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June 06 – Message

‘SQUARING THE CIRCLE’

At the request of a contemporary of mine in the school, I have been editing for a commemoration volume, various contributions from alumni and their relatives, of the Besant Theosophical School in Adyar, founded by the Theosophical Society in the year 1934.

At the time I spent my five years there, covering the period of the Second World War, having been evacuated from Colombo to Madras for reasons of safety, I did not quite see the connection between the Theosophical movement, and Freemasonry. The motto of the Society is “There is no religion higher than Truth” – which no freemason can deny, taken together with Brotherhood and Relief, as our goals. In fact a Lodge practising Co-masonry, admitting women, has existed in the Society’s premises down to the present day – out of bounds to us then, and remaining so, even now.

In a sense, therefore, I must have had a very early introduction, subconsciously, into the tenets of the Craft through a philosophy influencing a system of education which seems to have had its roots in Freemasonry.

At Morning assembly at the School, all the major religions were represented in the prayers, underlining the universality of all Faiths; there were no caste or communal affiliations countenanced or referred to, with the result that young minds were kept insulated from social prejudices and artificial differentiations. There was also a strict injunction about having any money with one, as a boarder, perhaps also derived from being received poor and penniless into the institution – poverty being a great leveler!

The great seer and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti who was launched at the turn of the 20^th Century by Dr. Annie Besant as a ‘Messiah’, cut himself adrift of those pretensions and the esotery of the Theosophical movement of that time, and followed a more rational-spiritual path in which he pursued the enhancement of self-knowledge – shorn of other trappings. He also laid out a system of education allowing for individual self-expression through a school system which is now supported by his eponymously named Foundation.

We return, therefore, to where I started – the connections that Freemasonry influenced in the last Century and beyond – representing those eternal Truths which are the goals that all faiths seek to achieve. In this, one also sees a hidden hand which makes the personal linkages which then influence our individual lives, and renders the circle complete. Mysterious are the designs of the Great Architect!.