A Mason's Work

In our recent episodes, we talked about cultivating awareness.

We talked about the case for reducing suffering and a big part of that conversation has to

speak to an underlying truth that's very mushy.

Folks, don't necessarily want to hear this.

But the reality is your entire experience is that.

It's yours.

You have, there is no other prevailing information.

The world's going to be arising and happening around you.

This is a normal thing.

But you cannot be aware of all knowledge at all times.

You cannot be aware of all of the things that are happening.

It becomes your quest as a man to try and find out the relevant information that you

need in order to inform your behavior in a way that it proves outcomes.

What this really means is, in many ways, there is almost no external information that's

going to matter.

If I gave you a book that contained the entire mechanics of how the universe operates, including

all of the laws of physics and all of the unanswered questions that are currently floating

about in the scientific community, it doesn't matter if the book is correct.

It doesn't matter if the book is perfect in its sort of execution as a book.

You are still required to internalize that information and process it in your own way

in order to make it effective.

What that really means is, like I started with, your world is yours.

You have to take information into it, process it, and use it to inform your behavior.

In a lot of ways, this plays complete disregard to ideas of facts and objectivity and object

of reality.

And there are some real meaningful questions about this.

Your physiology itself is super responsive to your psychology.

You literally will not see certain things that you don't want to see.

Like, literally, I mean literally not the modern interpretation, which also means figuratively.

There are some direct relationships between your psychology and your physiology that are

hardwired.

And I want to chase that for too long, but rest assured, this understanding of reality is just

that.

It's an understanding and it is a cultivating process for your mind.

This is entirely subjective.

And that's awful to say because a lot of folks are going to love it's entirely subjective

then, you know, this leads me down a path of, can I fly?

And then, no, you can't fly.

This is not, this is a space wizard boot camp.

You're not going to learn how to shoot fireballs.

When we talk about subjective, subjectivity being the only sort of real thing, that's not

denying that object of reality exists.

But if you are unwilling to recognize it, right, yes, you can still get run over.

Yes, you know, it doesn't, you know, not believing the truck is there.

It does not mean the truck's not there.

At the same time, you get to choose how it informs your behavior, right?

You get to choose in many ways, whether or not you jump out of the way.

And so with that in mind, the subjective approach and understanding your subjective world is

really vital to the sort of process and the mission here, which means you should spend

a ton of time, particularly if you're a younger man, learning how you learn, learning how

you solve problems, identifying the sort of meta conversation about how you work in the

world and how you process these things, this reality, whatever you want to call it, becomes

really important to learn because there will be times when you need to learn a thing.

And if you don't know how you learn, that's a problem, right?

There's no objective, you know, system out there where you're going to pick this up and

automatically be able to apply it.

And again, this gets back to one of the things you'll find a lot of guys do when they're

young and they're trying to figure things out is they'll go read yet like 30 or 40 books.

And I love the notion that you're going to do that, but you still have to process that

knowledge in a way that informs your behavior or it doesn't matter if you've read them or

not.

So this again, takes us back full circle, you know, to reduce suffering, you need to understand

yourself, to understand yourself, you need to gain awareness, to gain awareness, you

have to process information and the best sort of way to learn how to do that is understand

the meta process for how you work.

And how you work is different than how I work.

So you should spend some time figuring that out.

And I'd love to hear and start collecting stories and we'll put them out on the blog

of how your brain works and how your sort of cognitive process works because there is

recurring sort of themes and trends and you might be able to help others reduce their

suffering by sharing what you know.