Welcome to a special edition of The Scuttlebutt. A Brother Master Mason, in fact a past Grand Master of Washington, wrote a post this morning that I recommend:
I don’t want to steal his thunder, because I think you should go take a look at his words, but a basic piece of it caused me to do this special edition.
We have been taught by society here in the west, especially in the USA to fear death, and to view “The Grim Reaper” as an enemy. A being to avoid. We go to great lengths to evade death, spending sometimes ridiculous amounts of time and treasure to gain just one more month sometimes of pain wracked existence.
The Scythe is not a weapon, it’s a harvest tool. All things die, otherwise why live? The universe requires dichotomy. You can’t have “up” without “down.”
So this is one point of today’s “special,” in the words of Blue Oyster Cult “don’t fear the reaper.” But there’s a bigger and more fundamental point as well.
I like to consider myself an intelligent and well educated man. I am aware at the cognitive level of the truth that all things die, and that death is, in the end, the reward of life, and a passage to something else, though we can not know what.
(please spare me your religion’s opinion. I have one of my own. Understand that it is just an opinion. Just like you can have an opinion on the immensity of the Grand Canyon, but until you go there and see it for yourself, you don’t know how huge it is. You think you do, but you don’t. So to is that “Undiscovered Country.” Until you go there, you can not KNOW. You may have faith, and faith is important, but faith and knowing are two different things.)
But I digress. (I know, what else is new?)
That cognition did not have any bearing on my ‘instinctual knowledge’ which is to say the knowledge that I got by immersion from birth in our society, that Death personified, is something to be avoided. Think about it, we’re coming up on the Halloween retail season, the stores have these giant, sometimes animated ‘Grim Reapers’ for sale, we see him in the movies, in books and cartoons from birth, always as a ‘scary guy' meant to strike fear into your heart. If you get that from infancy on, you internalize it. That which we receive with our mother’s milk, we generally do not question.
Not all cultures have this perversion of thought, the Hispanic culture celebrates death in due time, for example. But that’s not a culture I grew up in, I ended up sitting down with a fellow foreman who happened to be Hispanic, years ago, because she was talking about how much she liked Coco. I admitted that I didn’t ‘Get’ the whole ‘Día de los Muertos’ thing, and the candy skulls and so on. (And I have to say that having to admit a complete lack of understanding of a concept is tough for me. The fact that prior to this discussion, I didn’t particularly like this gal, because I thought her to be more than a little arrogant for no good reason, didn’t make it any easier. However, this discussion improved both of our views toward each other.) I came out of it with a new appreciation for that piece of Hispanic culture.
All of this is a round about way of asking you the reader: What else do we “KNOW” to be so, because we have been taught it by immersion, that just isn’t so? What else do we not question, because we’ve been taught it since birth, not by intention, but by immersion in our culture, that is wrong?
I leave this as an exercise to the reader on this cloudy and smoke filled morning here in the Pacific Northwest.
and I remain, yours in service.
William Lehman.