A Mason's Work

I think an appropriate question you might ask as a relatively new Mason or somebody who

just sat down to reflect on the craft. An appropriate question might ask is, why are there

so many guards? Why are there so many dudes with swords at my lodge? And it's an awesome

question. If you take the perspective, however, that free Masonry is a mental exercise,

determine quickly that each of those guards serves a purpose. And that purpose now more than

ever is vitally important. We are living in an age of where information and the truth of information

is a difficult reality. There is so much content out there that is either politically motivated

or artificially generated or inspired by false beliefs or legitimate beliefs that turn out to

be morally bankrupt, that those guards really become just a critical part of understanding how

you can stay sane in an environment where sanity and retaining your sanity is increasingly

difficult. So what do I mean by that? The guards are the giant to help you maintain the integrity and

order of your mental and emotional landscape. And they do that by giving each of the doors in

the lodge room a sort of cognitive function. So from the outer door meaning all distractions

through to the inner door meaning good intentions through the examining room and the preparing room.

And we've talked about these in separate instances. But as you're looking through the online

or even offline landscape with books and media those filters should be sort of processed. And

it's helpful to process them in a certain order. So when you're sitting down in reflection,

you need to do the first order door closing. We're going to close the outer door.

And that means all data that is not relevant to the current reflection. And so this means while

you're sitting down to think about perhaps how can you better solve a situation with your neighbor

or how can you start building the kind of future for your family that you're looking for or what

have you. The first order door is anything that's not related to that needs to be eliminated

from your processes. Now like any kind of meditation, the way you let thoughts kind of not control

you is to just let them pass. You can note they're passing. But let them pass through your mind as

you're reflecting. The moment you start to try and pick up that shiny bobble of a thought or

a piece of information or a piece of data, you run the risk of getting distracted. And then that

outer guard sort of concept isn't doing the right work. So the next order of sort of operations

is I think it's the exam, the preparing room where as you are processing data from your everyday

life, you know, you need to put on your Masonic sort of headspace and you know remove your offensive

or defensive labels, remove your need to be right, your need to be vindicated, your need to be

all of the things that come with maybe putting on the armor and the trappings of the outside world

and removing from the conversation any of the sort of egoic attachments to money, fame or fortune

as that information, as you allow that information to come in. So first you, you know, the outer guard

protects you from all distractions that aren't related to the current sort of reflection meditation.

Second, the inner guard or the in Pennsylvania, Masonry, we have

masters of ceremonies. So the junior master of ceremonies is responsibilities, the guard that

preparing room door. And then your examining room door and that's where we examine visitors to

the lodge, data that we want to, you know, potentially bring in and validate, I've done a whole

episode in this already. But that examining room door is where we want to determine if perhaps new

information or current information might fit from a Masonic perspective, our overall goals and

designs. But if you use these guards as kind of an information processing algorithm, if you will,

you'll get very quickly to a deeper and stronger understanding as you're processing new information.

And you can do this in reflection. You can do this even in the context of browsing a website.

You can take a Masonic approach as audits it sounds to browsing the internet,

hold on those different sort of digestive or intellectually filtering layers where you determine

what information makes it into the inner chamber. And when you do that, you'll find that the biases

and the noise start to get the volume turned down, which again, in sort of current modernity is

really, really nice. So this is just another shout out to Wilmshurst idea of using the Masonic ritual as

a sort of mental reflection and headspace. So good luck. I want to know if it works for you.

I know that when I step through it, it's been pretty productive. So reach out and let me know what you've

learned.