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

“The initiate placed in the N.E. corner is intended to see, then, that on the one side of him is the path that leads to the perpetual light of the East, into which he is encouraged to proceed, and that on the other is that of spiritual obscurity and ignorance into which it is possible for him to remain or relapse.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Two paths are open to him at this stage, a path of light and a path of darkness; a path of good and a path of evil. The N.E. corner is the symbolical dividing place between the two.”
  2. “It is after investment with the apron that the initiate is placed in the N.E. corner. Thereby he is intended to learn that at his birth into this world the foundation-stone of his spiritual life was duly and truly laid and implanted within himself; and he is charged to develop it; to create a superstructure upon it.”
  3. “To those deep persistent questionings which present themselves to every thinking mind, What am I? Whence come I? Whither go I?, Masonry offers emphatic and luminous answers. Each of us, it tells us, has come from that mystical ‘East,’ the eternal source of all light and life, and our life here is described as being spent in the ‘West’ (that is, in a world which is the antipodes of our original home, and under conditions of existence as far removed from those we came from and to which we are returning, as is West from East in our ordinary computation of space).”
  4. “It is well to emphasize then, at the outset, that Masonry is a sacramental system possessing, like all sacraments, an outward and visible side consisting; of its ceremonial, its doctrine and its symbols which we can see and hear, and an inward, intellectual, and spiritual side, which is concealed behind the ceremonial, the doctrine and the symbols, and which is available only to the Mason who has learned to use his spiritual imagination and who can appreciate the reality that lies behind the veil of outward symbol.”
  5. “the ‘moon’ betokens our reasoning or intellectual faculties, which (as the moon reflects the light of the sun) should reflect the light coming from the higher spiritual faculty and transmit it into our daily conduct”