Manly P. Hall Quotes

“Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.”

“Having become a citizen of two worlds, the individual must act accordingly. There can be no backsliding, because the individual must reach a state of certainty before this enlightenment is given that makes it utterly and completely impossible to backslide.

He cannot ‘get it’ and then fail and turn from it. If he turns from it, it means he never had it. If he fails, he fails himself. He cannot fail the infinite.”

“If the infinite had not desired man to be wise, he would not have bestowed upon him the faculty of knowing.”

“In Freemasonry is concealed a mystery of creation, the answer to the problem of existence, and the path the student must tread in order to join those who are really the living powers behind the thrones of modern national and international affairs.”

“The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.

All true Masons know that they only are heathen who, having great ideals, do not live up to them. They know that all religions are but one story told in diverse ways for peoples whose ideals differ but whose great purpose is in harmony with Masonic ideals.

North, east, south and west stretch the diversities of human thought, and while the ideals of man apparently differ, when all is said and the crystallization of form with its false concepts is swept away, one basic truth remains: all existing things are Temple Builders, laboring for a single end.

No true Mason can be narrow, for his Lodge is the divine expression of all broadness. There is no place for little minds in a great work.”

“The world is the schoolroom of God. Our being in school does not make us learn, but within that school is the opportunity for all learning. It has its grades and its classes, its sciences and its arts, and admission to it is the birthright of man. Its graduates are its teachers, its pupils are all created things. Its examples are Mature, and its rules are God's laws.

Those who would go into the greater colleges and universities must first, day by day, and year by year, work through the common school of life and present to their new teachers the diplomas they have won, upon which is written the name that none may read save those who have received it.

The hours may be long, and the teachers cruel, but each of us must walk that path, and the only ones ready to go onward are those who have passed through the gateway of experience.”

“Universals cannot become particulars and particulars cannot become universals, but universals exist according to degrees and particulars exist according to conditions.”

“We can only escape from the world by outgrowing the world. Death may take man out of the world but only wisdom can take the world out of the man. As long as the human being is obsessed by worldliness, he will suffer from the Karmic consequences of false allegiances.

When however, worldliness is transmuted into Spiritual Integrity he is free, even though he still dwells physically among worldly things.”

“When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illuminated faith, and fear into love.”

“Wisdom fears no thing, but still bows humbly to its own source, with its deeper understanding, loves all things, for it has seen the beauty, the tenderness, and the sweetness which underlie Life's mystery.”

“The esoteric system is all based upon the ultimate motive. Ultimate motive is the service of truth itself, a complete dedication to the service of the realities of existence.”

“Every man has his own world. He dwells in the midst of his little universe as the lord and ruler of the constituent parts of himself. Sometimes he is a wise king, devoting his life to the needs of his subjects, but more often he is a tyrant, imposing many forms of injustice upon his vassals, either through ignorance of their needs or thoughtlessness concerning the ultimate disaster that he is bringing upon himself. Man's body is a living temple and he is a high priest, placed there to keep the House of the Lord in order.”

“In truth, the kingdom of heaven is within man far more completely than he realizes; and as heaven is in his own nature, so earth and hell are also in his constitution, for the superior worlds circumscribe and include the inferior, and earth and hell are included within the nature of heaven. As Pythagoras would say: The superior and inferior worlds are included within the area of the Supreme Sphere.

So all the kingdoms of earthly nature, the minerals, the planes, the animals, and his own human spirit are included within his physical body, and he himself is the appointed guardian spirit of the mineral kingdom and he is responsible co the creative hierarchs for the destiny of the scones and metals.”

“Light is not only sacred because it dispels the darkness in which lurk all the enemies of human life. It is also sacred because it is the vehicle of life. This is evidenced by the effect of sunlight upon plant, animal, and human life.

Light is also the vehicle of color, the coloring matter of all earthly things being imparted from the sun. It is the vehicle of heat, and according to the wisdom of antiquity, it carries the sperm of all things from the sun. Through light also pass the impulses from the Grand Man.

According to the Mysteries, God controls His universe by means of impulses of intelligence which He projects through streamers of visible or invisible light. This light serves the universe in a capacity somewhat similar to that in which the nervous system serves the body.”

“Occultism teaches that it is the presence of the liver which distinguishes the animal from the plant and that mystically certain small creatures having power of motion but no liver are actually plants in spiritual consciousness.

The liver is under the control of the Planet Mars, which is the dynamo of this solar system and which sends a red animating ray to all the evolving creatures within this solar scheme.

The philosophers taught that the planet Mars, under the control of its regent Samael, was the transmuted 'Sin-Body' of the Solar Logos which originally had been the 'Dweller on the Threshold' of the Divine Creature whose energies are now distributed through the fire of the sun.

Samael, incidentally, was the fiery father of Cain, through whom a part of human icy has received the flame of aspiration and are thus separate from the sons of Seth, whose father was Jehovah.”

“Pythagoras said that the universal Creator had formed two things in His own image: The first was the cosmic system with its myriads of suns, moons, and planets; the second was man, in whose nature the entire universe existed in miniature.”

“The auric body of a snake is one of the most remarkable sights that the clairvoyant will ever see, and the secrets concealed within its aura demonstrate why the serpent is the symbol of wisdom among so many nations.”

“The Greater Mysteries represented the felicity of the soul surrounded by light and truth. They symbolized that man had 'raised' himself from the darkness of ignorance into the light of philosophy.

Plato said that the body is the sarcophagus of the soul, for he realized that within the form was an immortal principle which could free itself from.”

“The highest of all occult orders which exists only in the inner world may be called the 'Order of Melchizedek', although among certain nations it has other names.

This Order is composed entirely of the graduates of the other Mystery Schools who have actually reached the point where they can give birch to their present selves out of their own natures, like the mysterious phoenix bird which, breaking open at death, permits a new bird to fly forth.”

“The most sacred part of the human body is the brain and spinal system, revered from all antiquity and symbolized again and again in all the religions of the world. While other parts of the body are of great interest to the student, the mysterious working of the spinal fires by means of which liberation is finally attained is so tremendous that many years must be spent in understanding even the fundamental principles. The spine is the rod which budded, the Yggdrasil Tree, the flaming sword, the staff of comfort, the wand of the Magi.”

“The pineal gland is a link between the consciousness of man and the invisible worlds of Nature. Whenever the arc of the pituitary body contacts this gland there are flashes of temporary clairvoyance, but the process of making these two work together consistently is one requiring not only years bur lives of consecration and special physiological and biological training.

This third eye is the Cyclopean eye of the ancients, for it was an organ of conscious vision long before the physical eyes were formed, although vision was a sense of cognition rather than sight in those ancient days.”

“The secret Order of Melchizedek can never appear in the physical world while humanity is constituted according to its present plan. It is the supreme Mystery School, and a few have reached the point where they have blended their divine and human natures so perfectly that they are symbolically two-headed.

The heart and mind must be brought into perfect equilibrium before true thinking or true spirituality can be attained. The highest function of the mind is reason; the highest function of the heart is intuition, a sensing process not necessitating the normal working of the mind.”

“This radiance is so great that it cannot be limited by the skull and it pours out from the head, especially from the back of the neck where the uppermost vertebra of the spine articulates with the condyles of the occipital bone.

It is this light pouring our in a fan-shaped aura around the posterior part of the head that has given rise to the halos of saints and the nimbus so often used in religious art. This light signifies human regeneration and it forms part of the auric bodies of man.”

“This ring of invisible flame is the eternal fire, the spark from the Infinite Wheel, the birthless, deathless, eternal center which includes within itself all that it has ever been, all that it is, and all that it ever shall be.

This germ dwells in the state Eternity, for to this immortal spark time is illusionary, distance is nonexistent, joy and sorrow are unknown, for concerning its function and consciousness all that can be said is that 'It is'. While other things come and go, It is.”

“Thus man is heaven, earth, and hell in one, and his salvation is a much more personal problem than he realizes.

Realizing that the human body is a mass of psychic centers and that during life the form is crisscrossed with endless currents of energy, that all through the form are sunbursts of electric force and magnetic power, man can be seen by chose who know how to see as a solar system of scars and planets, suns and moons, with comets in irregular orbits circling through them.

As the Milky Way is supposed co be a gigantic cosmic embryo, so man is himself a galaxy.”

“To those capable of seeing the light of these spiritual orbs, there is no darkness, for they dwell in the presence of limitless light and at midnight see the sun shining under their feet.”

“When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men. They shall then know truth and, more than that, they shall realize that from the beginning truth has been in the world unrecognized, save by a small but gradually increasing number appointed by the Lords of the Dawn as ministers to the needs of human creatures struggling co regain their consciousness of divinity.”

“The Christian cross comes from Egypt and India; the triple miter from the faith of the Mithraics; the shepherd’s crook from the Hermetic Mysteries and Greece; the immaculate conception from India; the transfiguration from Persia; and the trinity from the Brahmans.

The Virgin Mary, as the mother of God, is found in a dozen different faiths. There are over twenty crucified world saviors. The church steeple is an adaptation of Egyptian obelisks and pyramids, while the Christian devil is the Egyptian Typhon with certain modifications”

“The path of salvation could be walked successfully only by those who had practical, scientific knowledge of the occult function of their own bodies.”

“There is no doubt that the Old Testament is a physiological and anatomical textbook to those capable of reading it from a scientific viewpoint.”