A Mason's Work

One of the sort of more interesting parts of the human experience is as you kind of live

your life, you find that you are perpetually evaluating.

You are mentally evaluating positive and negative potentials outcomes.

Do I like this person?

Do I like, you know, not like this person?

Do I think this is going to be good for me?

Do I think this is going to be bad for me?

Well, it feels good right now.

It feels good later.

That kind of mental noise is really important, right?

The human experience of evaluation is one that helps us determine our course of action.

When it's conscious, it's an evaluated, it's very productive.

Meaning when we look at the decisions we're making and we make them with intention, it's

productive.

It's when our decision making sort of process or our evaluation process goes haywire and

becomes something that happens under our conscious awareness that things get messed up.

And so when we talk about, you know, growing ourselves as individuals, it becomes really

important to start to try and find those places where you are making unconscious judgments

and evaluations.

And in the process of doing that and the process of trying to surface these things, the net

positive for you as an individual is you begin to open yourself to opportunities that

you may have previously closed off because you've made these conscious evaluations or unconscious

evaluations.

As you start to look through some of these, the first question, the way you're going

to get to that level of awareness where you go, am I making these unconscious judgments

or evaluations or not, is you stop in a moment, take a moment of reflection and ask yourself,

why do I think this way?

I don't like this person.

I do, I not like this person.

Use the other tools that you have at your disposal, the Masonic tools, other symbols,

other concepts to help identify some of the mechanics behind the way you think.

Now, in the Western vocabulary, particularly in English, we have a lot of prepositions,

which helps us think of things in a pretty mechanical way.

If your language is not default language of thinking isn't English, let's say you think

in music or you think in other terms, some of this will be a little bit harder to do.

But when you are sort of cognitively approaching some of these concepts in English, the why

and the root cause analysis, why do I feel this way?

Why do I think this way?

What are the things I was thinking before I made this judgment become very easy with

the language that we use?

So start to do a little bit of a root cause analysis to try and figure out why you feel

the way you do or why you think the way you do.

And in that process, start to surface some, perhaps, of the unconscious beliefs that inform

your behavior, some of the unconscious identities that you may be working with.

I may identify as somebody who believes a certain way and have never examined that

belief set really beyond that identity.

So as you start to do this, you'll begin to sort of recapture conscious control of your

behavior, of your inputs, your systemic inputs.

And before evaluating them, do a little bit of a meta evaluation to say, hey, do I always

look down at people that are in this socioeconomic status or in this profession or in this demographic

or have this skin color or have this belief set?

Do I always look at these people in a way that has this negative or positive evaluation?

Again, the mission here is to try and become conscious of those decisions before they

turn into behaviors that might lead you down a path that's not productive for yourself

or for society at large, depending, of course, on your scope and how much you want society

at large to succeed.

Hopefully, it's a lot.

And hopefully in the process of going through this, you'll be able to objectify this thinking

in a way that you can then re-internalize it and then make it unconscious again if you

don't want to think about it.

That's okay.

So long as you've made the conscious decision to embed that in your sort of day to day thinking.

In this process, you're going to essentially elevate your capabilities every time you do

it.

Re-evaluate all of your preferences.

Re-evaluate all of your decisions from time to time.

And you'll find that process helps you become a better and stronger person.