A Mason's Work

The symbols of Freemasonry are really quite useful when it comes to doing some of the internal

work.

When you're trying to use the operative tools of the craft as cognitive tools for your

own sort of deconstruction and understanding the elements of your own kind of world and

psychology and internal space.

But they're not special in that regard.

There are tons of tools that you could use to do the same thing.

So for those of you that don't find that some of the Masonic tools are overly accessible

when it comes to doing the work, you can kind of move around and find tools that work

better for you.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

The operative tools of the craft, the GABEL teaches you to divest your heart and mind

of the consciousness of the vices and superfluid of these vifes.

But when you start looking at it, really any cutting instrument can do that.

You can even look in the natural world and find that there are elements of the fruit

that a animal might be eating that they discard.

They discard the rye and they discard the stem.

This whole understanding that the GABEL represents a divestment process, any natural sort

of function that, you know, as a divestment function to it or component to it, can serve

as that cognitive tool if you find that more accessible.

This is one of the reasons why we encourage people across the board in any mental health

kind of proximate profession, consulting, coaching, any of that kind of stuff to get

people to go outside.

Go see the world, the natural world, not the concrete jungle as it were.

Don't go outside to then go inside shopping mall and expect the same kind of level of sort

of liberation of your thinking process.

The natural world is almost unique in that capacity.

So the Masonic tools are functional tools because that's how humans naturally create

stuff.

And so in that way, they're very useful.

The natural tools that come out in the sort of the outdoor world or the outdoor space

are equally good.

So observe animal behavior, observe the way the rivers cut valleys through mountains,

observe the way water flows, observe how animals move in the wilderness and how trees grow

from seeds and not the other way around, observe these things and understand that the symbols

for your own internal work are all around you.

If you don't get enough traction or the kinds of cognitive delineations or capacities with

the Masonic tools by themselves, feel free to invent your own.

This is not, we're not in a situation where anyone's going to be able to evaluate your

use of any of the tools in your everyday life for your own internal work.

It's your work and your work will require your capacities to evaluate.

One of the tools that I kind of evaluated or developed early on is a tool that there

really isn't a good correlate for in free Masonry.

And it was this idea that you can oftentimes choose between the desire to be right versus

the desire to be happy and that those are both decisions and oftentimes right and happy

are not the same decision.

This isn't about feeling the joy of winning the game.

In some cases, like a game for example, it's not always the best experience to win the

game.

You know, let's say you're playing with a child and you want that child to have the joy

of winning.

You want to celebrate or revel in that together with someone else.

That oftentimes is a lens that I have to view my own internal kind of struggles with.

I have to determine am I in this situation trying to be right?

Or am I trying to create better outcomes longer term?

Or do I want to be happy in this moment and does being right enable or disable that as

a sort of a reality?

So as you start cooking your own symbolic language for your own growth and development,

if the Masonic stuff is not working for you, go outside and take a look around.

I think you'll find that the natural world provides plenty of examples to work with.