A Mason's Work

Brian
00:01

So today I wanted to talk a little bit more about not the working tools of a mason per se, but the experience you go through in your initiation that effectively can be considered a working tool or more effectively a perspective. If you imagine the working tools of a Freemason being individual perspectives about how to solve a problem, there are a ton of tools given to you that aren't presented in a catechism, but they are presented in a meaningful way, not the least of which is the reminder that you should not be bringing anything offensive or defensive into the body of the open lodge. Now, this preparation that you go through is a preparation that you should feel comfortable with in your everyday life whenever you go to a lodge meeting, and that preparation to essentially take off all of your offense and your defense to remove the perspectives of winning and defending or protecting.

Brian
01:15

When you take those perspectives off, you are walking into the lodge room emotionally open, intellectually open, without a pre conceived notion about right and wrong in terms of, you know, strictly speaking, in terms of opinions and allowing folks in the room to express themselves. Now, if you take on that entered apprentice preparation or your fellow craft preparation or your masturbations preparation, if you are trying to solve a problem and you can emotionally and intellectually walk your, through yourself through to that place where you can say, look, I need to solve this problem. It's outrageously difficult. I'm not sure what to do next about how to get through this. So let me, let me open myself to all the potentials or all of the ideas without discernment about my preconceived notions of right and wrong, and then eliminate or enhance these options as they present themselves based on a level of discernment after I have been open to what those potentials are. So I'll give you a, a a reasonably kind of artificial example, but it's a, it, it, it should work for our present purposes. And so let's imagine that you are trying to solve a project issue at work, and you have, you have to help them complete a, complete a task. And you need to then, in order to complete this task, you need the assistance of several different people, but your

Brian
02:58

Ability to reach them in the past has failed. They either are been unresponsive or they're not working the way they're supposed to. So there are tons of ways to solve that problem. But if you are un not open to listening to any of the ideas, you're never gonna be able to evaluate all of your options. And this is not to encourage decision paralysis, but this is to say that other people may have solved this problem in a way that's different than you have. So rather than kind of listening through somebody's suggestions or in reflection coming up with suggestions that are just essentially your old fashioned way of doing things or the way you've traditionally solved the problem, being open to those other perspectives should allow you to essentially solve the problem in a more effective way. So the better you get at this, the easier it becomes in terms of being, essentially being able to identify when your own prejudices or your own need to be right, or your own desires and ambitions about doing things that are comfortable as opposed to maybe more effective. As you get better at this, better at flexing through those perspectives, you'll find that, that all of these preconceived notions you have about the way things should work start to fade away and you just start collecting reality kind of as it stands. And this preparation that you underwent was vital teaching of Freemasonry and it never quite made it to the working tools, but it certainly made it in to the degree work that we do.

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