A Mason's Work

One of the things that's important to learn as you are working through some of the early

sort of levels of emotional intelligence is that your emotional responses to all things

while initially might be happening sort of beyond your control, the longer term emotions

you experience are entirely created by you and your responsibility. So what does that mean?

That means when you are angry, you are responsible for being angry. You're the reason, the fault,

all of that kind of stuff. Now, the circumstances that you're in may evoke an anger response.

It cuts you off in traffic, you get angry. But the anger is really a result of your evaluation

of the situation. And you may have had this experience. I know I have on numerous occasions where

you get angry about a given situation, but you have misinterpreted that situation in its entirety.

You get angry for the person cutting you off in traffic, but that person is cutting you off

because they have somebody in their passenger seat that's having a baby or choking or something.

All of a sudden, your anger seems absurd and ridiculous. And like it came, it typically vanishes

very quickly. As an emotional human being, it's important to understand the way these emotions

work because if you fabricate them all, if you are the person who creates these emotions out of

sort of thin air or out of a conjuring of the way you think the world works, then you can very

easily make them go away for in the same sort of puff of smoke. As emotional human beings, if you

know that this is the case, you can start to work with that and grow your capacities to process,

create or eliminate emotions that don't serve your needs. Now, we can talk about, what does that

mean and what emotions serve your needs and when and why and how. And some of that will cover

in future episodes. But we want to talk about the strong emotional responses that you have now

in any given situation. So if you know somebody who's regularly flying off the handle for whatever

reason or if you know somebody who is regularly upset or frustrated for, you know, seems to get

frustrated for even the smallest sort of slight, this is the place where you start. And the first

thing you do is you say, why am I feeling this? What is this feeling that I'm having accomplishing for

me? Every emotional response you have is delivering some immediate value to you as an individual.

Being angry allows me to feel self-righteous. Being self-righteous makes me feel important.

Therefore, every time I feel angry, I feel important. Is a good kind of analytics sort of step by

step that you can go through. Every one of your emotions is going to have this kind of causal chain.

I feel X because it allows me to feel Y and I feel Y because it makes me feel Z.

It is very, very uncommon that you're going to have an emotional response that doesn't have a

benefit to you personally, even if that emotion is uncomfortable. You might get visibly sad and

depressed and that garners sympathy from the people around you, which garners you the attention

that you were looking for, which is why you regularly feel depressed or look sad. Again,

and I'm not trying to trivialize, you know, meaningful mental illness and all of those other things.

But if you look at the emotional content of your day-to-day life, it is important to understand that

there is something going on here. You're not just idly kind of feeling stuff and you are not

the victim of those feelings. The things that you feel have a purpose that purposes to satisfy either

a known or unknown sort of underlying need and the reason that it keeps happening is because it

keeps doing that well. So as you go through your investigative process to try and figure out

kind of your own emotional underpinnings and how that stuff works, start to figure out

and you do this by study and reflection by externalizing your thought processes in places like

journals or using the Masonic Zimbals deck to start figuring out some of the sort of mechanics

of this emotional understanding. And as you do this, you'll get sort of emotionally more competent

and able to handle even more and more subtle emotions as they arise, complicated emotions that

have, you know, double-sided nuance, bitter sweet, things like that. You'll be able to work with

these in a way that helps you essentially not be a slave of your emotional states but be the master

of them, which is really one of the main objectives here of becoming a fully automated and agent

agentic human being, somebody who can respond to the world around them and create the kind of

change they want to see in the world without essentially doing it accidentally. So that's the plan.

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