A Mason's Work

[00:00] So this week we've been talking about the men who kind of didn't stop the conversation that started as legitimate grievance, hardened into certainty somewhere along the line, and ended somewhere that none of them really intended.
[00:18] But that's a different part of the story.
[00:21] The important things to kind of look into here are the 15 fellow craft that set out together.
[00:27] Twelve of them, somewhere along the way, had the emotional intelligence, the understanding of who they were, to turn back.
[00:43] And in that turning was the real gift of the craft.
[00:52] That turning, that place where these folks decided that they needed to come back to communion is a big part of where we should spend our time thinking when it comes to that process.
[01:12] When they recanted, they turned themselves in, submitted to whatever consequence that return required, and then they moved on.
[01:23] They were having the conversation.
[01:26] They were having the sort of warmth that the commiseration allowed, that shared grievance, the momentum of men who believed that they had successfully diagnosed a broken thing.
[01:38] And at some point in the middle of that, they had that stop and had the courage to move back from that edge.
[01:49] The meta conversation is really easy to frame as a failure of discipline or a failure of character.
[01:59] We look at the consequences of folks that have taken that to the logical extreme and they become entrenched or they do horrible things all in the name of this sort of perceived justice.
[02:13] But what it really is, is in many cases, the projection of someone who has surrendered all of their autonomy to an idea that no longer serves.
[02:27] It's the logical sort of fallacy taken to its conclusion.
[02:32] And in that process, they end up losing their way.
[02:37] When we stop describing the problem and start working on it instead, when we stop talking about the environmental conditions and we work on it to resolve our own internal and communal kind of responsibilities to it, things change.
[02:59] And in that process, that movement to that reintegration starts to become an important consideration to approach.
[03:12] Because from the outside in, from the rest of the craft in the degrees, those 12 fellow craft who recanted were just as culpable as the three who did the deed.
[03:28] So, so, so what do you do, right?
[03:31] Those folks who said, look, this has gone too far and I don't want it to go any further.
[03:35] We have to be able to bring them back into the fold.
[03:39] We have to help them reintegrate.
[03:41] We have to teach them what that looks like in the, in the understanding of that reintegration.
[03:48] There is an internal and external component to this.
[03:52] The first on the internal side is understanding that the desires you have that are emergent as a systemic response.
[04:03] So I feel like I have to respond this way because the system does X or Y or Z.
[04:09] Those are imposed upon you.
[04:11] Those are not the interoceptive signals your body is sending.
[04:16] This is not what you actually believe or think or feel.
[04:20] These are responses.
[04:22] And as responses, if you allow them to control you, you have lost the game.
[04:29] When we start to look at this from an internal perspective, what we want to do, and we've talked about this in other episodes, is find the seed of joy.
[04:41] There is a place that all of these desires stem from.
[04:47] The systemic response, the, the place where we talk about this commiserating and the meta conversation and all that stuff.
[04:54] There is something there that's missing from the, the conversation.
[04:59] And it's the joy that we have lost.
[05:05] If we spend time talking about that joy and discovering what that actually is, because for some people, they don't even know what it is anymore.
[05:14] They bought an idea of a joy as opposed to the experience of it.
[05:18] If we spend time in that emotional space where the, the joy and the, the excitement and the, the pleasure of discovery is the actions that stem from that place are the, essentially this series of actions you want to take.
[05:35] The social interactions that stem from that place are the ones that bring us closer together.
[05:42] So inside all of this discomfort and all of this sort of structural agony that comes around when the environment doesn't go our way, uh, inside that is this wish, this, this seed of, uh, joy.
[06:01] That if we can work on discovering it or rediscovering it, this is the path to reintegration.
[06:08] This is the way that we get from this stratified, isolated group of folks to a integrated partnership with the people around us and with the internal components of ourselves.
[06:21] We'll dig a little bit more into this tomorrow.
[06:23] And I understand this is a pretty abstract conversation here.
[06:27] Um, the problem with the meta in general is it lends itself to this kind of interactions and talking in so many levels of abstraction.
[06:40] Uh, what I will say to you is if you find your heart inside this work, if you find the word desires inside of these conversations and lead from those, the entire apparatus kind of changes.
[06:55] And we'll talk more about that softening tomorrow.