’s Alchemy in my mind yeah it’s a spiritual Alchemy where it’s I get refreshed and re-energized by being around these like-minded men from all different walks of life and I would love to be able to
Have that replication in the modern blue lodges where people start because if you get that fire around their head and you get them excited on what they’re talking about they’re coming back MH you know you said that you’ve noticed that other lodges around the world are doing things different because you said the
Modern American Mason you know get a petition they go to all these other different appendant bodies the shrine the Scottish right the orc right Grotto all that Eastern Star what are you seeing on an international level that these lodges are doing well I don’t I see that there
There’s kind of types of masonry around the world there’s the English type which is social masonry there’s masonry in the Mediterranean and South America which is it’s uh it’s more philosophical albeit perhaps a little more political in the sense because of the histories um American masonry is is is mostly a
Social uh mostly a social experience um similar to English Lodge work uh and it’s the American and the English lodges that seem to have issues right now uh the South American lodges are doing fine thank you very well the Italian lodges the German lodges uh The
Lodges in the Philippines uh they have a mix that is is keeping them going fairly strong uh here in the United States we have uh there soul searching going on about what are we doing what are our numbers doing who are we what are we um
So I I I see most of the world is not so much changing so much I see changing is coming and we’re in the middle of them here in the United States BEC and maybe it has to do with the American personality you know we’re we’re people
Of extremes aren’t we we we’re not in the middle on anything we have you know we we have puritanism over here we have slave owners over here and and uh you know that’s that’s where we come from and uh how we somehow uh balance these uh these Waring kind of factions in our
Own minds I don’t know but I think it’s it’s the American uniqueness that larger may be better A lot of respects and I don’t I fine with large uh but we tend to be up and down we tend to have Cycles in the United States uh that go over
Generations and you mentioned this before about you know whenever there’s a World War our numbers Spike and then we dwindle down a little bit more but in the last 10 or 15 years there’s a new impulse within American masonry that was not there before um the education the
Focus on a philosophical approach to the fraternity uh a kind of a moving away from just uh you know the marketing campaigns and the big charitable organizations uh they’re moving away from those things partly because I don’t know how effective they’ve become for us uh and they’re focusing more on
Traditional methods they’re focusing more on on the the experience of the candidate you know we don’t want to make widgets anymore a thousand a day we want to personalize uh we are Craftsmen after all so we want to make the that fine-tune watch it may take a while
While you talked about off air when we were sitting around having a drink and having a cigar that masonry brings a certain status in your life can you go into that and talk a little bit about that yeah um this has to do this goes back to the
Why the big why why are we why are we here why are we still around what what accounts for it and uh seems to me that there might be um I’ve been doing some reading and stuff about the uh you know the need of people for status or high dominance hierarchy kind of
Theories out there that that explains a lot about human behavior especially among men um you you you want to have status as a human being as a man and you get status by selling more widgets making more money having a better car better looking wife big house those are
Status things and it’s okay to do that that’s who we are we because the more status you have tradition the more likely are you will survive the next winter or you’ll not be killed by somebody breaking in so it it really it it’s evolutionary in a way status yields
Direct results uh to prolong your life and improve your chances to reproduce and and so on so uh so if if status is that I I thought maybe the the purpose of masonry is to provide status to all men you don’t have to have money to be a
Mason you don’t have to come from a family to be Mason or be related to a King to be a Mason um you don’t have to belong to this group or that group um it it opens its doors to all men of good faith who who then by joining it get a
Certain status imputed to them um and and I don’t think that’s a bad thing I think that um we all want status but we all saying no I would never do that I I’m self effacing and uh you know it’s I’m uh you know it’s it’s always the I give away everything to
Everybody else and you know it’s not about me it’s about everybody else rubbish it’s always about us first and I think that if you just say yeah well I I want to have status uh and fraternity is the most benign way of doing it you can join and have the status of a
Four million men fraternity oldest in the world been around the entire Globe a unique social organism throughout history and you can be part of that very easily and all you got to have is a few dollars in your pocket and be willing to to learn and to
Be a good a friend to other men and you’ve got that that status that answers the question of why 95% of our members don’t even come to Lodge they pay their dues and they carry a card around and maybe they have a lapel pin but that is
Worth it to them and we may say well these guys need to come back and participate and we need someone to scrub the pans after the bean supper blah blah blah but no what they’re telling us is they join for the status they respect and and they gained status from this
Great institution they have high opinion of it partly because maybe their father or grandfather joined and they were great men and so now they’re part of that tradition and just being that card carrying member is a tremendous thing and we ought not knock that okay I know
That’s I think that’s a great I think that’s a great point to it you know we live in the age of the internet lot of Internet what internet there’s a lot of information out there there’s a lot of men and this is my theory who are isolated due to
Social media and they’re recluse and they stay with themselves because they don’t know how to interact and masonry engages that interactance by being here for each other having this conversation you can feel the energy just in the room as we talk about our passions of the fraternity but there are men who are
Lost and you were talking about that who are trying to find that status being a part of that fraternity my question to you is masonry needed now more than ever as you look at the Modern Men in today’s age uh I only know what I read on the
Internet but what I what I seem to to U detect is a con and and it’s not just there it’s a there’s a professional concern about the status of men in society they seem to be getting the rough the short stick now and they’re being demonized and they’re being the
They’re toxic no matter what they do uh they um they’re losing ground in education they’re losing ground in so many measurements across Society they’re kind of withdrawing from society in a lot of ways they’re sitting in their basement with their you know fortnite and uh and that’s not a good thing for a
Society to have men uh who who kind of back away from the role of perhaps being you know this this risk taker a person that goes out sets goals and and makes conquests and and achieves things I don’t think Society is going to do well without those men women certainly uh that
Doesn’t mean that they can’t do those roles but I think you need to have both sexes pulling in the Rope um to do that but yeah I I I wonder why it seems to me that premon offers something that every man would be interested in doing there’s nothing
About it that a man has to uh give up to join he doesn’t have to stop believing in one thing to join he doesn’t have to be wealthy to join he really has to give up nothing except some time and basically time to be there to learn and to be incorporated into the
Organization what do you think about the these religious institutions who talk bad about the fraternity and say they’re devil worshippers they’re Satanist you know and they spew all this hatred to their congregation to negate them from knocking on our doors why do you think where do you think that started and why
Do you think that’s so prevalent in today’s society and it’s not just religious institutions it’s other organizations as well yeah but I see I see it more with some of these faith-based backgrounds yeah the first papal bull was in 1735 uh against masonry and it wasn’t
About the ban was not about anything to do with us at all about a ritual or anything it was because we were meeting in secret and you weren’t allowed to meet in secret if you met in secret you must have been plotting against the king
Or the or the or the bishop and that was the nature of the prohibition and it’s obviously ly expanded now um to include religious aspects and and I see that stuff too we we’re always going to have those oppositions they’re always going to be there because they’re driven from
Ignorance um and so what do we do with that we can’t stop that but what do we do is we listen to that stuff from time to time we listen to a little bit and then we listen and say wait a minute are they right or they wrong are we a
Religion disguise you know something like that and then you could say wait wait a minute no we’re not because because because so it’s can be a a tool to self-measure ourselves to test ourselves to make sure and to make sure that to say that look they say that
We’re not good for society well are we good for society or not we have to ask ourselves that are we collectively as a lodge good as a fraternity am I good for society so if they’re going to criticize me you listen to your critics because they can be your
Best teachers and test Masters okay I’m going to prove you wrong and this is why or maybe you’re right in this respect and we need to improve so we use that we can’t get rid of them in in the age of the internet uh it surrounds us it’s
Like a it’s like the air we breathe but we can still simply use them as reminders and as teaching tools uh to improve what we do you talk about education where I’m noticing in today’s society there’s a big spiritual movement Wiccan esoterics hermetics so much stuff is out there for the general
Public and I think men are looking for those philosophies and those kind of studies and you believe that we are the most educated that we’ve ever been as a society but how do you navigate through the Hermetic Arts the esoterics the occult in the traditional sense of hidden
Knowledge how do how do you how does one navigate through that in today’s society yeah I guess I would divide I want to distinguish between uh kind of the esoteric traditional Western esotericism okay which is cabala which is hermetics these kind of underground philosophical religious movements that have been
Around forever I’m not certain that a new guy coming to masonry knows anything about them or cares to him the kind of the exoteric masonry is as mysterious to him as anything else um and so it is that part of masonry that I think we focus on with
That man because that’s just as strange and hidden is anything that experienced Masons would say well here’s the blue Lodge here’s here’s the exoteric but we can go beneath it and there’s all these movements but to him they’re they’re equally mysterious he doesn’t know the
Difference uh and so I would say um I would try to deal with him and say look these really aren’t mysteries in e e exoteric masonry they’re not mysterious at all they’re allegories they’re symbols they’re just representations of ideas and because the ideas we don’t just simply write them out and that
Would be religion we say here’s a symbol and it may these things you contemplate that symbol and maybe the deity will speak to you through the symbol and you’ll say ah okay that’s what it means to me you interpret these things on your own that’s as far as the
Mystery goes I think because again it’s him himself listening to his own interpretation of symbols and allegories and everything else which are the that’s the pallet that we use in the fraternity uh the written word is not important as much as symbols are I think you’d agree
With that I would 100% agree with that yeah Doug I appreciate you coming on today talking discussing Freemasonry the last question I have for you is what’s one thing what’s your message you want to say to the public about the fraternity well the fraternity is nothing more than your neighbors it’s
Your father your grandfather father your uncles it’s family members going back Generations that you probably didn’t even know they were Masons but everyone stands at the tip of a long line of masonic uh involvement ex Masonic influence in this country and America is a particular claim on masonry toward its
Own greatness as a nation so if you’re patriotic masonry is a great support for that because we have this great historical background and the fraternity ining our nation but it it is no no different than let me put it this way um put the list the 10 best attributes or
Virtues that you expect from Men in society right now those 10 aspects those 10 virtues put those together and I would say to you those are the core values that every Mason follows that every that masonry is based was created to allow men to express and live it’s no more complicated than
That that is my brother Doug King I’m RL Frank and you are all Square thank you illustrious thank You Hey RL Franks here thanks again for watching today’s episode don’t forget to like And subscribe also if you believe someone can benefit from the message that we provided on today’s podcast send it over to them you may Inspire them
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