A Mason's Work

Yeah, I know the world operates is a cascade of systems.

More often than not, they are invisible systems, the relationships between animals and their

prides or packs or gaggles, if you will.

And the relationships between societies and values and things like that.

And as we start to figure out as people trying to improve it better, it becomes

obvious fairly quickly that you need to begin to develop an understanding of the

relationships in the world in order to make sense of how you're going to

progress your objectives, whatever they might be.

So when we talk about the world in this way, we really have to take a different

approach to solving problems.

One of the things that human beings do really well compared to us, most other

animals is we learn from each other.

So one of the best things you can do to learn how to interact in the world as

as a symbol is to take advantage of the other people that you have access to.

You can ask questions, you can set up scenarios, you can provide feedback.

Then that interactivity and those interrelated connections are the beginnings

of developing a sense of agency and capacity.

Beyond your own sort of immediate cause and effect relationships, you have the

social connections that really are oftentimes very difficult to fully see

without either coming to a cynical conclusion, perhaps, or

developing essentially a pathological way of viewing how people interact.

Good news is generally people are nice, but that's for a different conversation.

When we start looking at these relationships in sort of deeper, more meaningful

terms, one of the things that you'll come to appreciate more likely than not is

that the relationships between people and between cultures and between groups

are something that you actually have surprising amounts of control over,

at least in how you interact and present.

And right now we're looking at just a sort of a wave of how people interact

online and how different that is than they interact in person.

And there's just a lot of stuff going on there to process, but you can be part

of the solution with a lot of that.

You can essentially lower the temperature and start asking better sort of

more discovery style questions and then take those discoveries,

take the results of those questions back into your lodge and use the discovery

space that is the lodge to effectively formulate a better sort of trial and

answer experiment based model for you to go back and forth to create the

change you want to make in the world.

This, this relatedness, this interactivity is a function of the world that a

lot of people kind of take for granted in a negative way.

They suggest that the world doesn't change.

They suggest that it's impossible to change things in their sort of situation

or they have resigned themselves to not taking action because one day things will

change, but it's actually much more of a laboratory environment than you might

think.

Or if you like the video game parlance, it's a lot like a video game.

You can level up from other people's experience and you can work to try new

builds of your character anytime you need to to get different outcomes and

different results.

So in that sort of relational reflective way, you can be part of the testing

process to develop better and more effective solutions to problems that you

face.

You can also be part of the energetic sort of feedback system where you can give

energy to that system and help things improve, help add grace, help lower the

temperature, help bring things out into the world that you have learned in your

lodge that you can essentially use to make the world a better place.