"I have heard frequent use", said the late Lord Sandwich, in a debate on the Test Laws, "of the words 'orthodoxy' and 'heterodoxy'; but I confess myself at a loss to know precisely what they mean." "Orthodoxy, my Lord", said Bishop Warburton, in a whisper, -- "orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man's doxy".
Interchange between the Teacher and Rita in the film Educating Rita (a favourite of mine)..
Teacher: Ah, yes - tragedy.
We must not confuse tragedy - well, the real tragedy of drama -with the merely tragic. Let's a take a tragic hero, Macbeth for instance.
We see that the flaw in his character forces him to take the inevitable step towards his own doom. Whereas, what we read in the newspaper as being tragic - er, "man killed by falling tree" - is not a tragedy.
Rita: It is for the poor sod under the tree.
Rita is close to my heart
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home -Wordsworth
"To enclose all truth in a spoken language, to express the highest occult mysteries in an abstract style, this would not only be useless, dangerous and sacrilegious, but also impossible. There are truths of a subtle, synthetic and divine order, to express which in all their inviolate completeness, human language is incapable. Only music can sometimes make the soul feel them, only ecstasy can show them in absolute vision, and only esoteric symbolism can reveal them to the spirit in a concrete way."
"Man's possibilities are very great. You cannot even conceive a shadow of what man is capable of attaining. But nothing can be attained in sleep. In the consciousness of a sleeping man his illusions, his 'dreams' are mixed with reality. He lives in a subjective world and he can never escape from it. And this is the reason why he can never make use of all the powers he possesses and why he lives in only a small part of himself."
Hopefully this forum is making you feel a little bit excited about the unique opportunities that Freemasonry offers anybody who is willing to chase the clues, to set their minds free enough to explore paths hitherto ignored.
Some paths might have dead ends, but others lead to wonders most marvellous... thing is one needs to explore them all.
