Ancient Mystic Oriental Masonry

"Before appearing on earth, man lived in a spiritual world, similar to the one in which he lives on leaving the earth. Each awaits his turn in this world to appear on earth, an appearance necessary, a life of trials none can escape.

"The life anterior, which we have all passed through, was, so to speak, a life of nothingness, of childbirth, of happiness like that which we enjoy on our exit from the earth; but this happiness cannot be comprehended, ^[20] because it is not accompanied with sensations to prove its sweet reality, therefore God has deemed fit that we should pass through these successive lives, the first, on the globes of which I speak to you — a life unknown, of beatitude, devoid of sensation — the second, the one you enjoy, a life of action, sensation — a painful life placed between the two, to demonstrate through its contrast the sweetness of the third — the life of good and evil, without which we should not be able to appreciate the happy state reserved for us.

" That the Soul is an emanation of Deity, and in its original essence is all purity, truth, and wisdom, is an axiom which the disembodied learn, when the powers of memory are sufficiently awakened to perceive the states of existence anterior to mortal birth. In the Paradises of Purity and Love, Souls spring up like blossoms, in the all Father's garden on Immortal beauty. It is the tendency of the Divine nature whose chief attributes are Love and Wisdom, Heat and Light, to repeat itself eternally, and mirror forth its own perfection in scintillations from itself. These sparks of heavenly fire become Souls, and as the effect must share in the nature of the cause, the fire which warms into life, also illuminates into Light, hence the Soul emanations from the Divine are all Love and Heat, whilst the illumination of Light, which streams ever from the great Central Sun of Being, irradiates all Souls with corresponding beams of Light. Born of Love which corresponds to Divine Heat and Warmth, and irradiated with Light, which is Divine Wisdom and Truth, the first and most powerful Souls repeated ^[21] the action of the Supreme Originator, gave off emulations from their own being, some higher, some lower, the highest tending upward into Spiritual essences, the lowest forming particled matter. These denser emanations, following out the creative law, aggregated into Suns, Satellites, Worlds, and each repeating the Story of Creation. Suns gave birth to Systems, and every member of a system became a theatre of subordinate states of Spiritual or material existence.

" Earths that have attained to the capacity to support organic life, necessarily attract it. Earths demand it, Heaven supplies it. From whence? As the earths groan for the lordship of superior beings to rule over them, the Spirits in the distant Edens, hear the whispers of the tempting Serpent, the animal principle, the urgent intellect, which appealing to the blest Souls in their distant paradises, fill them with indescribable longings for change, for broader vistas of knowledge, for mightier powers; they would be as the gods, and know good and evil; and in this urgent appeal of the earths for man, and this involuntary yearning of the Spirit for intellectual knowledge, the union is effected between the two, and the spirit becomes precipitated into the realms of matter to undergo a pilgrimage through the probationary states of earth, and only to regain paradise again by the fulfillment of that pilgrimage."