A Mason's Work

[00:00] every plan you will ever make is made by the person you are in the present moment
[00:06] for a version of yourself that does not yet exist in conditions that have not yet arrived
[00:11] that sounds for a lot of folks pretty terrifying because it feels like you have nothing to grab
[00:20] on to and this is where you look up like look to astronomy look to concepts like geometry
[00:32] look to the liberal arts because they have a lot of value in under helping you understand how the
[00:40] world works by looking up in the sky and understanding the procession of the various
[00:49] you know celestial objects and how the sun and the mood uh control the interactions between you
[00:57] know everyday life you have this capacity to start to understand the way the world operates
[01:07] and when you are able to understand the way the world operates you are better enabled to create
[01:15] plans that survive contact with reality you might create these plans that essentially are built in
[01:24] isolation from this world and then be really upset when you can't execute things like you know you
[01:33] might set up an aggressive workout schedule and then never ever be able to achieve that schedule
[01:39] because you're not nutritionally prepared you're not meeting all of the requirements you're not going
[01:45] even know what those requirements are without study the reason we study these things is to give us a
[01:53] better insight into the natural order of things now for a lot of people myself when i was a younger
[02:02] man i can attest to this i wanted to fight the natural order of things i was full of fight i was full of
[02:11] the world the way the world works is stupid that doesn't help you make good plans for lack of a
[02:19] better way to say it that is a horrible way to get what you want in the world the folks that are most
[02:25] successful understand that you know you can't make it rain upside down and there's a guy right now
[02:32] listening to this podcast it may be a little voice in your head that says i could probably make it rain
[02:36] upside down but you can't deal with some of these realities and if you understand that you can work
[02:44] with them instead of against them you can actually make progress in this life so we move through this
[02:53] understanding of the way the world works from a celestial perspective and you bring that down into the
[02:58] present moment and you end up with sort of conventional wisdom things like make hay while the sun shines i don't
[03:04] know if you've heard that before in your everyday life make hay when the sun shines means you have to
[03:09] dry hay out in the sun you can't make hay overnight or when it's raining when you look at some of these
[03:18] practical bits of wisdom you've experienced in your everyday life they all come from essentially this
[03:25] this bottled understanding of the way the world works that's kind of distilled down into a single sentence
[03:31] and we bring that into the planning process we bring that into our architecture our architectural
[03:38] design process for the life we want to create we use things like the cable tow to determine what our
[03:44] capacities might be we use the premortem process to understand what it's going to look like if the
[03:49] plan's going to fail we take our on and off ramp processes that were talked about this week and we use them
[03:57] to help build a plan that will survive contact with the world and give us the means to get off
[04:05] to abandon that plan when it's appropriate in a way that doesn't come with the emotional sort of
[04:11] weight of the idea of failure because that's not productive and it doesn't help so when we start
[04:19] looking at these things and start doing this what we're actually able to do in this play in this
[04:24] situation is almost create kind of a video game style of gameplay right we're able to fail and it's
[04:31] okay we're able to succeed and that's also okay we're able to plan in the present moment and change
[04:38] those plans as time permits as situations permit and the review cycle running beneath everything
[04:44] lets us essentially manage the whole apparatus this is what freemasonry can do this is kind of symbolic
[04:53] language that you have can be used to help you on every single day you have in that day zero capacity
[05:01] it's the only time you're the only day you ever really have you're creating plans right now for your
[05:06] future self allow those plans to be informed by the sort of architectural masonic symbols you have access to
[05:14] when you add a new one to your toolkit it's going to enhance your ability to plan
[05:19] as you get successful at executing plans you build confidence as you build confidence you build capacity
[05:26] this is how we're going to move to a higher level of agency and turn you into a change agent
[05:31] that you're capable of being in the world to make the world a better place to be
[05:37] i think that's the goal of all freemasons whether they ascribe to it specifically or not
[05:43] see you next week