MANLY P. HALL’S LIGHT AND DARKNESS
What more can any creature ask than the opportunity to prove the thing he is, the dream that inspires him, the vision that leads him on? We have no right to ask for wisdom. In whose name do we beg for understanding? By what authority do we demand happiness? None of these things is the birthright of any creature; yet all may have them, if they will cultivate within themselves the thing that they desire. There is no need of asking, nor does any Deity bow down to give man these things that he desires. Man is given by Nature, a gift, and that gift is the privilege of labor. Through labor he learns all things.
Religions are groups of people, gathered together in the labor of learning. The world is a school. We are here to learn, and our presence here proves our need of instruction. Every living creature is struggling to break the strangling bonds of limitation — that pressing narrowness which inhabits vision and leaves the life without an ideal. Every soul is engaged in a great work — the labor of personal liberation from the state of ignorance. The world is a great prison; its bars are the Unknown. And each is a prisoner until, at last, he earns the right to tear these bars from their moldering sockets, and pass, illuminated and inspired, into the darkness, which becomes lighted by that presence. All peoples seek the temple where God dwells, where the spirit of the great Truth illuminates the shadows of human ignorance, but they know not which way to turn nor where this temple is. The mist of dogma surrounds them. Ages of thoughtlessness bind them in. Limitation weakens them and retards their footsteps. They wander in darkness seeking light, failing to realize that the light is in the heart of the darkness.
The Lost Keys of Freemasonry by Manly P. Hall
Manly P. Hall’s concept of the false light has been widely used by him to describe a contemporary “New Age” spirituality we observe today in the masses from a critical point of view. And it was all great till we find out he invents later another one term, the false darkness, which is made to denote what would not signify anything of real substance at all but “the result of debasing the power of the angels of Satan” in his own words.
From his natural darkness perspective by which it is “the basic principle of things“, the false light would appear to be the means by which Satan’s angels influence us.
But what is the false light in it’s core of essence?
Manly P. Hall seems to have a tendency to associate this term with a Christian definitions of wisdom: there are two different aspects of wisdom one can find referred to in the Bible as earthly and divine.
Although Biblical concept of Godly Wisdom does not fit in to these quite obscure and exceptionally mystic expressions of the author, none of them are Masonic since Hall has become a Freemason years later.
The Divine form of Wisdom should be understood as the providence of the so called Great Architect of the Universe and the Earthly one as all kinds of reasoning coming out from natural darkness of our deceptive minds.
Manly P. Hall metaphysical definitions of different shades of light and darkness were created primarily to make a distinction between black and white magic.
· The false light expression may be found in his work (1928) The Secret Teachings of All Ages and in “A Monthly Letter”, April 1st, 1936.
· Other such terms as false darkness and natural darkness can be found in his Magic: A Treatise on Natural Occultism (1929).