My dear friends, family, and brothers in Freemasonry, I am filled with the joy of the Supreme Architect’s presence to again be addressing you in this column. There is so much I want to share with you of my research during the last five years, but space is limited so let me jump right into this month’s topic, which is building towards a set of information that will take several month’s of this column to convey. So let’s get started.

An autodidactic is someone that is self taught. A self taught person looks at evidence and draws his own conclusions. A scholar is someone that goes to school to memorize what other people came up with, and blindly believes them to be correct. Those priorpeople are not necessarily any smarter than you are, nor did they necessarily have access to all the information you have access to today, and you probably do not have the constraints the scholarly system puts on it’s participants to preach the party line. A frailty of the ego is to assume what we’ve been taught is in fact the truth. Not that those who taught us our history obfuscated the truth on purpose; I’m not talking about a conspiracy theory kind of thing (although in many cases we will see that is very likely what did occur), but it is possible that early historians built upon earlier work they believed to be true but a more modern age may look back and realize they made basic assumptions which lead to errors. As a species we are intellectually and technologically young, yet because we measure the span of human accomplishment by the length of our own life we assume that we are supremely advanced and none before us could have been more advanced than we are now. Yet when we look at photos from the CivilWar in America for example, we see massive stone buildings with giant Roman like columns with horse and buggy people on the road in front. One does not need a degree in architectural history to scratch one’s head with the realization that wait a minute, horse and buggy technology people could not have built these incredible stone buildings which abound in the earliest days of our country’s recorded history.

Before we can take a close look at the architecture during the formative years of Freemasonry, we have to remind ourselves of how to use retroductive reasoning by the recognition of that which is the most elemental, or True in our observational awareness, else we might make the same mistakes of judgement that influenced the historians we quote from school, and we need to take a look at the underpinnings of the manifested material world so we can appreciate what might have been the techniques and purpose of the architecture we will look at.

Before you think my expository train has gone off the Masonic rails (and that is easily done if you know me), don’t forget the lessons of the Fellowcraft degree to look closely at science and architecture, and that’s all I’ve been doing the last five years since I last wrote this column. Anyone that has taken the time to memorize the Middle Chamber lecture of the second degree must be curious why all this hullabaloo about architecture and science and take a closer look. A look at these things unbiased by our education results in clear observations that things are not as we learned in school, and maybe Masonry directs our attention here for a reason.

As the briefest example, consider the Parthenon. It’s massive solid stone floor shallows slightly towards the center so that it visually appears flat. It’s columns widen slightly in the middle so as to appear straight. Skilled workmen today take up to 3 months to rebuild or repair a single marble block yet historians tell us the Parthenon was built in 8-9 years by people with copper chisels. Sure, totally believable because I learned it in college so it must be right? Retroductive reasoning my brothers. Make up your own mind. You are as smart and as capable of reasoning out the truth as those historians we chose to believe.

“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of the facts in human heads.” George Santayana

There are two things that should be in your mind when we discuss the art and architecture of the 16-19th centuries of the formative centuries of our great Craft. One is the element of observation, and how that works. For if we look at architecture and do not have an understanding of how that looking occurs, we are likely to make mistakes of ego positionality, that little voice in our head that never shuts up that
tells us things are one way or the other, when actually they are both at the same time. The other thing we should be clear on is the very underpinnings of the natural world, for if we observe architecture and do not understand the energy from which it manifests, we are likely to make mistakes of judgement over construction and intended uses.

That probably sounds a little wacky. Well, considering the source, (that’d be me), I suppose it’s de rigueur. But if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, let me remind you of the Monad and the lesson it speaks to about observation. The Monad is the point within the circle that is supposed to be represented in every regular lodge. Masonry adds two other elements: two parallel lines, and the book of holy writings, which each add elements of the message, but here we will just look briefly at the Monad aspect. It is an ancient mystery school symbol that in Masonry we are taught represents an individual brother circumscribing his passions within due bounds. The traditional meaning of the symbol is the point represents God, or the True Self, or another term is Awareness, and the circle represents the ego (that which decides what things observed mean), or it can also reference the observable space.

If you want to experience something truly mysterious pass a compass around the ring of our lodge’s sculpture of the Monad. The compass will spin, yet touch the ring with a paperclip and you will see it is not a magnet. It represents what our brother Ed Leedskalnin, the builder of Coral Castle in Florida discovered, but I digress.

This awareness at the center is something that never ceases to exist. It pervades all our experience, at every single moment. As a result, for the most part we are completely unaware it is occurring. Awareness is the same for each and every one of us. It is the sameness quality of experience. In many mystery school traditions this is God, or the Godhead, Truth, or Reality. I have come to believe that the Great Architect of the Universe may be something else again, but that is the subject of another column.

Similarly in the material world, there is an aspect that pervades all space and all objects. As with Awareness, we ignore this sameness aspect of the observable space and pay attention instead to the differences that appear to exist, which we call the material, or manifested world. Einstein made a mistake called reification. Reification is observing a behavior, or rather an attribute, and calling it a thing and making an object out of it. This resulted in what today’s modern autodidactic (remember...self taught) physicists call the Cult of Bumping Particles, or the Cult of Quantum. In short (and my space here requires short, challenging though that is), Nicola Tesla, Oliver Heaviside, and Charles Proteus Steinmetz, to name a few, called Einstein a quack because he failed to understand this thing, or rather non-thing that pervades all space and from which the observable material world manifests. This non-thing was called either Aether (or Ether), or Dielectricity. The latter term is primarily used today. It refers to a thing, if you will (though it’s not a thing, and like speaking about Awareness, it’s difficult to use language to accurately describe it) that pervades all space and all objects but can exhibit attributes when in a coherent, and incoherent state.

An example of how dielectricity works as opposed to the bumping particles model (and believe me this will be important when we look at early stone architecture, in a really mind opening way) is light. Freemasonry very loudly points our attention to light. Lux et Veritas. When Freemasonry points our attention to something, for as much time and energy as we put into the practice of our Gentle Craft we should most certainly take a peek, right? So the Cult of Bumping Particles would have us believe that when we turn on a light, particles called photons fly out of the light bulb (or star) and travel through space at a speed that is well known and measurable. Yet the Cult of Quantum can not explain how, after light slows down while passing through glass or water, it speeds back up again. The particle model suggests light loses energy going through the medium and requires energy from somewhere to speed back up again, and it’s a mystery, so quantum physicists go down very lengthy and expensive pathslooking for invented particles and invented dark matter and dark energy to explain it.

But it’s not a mystery at all, for light does not consist of particles flying through space, but is rather the propagation of a disturbance of the aether. More accurately stated it is an “aether perturbation”. To use water as an analogy, (and it is a very loose analogy at that), imagine you’re in the middle of a pond and
you slap your hand in the water. Do the molecules of water under your hand fly to the shore making a wave as they travel? No. Rather, the energy of your hand slap propagates through the medium of the water. If that propagated wave encounters an area of water plants, the wave slows, and when it gets past the weeds into clear water again, it speeds back up again. That is because the actual molecules of water under your hand did not travel fast to the weeds and slow down through the weeds and then somehow got energy to speed back up again. The speed of the wave is a rate of propagation. The speed of light is not the speed of photons traveling, but rather the rate of propagation or a perturbation of the aether (or dielectricity). Similarly with sound. The clap of a hand does not send molecules of air flying towards one’s ears, rather it creates a perturbation of the air that propagates to your ear.

Now you might say, well Michael, that’s a fine model, but who’s to say one model over another is correct when we’re talking about something invisible? Well, it’s not so invisible. I have built a recently invented device called a Ferrocell which enables us to visibly see the propagation of the aether when it is in a coherent state in iron containing material. You call that a magnet, but magnetism is not a thing, rather it is an attribute, and it does not behave at all how you were taught in school, and now that we can see it with our own eyeballs, we can totally get it. In Plato’s Republic, in passage 514a-521b, Ken Wheeler discovered the math which explains the behavior of dielectricity when in a coherent state. The ancients most definitely knew this information. The great thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and Pythagorous from which Masonry derives it’s most important lessons of the material, manifest world understood how dielectricity operates.

There is so much more to explain about dielectricity. It exhibits something called incommensurability, which means two things which arise together, each having nothing in common with the other, and neither able to exist without the other. Space here does not allow me to expound on this further, butsuffice it to understand that dielectricity behaves in a coherent fashion in iron with the posterior attribute of magnetism resulting, in what bumping particles physics calls “atoms”, in the spiral shape of the sunflower, and in spiral arm galaxies. When dielectricity behaves in an incoherent fashion it produces the posterior attributes of mass and gravity and we see the result in things like irregular galaxies and with the varying mass of elements here on Earth.

The flow of dielectricitydown to our planet’s surface is measurable and well known. The earth’s surface, the ionosphere, and the atmosphere between them are known as the “global atmospheric electrical circuit”. The electricity is generally positive in the air and negative at and below the ground. The rate of energy is measured on average at about 30 volts/foot of elevation. Lightning is formed from water droplets collecting this electrical energy until it discharges to ground. If you can imagine clouds collecting this electricity at an elevation of, say, three thousand feet (which is not very high), the electrical potential can be 30 volts/foot x 3000 feet = 90,000 volts! We can collect this electrical energy on clear days, strongest mid day, by placing a tall antenna and running awire to the ground, with a gap before it enters the ground. The electricity will build up in the wire until it jumps to the ground creating a miniature lightening bolt, or spark. This electricity is called ‘static’ because it has virtually no amperage andtherefor can do no work. In order to collect and store the electrical potential so that it can be used to do work we place a capacitor between the wire and the ground so when the spark jumps the gap we store it’s energy. These devices make a small sound, a rhythmic “snap, snap, snap” as the spark jumps and is stored.

With these two understandings in mind, how to use retroductive logical reasoning by keeping in mind the source of awareness symbolized by the Monad, and our new understanding that the ancients totally understood the math and behavior of dielectricity, we are now well poised to take a critical look at the architecture that existed at the time of the formation of Freemasonry, and of course we are going to look most closely at stone architecture because that is specifically what Freemasonry derives much of it’s symbolism from.