Open Buddha

Last night, I attended my masonic lodge meeting for October, which was also our installation of officers for the new year.

I passed the requirements to advance to the next degree, which is Master Mason or the third degree. This is the final one in the fundamental “blue lodge” of masonry and I’m looking forward to participating in the initiation and the activities following it. I’ve been getting quite a bit, personally, out of studying the symbolism of the degrees, the lectures, and contemplating the masonic lodge room as a memory palace or theatre.

Last night was also our final lecture in the series on the seven liberal arts. The master of the lodge is a professor at Seattle Pacific University and has been inviting fellow professors from work with specialties in the areas to do the lectures. The professor from the communications program did the one on Rhetoric, for example. The final one was the Astronomy lecture.

The professor, whose name is no eluding me, lectures on Johannes Kepler and the switch to the Copernican model of the solar system. Along the way, we discussed Kepler’s three laws, the work of Tycho Brahe, and why the switch to a heliocentric model was not quite as much of a given as modern people like to believe based on the evidence available at the time. As an aside, he discussed the work that Kepler did that got the attention of Brahe in the first place, which was on using the platonic solids nested in spheres to describe the distances in the orbits of the planets in a heliocentric model. Brahe didn’t think much of the work, which Kepler thought to the end was some of his most profound, but it displayed Kepler’s mathematical genius.

Here is a picture from his work on the solids:

All in all, a good meeting.