A Tendency To Go in a Particular Direction

Greetings and welcome back to our study and opinion of Albert Pike’s “Morals and Dogma” as we continue chapter 26!

 

 As we continue this chapter, we will find Pike commenting upon the fascinating forces of nature that rule the direction and tendencies in which we are are bound to.

 

 

Without any more delay, LET’S READ PIKE!

 

The greatest mysteries in the Universe are those which are ever going on around us; so trite and common to us that we never note them nor reflect upon them. Wise men tell us of the laws that regulate the motions of the spheres, which, flashing in huge circles and spinning on their axes, are also ever darting with inconceivable rapidity through the infinities of Space; while we atoms sit here, and dream that all was made for us. They tell us learnedly of centripetal and centrifugal forces, gravity and attraction, and all the other sounding terms invented to hide a want of meaning. There are other forces in the Universe than those that are mechanical.

Pike ends this paragraph reminding us that there ARE other foces in the universe other than just those that are mechanical. 

 

 And that statement will begin Pike’s discourse.

 

Let’s read on:

 

Here are two minute seeds, not much unlike in appearance, and two of larger size. Hand them to the learned Pundit, Chemistry, who tells us how combustion goes on in the lungs, and plants are fed with phosphorus and carbon, and the alkalies and silex. Let her decompose them, analyze them, torture them in all the ways she knows. The net result of each is a little sugar, a little fibrin, a little water--carbon, potassium, sodium, and the like--one cares not to know what.

We hide them in the ground: and the slight rains moisten them, and the Sun shines upon them, and little slender shoots spring up and grow;--and what a miracle is the mere growth!--the force, the power, the capacity by which the little feeble shoot, that a small worm can nip off with a single snap of its mandibles, extracts from the earth and air and water the different elements, so learnedly catalogued, with which it increases in stature, and rises imperceptibly toward the sky.

One grows to be a slender, fragile, feeble stalk, soft of texture, like an ordinary weed; another a strong bush, of woody fibre, armed with thorns, and sturdy enough to bid defiance to the winds: the third a tender tree, subject to be blighted by the frost, and looked down upon by all the forest; while another spreads its

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rugged arms abroad, and cares for neither frost nor ice, nor the snows that for months lie around its roots.

But lo! out of the brown foul earth, and colorless invisible air, and limpid rain-water, the chemistry of the seeds has extracted colors--four different shades of green, that paint the leaves which put forth in the spring upon our plants, our shrubs, and our trees. Later still come the flowers--the vivid colors of the rose, the beautiful brilliance of the carnation, the modest blush of the apple; and the splendid white of the orange. Whence come the colors of the leaves and flowers? By what process of chemistry are they extracted from the carbon, the phosphorus, and the lime? Is it any greater miracle to make something out of nothing?

Pike tells the story of two seeds, bot with roughly the same chemical makeup. 

Yet, one seed will grow to become a weed and the other seed grows to become a beautiful flower.

 

Pike asks rhetorically, from WHERE do the beautiful colors come when the seeds bloom?  Where do the colors come from that make up the green leaves?

 

 From the dirt and mud springs forward beauty!

 

 Sometimes, the same can be said for our own direction and ideas.

 

  It is a myth, I have found, to believe in “only having one shot to get it right”.

 

 The “one shot” myth laughs in the face of REDEMPTION.

 

  We will get it “wrong” long before we ever “get it right”.

 

  We will continually fail and in our failures we will LEARN and we will do better the next time we try to do a thing.

 

 Pike ends the paragraph stating “Is it any greater miracle to make something out of nothing?"

 

  Those of us who have set out to create will confer that it is the most miraculous and awe striking feeling to see an idea to its concrete fruition.

 

   Next:

 

Pluck the flowers. Inhale the delicious perfumes; each perfect, and all delicious. Whence have they come? By what combination of acids and alkalies could the chemist's laboratory produce them?

And now on two comes the fruit--the ruddy apple and the golden orange. Pluck them--open them! The texture and fabric how totally different! The taste how entirely dissimilar--the perfume of each distinct from its flower and from the other. Whence the taste and this new perfume? The same earth and air and water have been made to furnish a different taste to each fruit, a different perfume not only to each fruit, but to each fruit and its own flower.

Is it any more a problem whence come thought and will and perception and all the phenomena of the mind, than this, whence come the colors, the perfumes, the taste, of the fruit and flower?

And lo! in each fruit new seeds, each gifted with the same wondrous power of reproduction--each with the same wondrous forces wrapped up in it to be again in turn evolved. Forces that had lived three thousand years in the grain of wheat found in the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy; forces of which learning and science and wisdom know no more than they do of the nature and laws of action of God. What can we know of the nature, and how can we understand the powers and mode of operation of the human soul, when the glossy leaves, the pearl-white flower, and the golden fruit of the orange are miracles wholly beyond our comprehension?

We but hide our ignorance in a cloud of words;--and the words too often are mere combinations of sounds without any meaning.

In these paragraphs, Pike compares thought and perception of the mind to the same concept of the growing seeds.

 

  Where DOES thought and perception come from?

 

 We know that a combination of nature and nurture fertilizes brilliance and shapes our own thoughts and prejudices and sets us on our paths early in life.

 

  But, what keeps our thoughts and actions pointing toward a goal?

 

  Many are motivated by money, some are motivated by trying to help make a difference in society.

 

  We all must take a moment to understand what our motivations are on a personal level.

 

  Pike also reminds us that we often do hide our ignorance in clouds of words, too often just sounds that have no meaning at all.

 

  I hope that is a rare occurrence for myself, but i am forthright enough to recognize I am as guilty as anyone else burrowing in words to hide my own shortcomings.

 

  Next:

 

What is the centrifugal force? A tendency to go in a particular direction! What external "force," then, produces that tendency?

What force draws the needle round to the north? What force moves the muscle that raises the arm, when the will determines it shall rise? Whence comes the will itself? Is it spontaneous--a first cause, or an effect? These too are miracles; inexplicable as the creation, or the existence and self-existence of God.

Who will explain to us the passion, the peevishness, the anger, the memory, and affections of the small canary-wren? the consciousness of identity and the dreams of the dog? the reasoning powers of the elephant? the wondrous instincts, passions, government, and civil policy, and modes of communication of ideas of the ant and bee?

Who has yet made us to understand, with all his learned words, how heat comes to us from the Sun, and light from the remote Stars, setting out upon its journey earthward from some, at the time the Chaldæans commenced to build the Tower of Babel? Or how the image of an external object comes to and fixes itself upon the retina of the eye; and when there, how that mere empty, unsubstantial image becomes transmuted into the wondrous thing that we call SIGHT? Or how the waves of the atmosphere striking upon the tympanum of the ear--those thin, invisible waves--produce the equally wondrous phenomenon of HEARING, and become the roar of the tornado, the crash of the thunder, the mighty voice of the ocean, the chirping of the cricket, the delicate sweet notes and exquisite trills and variations of the wren and mocking-bird, or the magic melody of the instrument of Paganini?

Our senses are mysteries to us, and we are mysteries to ourselves. Philosophy has taught us nothing as to the nature of our sensations, our perceptions, our cognizances, the origin of our thoughts and ideas, but words. By no effort or degree of reflection, never so long continued, can man become conscious of a personal identity in himself, separate and distinct from his body and his brain. We torture ourselves in the effort to gain an idea of ourselves, and weary with the exertion. Who has yet made us understand how, from the contact with a foreign body, the image in the eye, the wave of air impinging on the ear, particular particles entering the nostrils, and coming in contact with the palate, come sensations in the nerves, and from that, perception in the mind, of the animal or the man?

These paragraphs are reminescent of the rhetorical questions written in the book of Job in the Old Testament in the Bible.

 

 Though rhetorical, it makes sense to take time to ponder from where our will is directed from. What IS it that inspires anyone to do anything at all? 

 

  When I founded the Universal Freemason Research Society, the seed of my inspiration was my love for masonic philosophy. 

 

  Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike planted that seed. As masonic philosophy took root in my own life, I found that my outlook at life was changing in profound ways. 

 

 I was seeing beauty and symbolism in the most obscure things and in people. 

 

 I was reminded to open my mind to philosophies my upbringing told me was supposed to be off limits, or evil! Little did I know until I was inspired by Pike’s words to research EVERYTHING, how enlightened I would become by the ways of ancient truths and in Gnostic thought.

 

  Having had my own life changing experiences through masonry, I found it important to share these philsophies with all in hopes of planting seeds myself and through Universal Freemason, to affect positive changes in society. 

 

  I hope this inspires you to do something positive, too. 

 

  And with that, I will close the study for this time!

 

  Thank you for joining me again. And for those of you who have been with this study for the past two years, through illness and life’s curveballs, thanks for having the patience to see this through to chapter 32. We should finish our study and opinion of Morals and Dogma by early 2017 (I hope).

 

  See you next time!