A Mason's Work

So in the hundred plus episodes of this podcast, I have never addressed the underlying conversation

of why bother growing at all.

Why bother with this development thing to become a better person, all of that kind of thing?

And I realized the, for some of you, this question's absurd.

And I want to sort of dive into it for just a moment.

You have very little control over a ton of things in life, right?

You have no control over, in many cases, the mechanisms of your biology.

You have no control over the way your body is going to process nutrients or things of that

nature.

You have no control over the way people have lay across the globe are acting on a moment

by moment basis or the underlying physics of the sun, right?

The number of things you have no control over is infinite.

But there are some things you can exert influence over.

And when we start to talk about the ability to exert influence, we're talking about the

things that are within our locus of control.

When, you know, and there's, that's a whole deep well, look up locus of control.

You'll find that there's tons and tons of resources out there on that.

And if there's any interest, we'll do more episodes on this as well.

But that locus of control has to start somewhere.

And it has to start with to a great degree, your mind.

Now get into the other philosophical arguments, are you your mind?

Are you not your mind?

Whatever.

That's all finding good, go do that.

And when you come back with whatever the answer is, please let me know.

But in the short term, you have to believe at some fundamental level that you can control

your reactions and to a great degree, your actions in this world.

Those reactions and actions, the more aware of them you become, the more control you exert

or influence you exert.

And the less you suffer.

Now I want to be clear here, there's a big difference between pain and suffering.

But suffering is a function of the things you are aware of and the amount that you can

control those things.

So when somebody is in pain, let's say they have broken a limb or something like that,

the pain of that is a defined thing, right?

Whatever scale you want to use, whatever the impact is, the pain of that is the thing,

right?

The suffering that comes from that is separate and something else.

How much you let the pain of that inform your conscious experience on a moment-by-moment

basis is in many ways a decision.

How much you choose to turn in that pain event and the subsequent experiences that

pain event into something that becomes debilitating lifelong or what have you.

Those are all conscious behavioral decisions that you have some level of influence over.

Again, I'm trying to avoid going down the logistical sort of epistemological rabbit hole of

like, what do you know and how do you know, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

What we're really talking about is from a day-to-day average geo experience, what is it

like?

And you get a paper cut and you can or a brick a limb or whatever.

And you can just kind of deal with that.

This is the pain that happens is part of the product we've already living.

How you process that and what you turn it into is essentially the mechanics of suffering.

And when we talk about our improvement as people, we are talking about the ability to

move to a place where pain is just pain and suffering is reduced.

If we can get to that, then the though product and proceeds of our work are beneficial.

When we talk about improvement as men, we are talking about the ability to reduce suffering.

Obviously, we can't reduce pain, but reduce suffering and process it in a way that is

productive so that we increase our agency and increase our ability to influence the environment

around us.

That's kind of the mission here with Emasons Work.

It's kind of the mission here for Masons in general.

Again, absent any of the extra sort of underpinnings of this when it comes to purpose and meaning

and all that kind of stuff, we can get into that in different episodes.

But again, from where we're going and why, this is the point.

We grow because we want to reduce suffering for ourselves and reduce suffering in the

world.

If you look across every major tradition, this is a recurring theme.

And that's the sort of intent and purpose of our work.