In Freemasonry the art of building in stone is expanded to included the inner world of the individual. From a rough and ignorant state to a smooth and perfect one. Without doing any work on the self, the spiritual path is meaningless, filled with delusions of grandeur and very little of real value. 

Perfection is an unattainable ideal, yet the effort is what matters. The path itself, not the destination. 

Alchemists work with the Philosopher’s Stone, and Christians search for the Holy Grail. It matters little which path we choose to follow, as long as we are committed to self transmutation through the integration of opposites. The Alchemical Wedding. 

The Stone itself contains a great and mysterious secret – hence the reason it is called, the Philosopher’s Stone. Apart from the metaphor of turning the Rough Ashlar into a Perfect One, or transmuting base metal into gold, there is another meaning. Discovering the answer to this riddle directly leads to decoding the Bible.