Happy Summer Time! I hope you are all well and having fun in our gorgeous high(ish) altitude summer sun.

Stated meeting is August 2. Summer dress (like there’s any chance of wearing a tie in our warm summer evenings). As I learned last month, there is no dinner during the summer months, so the Hall Board meets at 6:00, and Stated starts at 7:00. We have a new applicant we will be hearing the investigation report on. Thank you to those who have accepted the responsibility of doing investigations this year. A man’s journey in Freemasonry begins with becoming our friend. He comes to dinners and non-tiled meetings, hangs out, and gets to know us, and we him. Then he applies and puts money on the line. Then a few brothers have a one on one with him to get to know his motivations. Then we get to start practicing and re-memorizing.

I better get on my own memorizing. It won’t be too long before we’ll be putting on this new fellow’s first degree. Might be a hint to the rest of the officers to crack open the cypher every now and then.

Let me know if any of you have any ideas to generate recurring revenue from our property. I am specifically speaking to the larger membership that we rarely see or hear from. There are still a couple of ideas that are being looked into, but I understand the hall board has been trying to come up with a solution for some years now and there’s not too many ideas left to pursue to see if they have legs. Our hall president is pursuing a really promising one, but we will need more than it alone will provide. We could use some fresh ideas from those of you we don’t often see. We need to find a way to generate recurring monthly revenue to the tune of two grand a month to break even, or what we really need is better than that so we can start saving at least a little bit towards building repairs. If we could get some regular recurring income coming in we could use that to service a loan for a bigger business idea, and with a lot of our size, there are a number of good business ideas that have been floated. The hall board meetings are open to everyone, and I encourage your attendance and your voice.

Luckily our current property is not an historic Masonic temple that we feel obligated to try to save right up until our last dollar runs out, like so many other lodges I’ve seen that have failed in recent years. We should probably have it in our awareness that right now we look a lot like those lodges did before they had to sell and consolidate. If we don’t come up with some income ideas pretty quick, we should consider ideas to keep Masonry at our end of the lake without this property.

We will be successful at keeping Masonry at our end of the lake. We can be an example to other struggling lodges that we don’t have to work to have the same environment we’ve been used to back when we were able to support large single use lodge buildings on dues alone. It’s a completely changed environment today. We are currently in a strong position. It is my intention to keep Freemasonry at our end of the lake. Most ideally on the property where we are now. It’s a great lot in many ways. But if it should be that there is no clear path towards a fairly significant income stream (and from what I hear, this effort has been going on for some years), and if we recognize that early on while we’re still strong, the interest income from our invested value would give us exciting options while we shop for a property that would provide rental income to support Masonry in Clearlake far into the future.

To reiterate, we are strong right now. Have no fear. Our lodge leadership is top notch. I am new to this community (four years now), but the fellows making the decisions and doing the yeoman’s work have been a part of this area for a very long time. They have connections, they know the local business community, and they have a good sense for what can work or not work. But we could use your ideas, ‘cause I think they’re starting to run thin.

Our personal goal as Masons is to become better men. Our mission as Blue Lodge Freemasons is to make more Masons. That is our “work” as Masons. That should be our primary focus: to do whatever it takes to keep Freemasonry in the Clearlake/Lower Lake area to be available for good men that might pursue membership in our ancient Craft.

I’ve discovered some super exciting information about the history of the area in which our Masonic lore originates. Sometimes a month or more goes by as I study and learn the subjects my research has exposed me to without learning anything particularly new or exciting. So when I stumble across something entirely new, it is very exciting. This has to do with the pyramids in Egypt a mere 200 miles from King Solomon’s Temple. I assure you that this is a model of their use that is something you did not know, and the evidence for it seems quite compelling, but most curious is the clue that lead to the discovery of the function of the pyramids is hugely blatant and obvious, so why have Egyptologists told us for so long they were tombs for Pharaohs? Is it a function of the human condition that we are so blinded by our addiction to our beliefs that the most obvious facts go unrecognized in the ego’s relentless support of a narcissistic belief? Are the people that disseminate our history to us so loathe to change their narrative when new information is discovered that they will dogmatically insist that the old, now foolish looking model is still the “truth”? I know we all do this in small ways all the time, but are we really doing this on a global scale among the smartest of us? Or has this information been kept secret from the world, and if so, why? I am starting to have an idea why. When visiting some pyramids tourists must first watch an indoctrination video explaining how they were built with thousands of slaves for hundreds of years to be tombs, using copper hand tools. It is amusing to watch videos of people in these indoctrination attempts laughing at the ridiculousness of the model being presented. No one seems to believe the official narrative anymore. Yet the officials do?

I’m not sure if Masonry ever draws our attention to the megalithic pyramids in Egypt that are only a couple hundred miles from where King Solomon’s Temple was (ten days by camel). I haven’t looked for pyramid images or references in Masonry about pyramids before. I think there are pyramids on the poster that is in most lodges, we have one, that shows the hierarchy of the different bodies of Freemasonry in like a pyramid shape. I’m not sure if that part is a pyramid, or just a triangle, I’ll have to look, but I’m pretty sure in the lower right corner there is a small image that shows pyramids in the distance. I find only slight references to the pyramids in Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma.

The mainstream narrative has King Solomon’s Temple (the first one) being built 957 BC. How can they be so exact with the year? I’m surprised they don’t tell us what month and day too. Well, in any case, the mainstream narrative on the pyramids is they were built around 2500 BC. So the builders of King Solomon’s Temple, and all the players in our Masonic story, must have been very aware of the pyramids not that far away. Some likely right there in the same area as the temple. I wonder, did the builders of King Solomon’s Temple know what we now know about the pyramids actual function? Is there a connection with the alchemical aspects of Freemasonry, and the “Land of Khem” (chem...as in chemistry)?

I have suggested before that Masonry holds a secret that has not yet been discovered. It has to do with a frequency, or set of frequencies, or in other words, a specific undulating tone, or you might call it a word (as in the lost word), that was used to lift or work megalithic stone blocks. We also know there is a strong element of alchemy interwoven in Masonry. Is there an ancient secret chemical knowledge stored within the fabric of our Craft that has also gone undiscovered?

Come to stated meeting and hear about this fascinating new discovery and you can let me know if it excites you as it did me. And here I thought I had been down all the possible rabbit holes already :-) See you at Stated,

Michael McKeown