A Mason's Work

[00:00] This week, we're going to talk about conscious awareness, which for some of you might be
[00:06] a very weird conversation to have because conscious awareness isn't something that we
[00:13] often talk about.
[00:14] It's there's not a class on it.
[00:15] The places you'll find education on things like conscious awareness are typically your
[00:21] meditation centers or maybe even in abstract at your church or synagogue or temple or what
[00:28] have you.
[00:29] When we look at conscious awareness, though, we have an advantage as Freemasons because
[00:35] we have a ton of structural components we can use to talk about what it is and even perhaps
[00:42] map some of the stages of conscious awareness.
[00:47] Today, we're going to start with the sort of Tuscan stage of conscious awareness.
[00:52] This pre-understanding of the way the world works, the things that are happening.
[01:01] It is not evaluative.
[01:04] Okay.
[01:04] So what does that mean?
[01:05] That all sounds crazy complicated.
[01:07] When you wake up in the morning, there is a series of sensations you're going to have.
[01:16] If you remember this morning when you woke up, you probably were first aware of brightness
[01:24] or light of some kind.
[01:27] You don't give it a label.
[01:30] You don't name it as the sun or the room light or any of that kind of stuff.
[01:34] You are at a Tuscan level of awareness.
[01:38] It is just a sensation.
[01:40] Everything that you're going to experience throughout the day at a Tuscan level of awareness is just
[01:47] sensation.
[01:49] It is not even labeled mentally in your head.
[01:55] It is the sensation before labeling it.
[02:00] So it is the feeling of cold before calling it cold.
[02:03] Tuscan awareness or that level of just conscious awareness without any additional function to it
[02:14] is a vital thing to develop.
[02:19] Being able to note what is happening without giving it a name, without giving it an evaluation,
[02:27] without any of those extras, the impositions of other levels of consciousness on that awareness,
[02:37] cultivating that makes for a very valuable sort of stage in the process of developing.
[02:44] If you can begin to have experiences and increase your awareness of those experiences,
[02:50] again, at a pre-naming, pre-evaluative state, you then set up the stage for additional levels
[03:00] of development moving forward.
[03:01] What happens through this process as you begin to cultivate this awareness, your ability to
[03:11] sense things will increase over time.
[03:13] Like any instrumentation, your ability to understand the smaller fluctuations, the subtleties and the
[03:22] nuance will develop again through this exploration.
[03:27] So when we look to develop this for ourselves, there are fundamental practices.
[03:34] Most folks will consider things like going for a walk in nature or sitting in meditation or even just
[03:45] laying down and kind of doing a mental bodily scan is a great way to begin the process of cultivating
[03:54] that level of awareness.
[03:56] And without trying to ruin or spoil the story here, what happens as you go through these stages
[04:02] of consciousness?
[04:04] And again, we're mapping them to the principal orders of architecture for convenience more than
[04:08] anything.
[04:08] There's not, uh, there's no sort of symbolic reference here in any of the, uh, the ritual
[04:15] or any of that kind of stuff.
[04:16] So, uh, we're using the frameworks of Freemasonry essentially to just give us that apparatus that
[04:21] we can use, uh, without again, connecting this to any historical, historical reference or any
[04:26] that kind of stuff.
[04:27] Um, but using it as that apparatus, what will happen is as you move through these various
[04:33] architectural stages of consciousness, uh, you'll note that they start taking on, uh,
[04:38] this sort of recursive similarity so that this level of conscious awareness, uh, that you
[04:44] have at the Tuscan level also maps to a, uh, a level of conscious awareness that you have
[04:50] actually at the very end of the composite level.
[04:53] Uh, and it's almost like an Ouroboros or a snake eating its own tail.
[04:57] Uh, when we cultivate this consciousness, we're going to be moving through these stages to
[05:03] help us grow and evolve and advance, uh, so that we get to that point of enlightenment where
[05:08] we are both consciously aware and have complete agency.
[05:12] One of the perils of awareness alone without any of the evaluative context over top is that
[05:18] you don't gain mastery over your ability to respond.
[05:21] It's just response.
[05:24] And so in that way, there's a certain amount of perpetual sort of victimhood in that process.
[05:28] And we're going to move past all of this, uh, and explain it more as we get into some of
[05:33] the, uh, more discrete stages in the middle.
[05:36] See you then.