A Mason's Work

So the Hiramic legend and the

fellowcraft basins that enter a conspiracy to

you know, kill a grand master

are super instructive about a lot of things

stuff that we don't talk about in the other degrees.

So if you are not yet a third degree Mason

and you want to not spoil the story,

you know,

you should probably tune out.

But if you're a master Mason,

we're not going to be talking secrets here.

We're just going to talk with story,

the ceramic legend, which is available in numerous sources online,

talks about the brothers who are

essentially self-conscious that they're not going to be able to

achieve the word of a master Mason.

Now it doesn't really matter what the

McGuffin is, right, in the story.

What matters is the story itself that people

were apprehensive about a situation beyond their control

and their response was at least some of them was violins.

Now what does that teach us about the

Masonic sort of tools and lexicon and how's it work?

What it really points to is that there will

perpetually be situations beyond your control

and you have choices.

More often than not, you have choices about how to respond.

Now you get about a second,

maybe a second and a half of, you know,

to be overwhelmed by your emotions.

But as men in this society,

we are not allowed to sort of not be accountable for those emotions.

We have to process them and we have to process them pretty quick.

A lot of the emotions that we are prone to have

with testosterone being what it is.

And so we are not allowed to tend towards dark,

violent, awful things.

And so what this really kind of advises us of

is that there will be perpetually situations beyond our control

and the only really meaningful response we get

is how we deal with those things.

Sometimes that's pleasant.

And you have surprises that come up where you're like,

oh man, this is great and you're having an awesome time

and you kind of take that and roll with it.

There's typically an equal amount of adversity that comes up.

And as that comes up, your response is,

again, within your control.

What there's a saying in life that pain is unavoidable

but suffering is optional.

And when we talk about that, what we really mean here is that

there will be pain in your life, there will be adversity,

there will be situations that are beyond your control.

And you get to choose those responses.

What we're trying to drive for here as men

that go through this sort of Masonic process is we're trying to achieve

a meaningful level of agency.

We're trying to become the master craftsman,

the people who can master their domain.

In some ways, it is the ultimate form of control

to be in control in an environment that is out of control.

And so as you evolve and grow yourself as a person

and you increase your level of agency,

you're going to gain power over your emotions,

over your physicality, over the relationship you have in your life.

You're going to gain that agency as you progress and develop your ability

to respond to the adversities of life.

And the Masonic tools will help with that a great deal.

If you spend the time and work on it,

cultivating things like self-awareness, cultivating things like,

you know, being able to process and analyze the way you feel

and turn that into things that you can work on out in the world.

This is one of the things that the Masonic symbols deck

that I've cooked up is super useful for.

In fact, is extroverted in your thinking process.

It's about getting those thoughts out into the world.

So you can operate on them, determined with one job good,

determined what to do with them, and discard the ones

that aren't adding value.

This is the gable over and over again.

So when things come up, when adversity strikes,

remember your apron.

Remember to put it on and become the Mason that you have been raised to be.

Work on that analysis, work on getting that clarity that you're going to need

to move your initiatives forward in upright matter, you know,

with your action square against the square of virtue and all those good things.

And you'll find that the Masonic experience beyond just being kind of like the fun thing

that you do with your buddies starts to really be a road map

for the better version of yourself as you move forward.