A Mason's Work

[00:00] behaviorally, when we take on the role of secretary, we gain the ability to look across
[00:06] our entire sort of collective memory of our own sort of experience and look for
[00:14] lots of different things. First and foremost, when we're recording honestly, we can start to
[00:22] look across the things we have learned or the experiences we've had and articulate patterns
[00:31] and repetitions. Patterns and repetitions are a great place to start when it comes to analyzing
[00:38] your behaviors from a different role, but you need to be able to collect those insights and the
[00:44] secretary's sort of mental function is the one that does that. So when you're sitting down and you're
[00:49] going, man, I feel like I've learned this already once before. Grab your secretary's ape and put it
[00:56] on, start thinking through the other times that you may have experienced this. Like we discussed
[01:03] yesterday, it's very likely that your memories are encoded with emotional content. Your memories are
[01:11] also going to be encoded with sort of irrelevant factual content, stuff that may or may not have
[01:18] been accurately recorded at the time because you didn't have enough information or context or
[01:23] insight. When we start to look at ways to best leverage the memories that we've recorded,
[01:32] one of the things you're going to want to do is understand that the memories that you have,
[01:39] regardless of how much you've tried to cultivate them in a open and honest way or in a factual way,
[01:46] are always going to be, uh, imperfect. They are recorded by a mind, the mind of the time.
[01:54] So first and foremost, if you remember something from your childhood, uh, even though you might be
[02:00] able to recall it in vivid detail in your adult mind, the, the secretary that recorded at the time
[02:07] was a child, that secretary function that, that encoded that memory in your brain, um, didn't have
[02:14] all of the capacities that you have, didn't have all of the knowledge and insights that you've gained
[02:19] since. And as such, the emotional content that accompanies those memories that you recorded when
[02:26] you were a child, um, very likely is something that, uh, sort of no longer meaningfully applies
[02:33] that if you can step from the, you know, if you can, you can step out of that headspace for a moment
[02:38] that recorded that memory, uh, you might be able to be like, yeah, that was ridiculous. I was really
[02:42] upset about that for reasons I don't fully understand. Let me see if I can break it down
[02:47] and reprocess this sort of referential sort of behavioral analysis, memory analysis, um,
[02:55] seems like, um, a rabbit hole. And quite frankly, it is for most people, the moment you start trying
[03:03] to connect the dots with your memories, uh, and say, this is what caused that. And that's what caused
[03:07] this. You're really getting to a situation where you have to describe the entire operation of the
[03:12] universe in order to explain anything that ever happened. Um, so with that in mind, the interest
[03:18] here for the secretary role is not necessarily, um, to kind of relive the entirety of your life,
[03:25] uh, one chapter at a time or one event at a time. The idea is, um, when you're confronted with a
[03:31] situation that you may not understand or have the context for work backwards through what you remember
[03:37] about it, strip off the emotional content, strip off the unnecessary, uh, rationalizations or the
[03:43] unnecessary ego perspective that comes with it. Um, and, and see if you can approach that memory or
[03:50] that event from a factual perspective. Um, from there, you should be able to then work through maybe the
[03:58] other, uh, other layers that you've encoded with that memory, uh, like the emotional content or like the
[04:05] ego content, but you can do it with a understanding, a grounding in the facts of the event. Um, so that
[04:12] you can process those emotional responses or those other responses from sort of different perspectives
[04:16] in the lodge room and say, okay, well, maybe that was an irrational response given these facts, or maybe,
[04:22] uh, maybe the way I remember this, um, doesn't pay homage to the other people in the room that were
[04:28] trying really hard to do something else at the time, but you can't get there until you can take
[04:34] some of the content sort of separated out, process it, um, and, and separate the, the feelings from
[04:41] the thoughts and then the thoughts from the actual events. Um, when we consciously start to do this
[04:48] for your plans moving forward, when you actively record memory in a way that says, listen,
[04:54] I just need to write down what actually happened. Uh, and then I can write down separately what I felt
[05:00] about what happened. Uh, you begin the process of being able to create useful data for future versions
[05:06] of you that need this kind of support.