A Mason's Work

We talked in our last episode about the reduction of suffering and sort of how that's the

purpose and end of our work.

When we look into the day-to-day experience of life, you're going to find that increasing

awareness is vital to creating meaningful change for yourself and others.

Creating awareness and what does it look like and how does it work is the single most

important thing you can do to, again, begin to develop those influence sort of capabilities,

the cornerstone of agency.

Awareness is always step one.

So, when we talk about cultivating awareness, though, not all things are the same.

So you'll notice in a lot of the places where people congregate online or post together

in social groups and what have you, that people tend to find places where they are going

to get confirmation of what they already know.

This confirmation bias, as it's called, is relatively easy to get when it comes online

or even in groups because people tend to hang out with folks that they are similar

to.

And in online environments, you're listening to folks that agree with you because there's

a dopamine hit there because agreement feels good.

And so when we look for awareness, however, the opposite is true.

You do not get awareness or gain awareness inside that sort of cognitive echo chamber.

Now, when we look at this sort of from a personal perspective, does this mean you should always

hang out with folks that don't believe what you believe or what does it mean in terms

of developing awareness?

There are essentially a couple of different takes on how this might work.

The first one is if you constantly hang out with contrarian opinions, you're only really

just going to get good at arguing if you are not listening to them, if you are not entertaining

them in a meaningful way.

That means you have to start, start with your under-premises degree, you have to drop

all your mental and metallic substances, you have to drop all your money, you have to

drop all of the appearances of superiority that you keep about yourself and everyday

life.

So you can genuinely listen, you have to become vulnerable to listen.

When you do that, you will immediately become less argumentative as a concept.

You can listen to things and listen to the environment the way it truly matters.

And so step one with meaningful awareness is when you hear somebody's opinion that's

not your own, you have to drop all of the trappings of the outside, all of that mineral

metallic, all of that reason, you know, the defensiveness, the aggressively defensiveness,

the weaponized ignorance, all of that stuff has to go away in order for you to meaningfully

cultivate awareness.

And it's not easy to do that, to be clear.

So when you are finding yourself with a visceral emotional reaction to things in the world,

this is also a good indicator that you are having some level of opportunity to gain

awareness, whatever that might be.

So other ways that you might gain awareness are in reflection.

One of the things that I have done with my Masonic work, as you can see on the website, is

I've created this toolkit to allow you to externalize your thinking process.

So you can take some of these opposing thoughts, these opposing concepts and put them out

on the table in front of you and use them as perspectives to solve problems.

You need not, you know, pick up this toolkit to do it, you can do it with your own, you

know, get to grab some three-by-five index cards, draw your Masonic symbols on them, and

use them to start working around problems or working around perspectives to increase awareness.

As you increase your awareness of how the mechanics of these problems work, the situations

that you're experiencing in your life, the situations you're experiencing in your community,

politics, religion, all that kind of stuff.

As you start using these tools to help you gain this awareness, you can then begin the

process of reflection and analysis and all of the stuff that's going to allow you to

essentially create a new set of actions, right?

So this AIDA, they used in marketing language, it's awareness interest decision action,

or in the case of what we're doing, it's awareness, reflection, analysis and action.

You're going to start to really build that agency and begin developing the skills you're

going to need to decrease your personal suffering and likely decrease the pain you create

in the environment around you by result of ignoring that accidental or incidental suffering.

So this should help you develop some agency and build your influence skills and create

better outcomes for yourself and the people around you.