The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry from The Meaning of Masonry by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst.

“As the admission of every candidate into a Lodge presupposes his prior existence in the world without the Lodge, so our doctrine presupposes that every soul born into this world has lived in, and has come hither from, an anterior state of life. It has lives elsewhere before it entered this world: it will live elsewhere when it passes hence, human life being but a parenthesis in the midst of eternity.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Hence every Candidate upon admission finds himself, in a state of darkness, in the West of the Lodge. Thereby he is repeating symbolically the incident of his actual birth into this world, which he entered as a blind and helpless babe, and through which in his early years, not knowing whither he was going, after many stumbling and irregular steps, after many deviations from the true path and after many tribulations and adversities incident to human life, he may at length ascend, purified and chastened by experience, to larger life in the eternal East.”
  2. “In some Masonic Lodges the candidate makes his first entrance to the Lodge room amid the clash of swords and the sounds of strife, to intimate to him that he is leaving the confusion and jarring of the religious sects of the exterior world, and is passing into a Temple wherein the Brethren dwell together in unity of thought in regard to the basal truths of life, truths which can permit of no difference or schism.”
  3. “In all periods the world’s history, and in every part of the globe, the secret orders and societies have existed outside the limits of the official churches for the purpose of teaching what are called ‘the Mysteries’: for imparting to suitable and prepared minds certain truths of human life, certain instructions about divine things, about the things that belong to our peace, about human nature and human destiny, which it was undesirable to publish to the multitude who would but profane those teachings and apply the esoteric knowledge that was communicated to perverse and perhaps to disastrous ends.”
  4. “But, in the advanced degree of M.M. the answer is that he comes ‘From the East,’ for by this time the Mason is supposed to have so enlarged his knowledge as to realize that the primal source of life is not in the ‘West,’ not in this world; that existence upon this planet is but a transitory sojourn, spent in search of ‘the genuine secrets,’ the ultimate realities, of life; and that as the spirit of man must return to God who gave it, so he is now returning from this temporary world of ‘substituted secrets’ to the ‘East’ from which he originally came.”
  5. “To state things briefly, Masonry offers us, in dramatic form and by means of dramatic ceremonial a philosophy of the spiritual life of man and a diagram of the process of regeneration.”