Yes. I have heard that once upon a time there were metaphysical practices, but I still don't think that they were what you might be led to believe. I don't know for sure. I'm going to make a note to ask someone about that. There's a guy who is a Masonic scholar and historian that comes around once in a while. I think I have his contact info; or I can get it.
What is going on that is foul in this world is people who have no honor and who are cowards who won't step up and who, worse, work to confuse others. That's each and every one of us on any given day to some degree. The only thing necessary for evil to get a hold is for good men to do nothing - or to become confused and even deny that there is such a thing as evil. If you want to call that a conspiracy, then we're all in on it.
It all depends on the lodge (membership thereof), rite, and degree how explicitly “metaphysical” things get. Symbolism, Masonic included, is multi-layered; it can stand on its own as only representing development into “a better man,” but it also represents a great deal more. Now, whether those additional levels of the symbolism were intended in all degrees, as Michael indicates, is highly contested - but it is there nonetheless.
Read some Albert Pike or Harold Percival and it becomes clear that esotericism is at the root of Masonry, at least for some of the most prominent Masons of recent history.
"Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy,
conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled;
to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, from them, and to draw them away from it. Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to them to know." - Albert Pike,
Morals and Dogma p 104-5
"Masonry is a succession of allegories, the mere vehicles of great lessons in morality and philosophy. You will more fully appreciate its spirit, its object, its purposes, as you advance in the different Degrees, which you will find to constitute a great, complete, and harmonious system.
If you have been disappointed in the first three Degrees,
as you have received them, and if it has seemed to you that the performance has not come up to the promise, that the lessons of morality are not new, and the scientific instruction is but rudimentary, and the symbols are imperfectly explained, remember that the ceremonies and lessons of those Degrees have been for ages more and more accommodating themselves, by curtailment and sinking into commonplace, to the often limited memory and capacity of the Master and Instructor, and to the intellect and needs of the Pupil and Initiate; that they have come to us from an age when symbols were used, not to
reveal but to
conceal; when the commonest learning was confined to a select few, and the simplest principles of morality seemed newly discovered truths; and that these antique and simple Degrees now stand like the broken columns of a roofless Druidic temple, in their rude and mutilated greatness; in many parts, also, corrupted by time, and disfigured by modern additions and absurd interpretations. They are but the entrance to the great Masonic Temple, the triple columns of the portico." - Albert Pike,
Morals and Dogma p 106