Brethren, family and friends,
First degree on May 31, 7:00 p.m.
Stated Meeting is June 7, Hall meeting 5-6, dinner 6-7, meeting at 7:00. Summer dress (long pants/button up or polo shirt), except I reserve the right to wear a tie because I like to, and you may as well if you are so inclined.

I attended the Master's and Warden's retreat two weeks ago at Incline Village at the Nevada end of the Lake Tahoe. It was beautiful. It was educational. I was invited to a private party in a suite rented for the purpose. It was fun. Masons act with a certain decorum, even when the bar is free. It was expensive; I'm kicking around some fund raising ideas so maybe I don't have to pay for Annual Communication also.

I brought back some swag for those that come to stated. Don't get too excited, but I was thinking of you.

The Royal Arch degrees will be held again this year after long hiatus during the pandemic. It will be held on a private ranch in Comptche June 23-25. The event starts Friday evening with a fish fry, then Saturday morning there is a group breakfast and the degrees get started right away. Lunch and a barbeque dinner are provided, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

This is a camp-out kind of thing. People bring RV's, trailers, tents, or even just sleep in the car. I'll be in the adventure van, and will bring a giant telescope to share the night sky with.

The ranch the event is held at has a large outdoor lodge set up. It has amphitheater seating scaling up a steep hillside looking down upon a lodge room stage with an actual River Jordan running through. There is a large professional cook shack, and ample seating for our large group. This is a special kind of Masonic event we get to enjoy here in Northern California, and I encourage you all to consider attending. I put a button up for the flyer at our website at https://clearlakemasoniccenter.org

Most of us wear a Masonic ring. I don't think we do it for the benefit of other people. I think maybe twice someone has recognized me as a brother, or the other way around, because of our rings. That's pretty rare. I like to wear the ring because men don't have too many excuses to wear jewelry. My ring isn't exactly flashy though. It's one of the inexpensive indestructible tungsten carbide type they sell on eBay, so maybe it's not so much about the fun of wearing jewelry. Although that is a thing.

The ring is almost more of a badge of a mason than the apron. I find the ring is a constant reminder of our core Masonic values. We do have a lot of them. I wonder how many they add up to?. Brotherly love, relief, truth. Faith, hope, charity. Temperance, fortitude, prudence and justice. Wisdom, strength and beauty. That's 13. I'm sure I'm missing others. The first degree is prominent in my mind right now as we are preparing for that degree. Can you think of others? Drop me a note at عنوان البريد الإلكتروني هذا محمي من روبوتات السبام. يجب عليك تفعيل الجافاسكربت لرؤيته.

Some things we espouse to are not directly attributes of the right living of a spiritually mature human, but point to it through allegory. For example images like the level, the plumb, and the square, or the setting maul, the coffin, and the acacia, and even the square and compass are not of themselves attributes we should emulate, but point to particular behaviors that only those that know the allegorical meaning of these symbols can understand.

Well in any case, this making a good man better thing kinda gets to the crux of what wearing the ring is all about. Maybe. It does remind me of my vows. It does remind me to conduct myself so as to bring honor to our fraternity. When people wonder about how equanimical and fair we are in our business and personal affairs, others will tell them "oh, didn't you know? He's a Mason". People know us by how we conduct ourselves. The ring is our brand recognition.

But we don't practice all this good behavior and living stuff just to be cool, right? That would be like being a poser of a good man. Besides, we're all human and addicted to what our poorly trained learned responses to the environment tells us things mean, things that it's usually wrong about. So there's a pretty significantly short limit to just how far we can change our behavior to become this vaulted "better man" Mason thing all on our own. We can't fake being cool.

Maybe we can. Maybe acting cool is a trick to obtaining actual coolness. No one would be able to tell the difference. By "cool" I mean unmoving. A thing happens and you just sit back relaxed, humorously observing the ego as it jumps from meaning and reaction in a knee jerk way and you're not buying it, and you just sit there observing. Chill.  Cool.

That seems nigh impossible for the most part. I do pay attention to the movement of energy of emotion and it seems like most of the time I react based on an assumed meaning of what I'm observing and then I identify with the resultant emotional response: "this is how "I" feel",  instead of remembering to stand in the center as the observer. And I don't mean only in terms of large emotions, but tiny constant misunderstandings of what I see and interpret it to mean.

There is hope for us though. My understanding is that the difference between the enlightened Self aware state and normal awareness like we're doing right now is merely in attachment, in other words instead of identifying with the learned responses to things like we do now, we identify with the sense of Awareness itself. However even after enlightenment, the ego's poorly trained responses to stimuli, and the resultant movements to energy labeled as emotion, continues. The difference is there is no longer attachment to them; we no longer believe those responses and beliefs to be "us". As time goes on spent in the enlightened state, the learned responses begin to fall away through disuse, but initially the enlightened person looks just like the unenlightened. They just don't buy into the dream like responses anymore, even though they still happen on autopilot like they always have.

Look within your center right now, this moment, for that aspect of you that is forever unchanging and ever present. It is right now this very moment the most impressive attention filling thing going on in your awareness and it is so attractive you are completely addicted to it. You are this thing at your core, but like the dog "Dug" in the movie "Up!" who's entire attention is instantly distracted by a squirrel, our entire attention is continually distracted by the changeable and we completely ignore the perennial.

Well anyway, I wear my ring with pride. I am proud to be a Mason. I was a Mason before I knew what Masonry was. There are many other good men, and their ladies, that need to know what Freemasonry is about. They need to know there are real secrets in the world that hold the solution to human's very survival on this planet. The world needs to hear our message of civility. The world's population needs to be exposed to the great moral and spiritual precepts that lead one to the enlightened state of awareness.

We can not pretend a civil world. We can not cry from the East for civility to spread throughout the realm and expect anything to happen. But those who Awaken are instantly made civil humans. Never again does an awakened person behave in a manner so as to bring pain on his world because any pain we spread around us is pain we are making on ourselves, for we are that which we observe.

We make Masons to make them think about why and how to be a better man. We make Masons so they consider their mortality and the moral compass by which they live. In this way we lead them to a realization of who they really are, and as the awakening of the human species expands, civility will become our natural order on the planet. We will live in harmony with the Great Architect's Grand Design.

We must make more Masons. The goal is civility. The path is Awakening. Our members need to come from all the good men you know.

Michael McKeown