A Mason's Work

One of the things that happens as you sort of go through life, there's a sort of critical

understanding that everyone has to kind of come to in order to move their thinking past

maybe sort of elementary primal kind of, you know, animalistic way of thinking.

And that understanding is that everything that's happening is happening in your mind.

You are experiencing the world and in that experience, you are perpetually typically

evaluating that experience on a regular moment by moment basis.

So you are determining good or bad, left or right, up or down.

You are in all ways interacting less with the real world and more with your idea of

the world.

We'll talk about this in future episodes, particularly in terms of relationships.

But with this concept at hand, it becomes obvious very quickly that there is no objective

morality, for example, in a given object.

Objects aren't good or bad.

Things are things.

There is no inherent sort of virtue or non-virtue in the sort of day to day moments that

we have.

Now, that's not to say that there doesn't exist morality and things like that.

But again, all of this is happening as an expression of what you think and what you feel, which

means all of this is happening in your mind.

There are tons of little examples of situations where you'll find you can create a very, very

powerful emotional response based on something that is absolutely and completely untrue.

If you fly off the handle because somebody gave you a piece of advice and they were mistaken,

or you misheard that same piece of advice and took the wrong action, the results are the

same, right?

The outcomes in the real world are the same, but your mental sort of landscape goes through

some sort of cyclical iteration of hellscape or heavenscape depending on whether or not

you understand that you have made a mistake or they made a mistake or what have you.

Because of this, because everything's happening in your mind, there are tons of knobs and

dials and switches in the mental landscape that you can use to essentially recontextualize

how you process the real world.

One of the first switches that you want to turn off, for example, is the discernment

switch.

You do not want to perpetually be evaluating everything that's happening moment by moment

as good or bad.

When you evaluate everything that's happening moment by moment as good or bad, you're

left with a black and white world.

One oftentimes that you have mischaracterized and leads to its own sort of subsequent suffering.

Because of this, if you turn that sort of judgment off and just allow moments to be

without you having to inject some sort of mental framework over top of them or go to

bad, you'll then be able to essentially appreciate the moment in its fullest and subsequently

in another time or in another in reflection with intent, then make whatever evaluations

you might need.

Now, again, this doesn't work for things like snap judgments and stuff like that.

But for the large moving pieces of the human condition, they all happen in your brain

and you have absolute control or have the potential for absolute control over what's

happening in your mind.

This will give you a level of unparalleled freedom and ability to respond to the world

in a way that other people lack.

When we look at other people in the world who are constantly stuck in this mental framework

of dealing with their projections, you get into naming and blaming and all sorts of stuff

that happens when your mind is essentially untrained.

So how do we start the process of training our mind and how do we sort of let go of this

judgment stuff because it's really, really hard to do?

What you want to start with is start noticing the gaps between your thinking.

So when you're in a moment, whatever that moment might be, look for the opportunities

between thoughts and nurture those to greater and greater lengths of time.

As you are able to reduce the number of thoughts you have per day, this will allow you to create

those spaces where non-judgment is coming or happening or what have you.

This kind of nurturing will allow you to cultivate further awareness of the present moment

and again, stop building these mental constructs which should improve your quality of life over

time.

As you get a better ability to essentially repeat the contents of what's happening moment

by moment to yourself and to others without judgment or discernment, you'll better be

able to respond again without the emotional baggage that comes with all of these preconceived

notions.

We'll get into the next episode how that projects itself into conversations about relationships

and things like that.

But for now, start working on just a little bit on trying to stretch the distance between

your thoughts.