A Mason's Work

It is probably not a surprise to you that we are living in interesting times, I guess,

as the proverb goes, or as the ancient Chinese blessing slash curse goes.

When we talk about the sort of current environment that we live in, you'll find that across the

entire spectrum of the human condition, there are differing sets of beliefs.

And my supposition here for your consideration is that human beings develop and grow

in a directional way. So they grow from being, let's say, when they're infants, they're

not sure how the world works. They are superstitious. They behave in a certain way that

is kind of a model for the way the world works, and you grow through it and you don't go backwards.

So you grow through that superstitious model, you grow through that believing in magic,

you grow through the belief in things like Santa Claus and stuff like that, and you don't go back.

Now, those beliefs may remain unexamined in certain domains of your life. You may still have

superstitions, that's not to suggest that you don't, but what will happen is you will no longer rely

on superstition for your basic needs. You will not push those superstitious beliefs into the

stuff that you've learned how to solve as an individual. So you become

agentic in a given space. And as you grow, you really can't sort of go back. Your brain won't

fit in the same spot. There is the platonic allegory of the cave. There are all sorts of examples,

just philosophically, for you to explore, that point to the fact that growth and development as

an individual is directional and irreversible. So that's not to say you can't have a behavioral

regression, but the worldview stuff, the meaningful changes to the way you see the world, typically

don't go backwards. So what does that mean? And why is that important to the current sort of overall

zeitgeist of our society right now? What it points to is an understanding that everyone develops

through periods of prejudicial contempt through periods of a deterministic worldview through periods

where you have to demonize your enemies based on what they look like or what they act like

without taking direct personal responsibility. These worldviews that you're going to cycle through,

they happen. And they happen to everyone. You are required by virtue of growth and development to

essentially grow through all of the stages of the human condition that everyone else in this world

has grown through. You grow through a tribal phase, more often than not that happens in your teenage

years, where you have a sort of a leader of the tribe and the way you interact and behave has

tribal components. You go through a futile phase, you go through all sorts of different sort of

societal models internally for how the world works. This is reasonably well documented if you go

out and look at any of the studies out there. Piaget is probably the easiest and most accessible.

But I like Ken Wilbur, I like, you know, Graves and Beck, it doesn't really matter. The idea, though,

you do grow and you do develop and it is directional, which means the folks that have a worldview

that is different than yours are in one of two locations. They are either behind you developmentally

or ahead of you developmentally. And it becomes your role as a Mason as someone who's trying to

become a better person to understand which is which, right? When we look at the understanding of

the way the world works, you increase accountability as you grow developmentally. So this means

when you get to be well developed as an individual, you take accountability for all the things,

right? It doesn't matter whose fault it is, I have the agentic response, I can go fix it, I can

go take care of it. This is not to be confused with the martyr complexes or any of that kind of stuff,

but this sort of radical accountability where you don't run away from the adversities the world

presents, nor do you assign fault to individuals against those adversities. You just, you just are

present in the moment and you respond. That level of development will essentially be a higher order

of thinking and that happens as you grow and develop, right? So you get to those at level of

agentic sort of global or universal level accountability response where you do what you can

to solve the problems of the world, you may give in domain. Now you don't develop evenly across

all the domains of the human condition. Typically that is a, you kind of develop a little bit over here,

you develop a little bit over there. Your emotional intelligence might be outrageous, your

kinesthesiological intelligence might be absolutely awful like me, I'm a potato. When you start to do

this though and you round out your growth and you start growing in certain ways, you'll see the

holes in other people's limits of their personal accountability. You'll notice that they refuse to

look at these parts of their life where they refuse to look at the results that this out, this

behavior is created. Your role is amazing as someone who's trying to become a good, you know, a

better person through the process of self discovery, through the process of, you know, appreciative inquiry

should be to talk to people and determine as much as you can the ways in which the world you

enables them and prohibits their growth. And then obviously take the good stuff and discard the

stuff you don't need. As you do this, you'll find that you grow developmentally. The one thing I can

say before we wrap this up is you definitely do not want to point out the holes in somebody else's

worldview. It starts a conversation that doesn't win. What you can do is help them experience

the benefits of your worldview through the actions that you take and don't get into the whole

sort of rhetorical fight that comes with defending dogmas and stuff like that. As you do this,

as you create this sort of meaningful appreciative inquiry, you'll find that you're able to grow at an

accelerated rate which should help all of us move the ball forward.