A Mason's Work

I'm going to play something for you from the Song of God or Bhagavad-gita chapter 2 verse

48 and you can find this and all the other chapters of Bhagavad-gita on a website called

holly-baghadvah-gita.org.

I'll try and leave comments or a link in the show notes for you.

This is chapter 2 verse 48.

Give it a listen and then we'll come back and we'll talk about what it means.

So roughly translated this means, piece that fast and the performance of your duty, abandon

attachment to success and failure.

And when we talk about that from a Masonic context, it is really quite beautiful, how

well that interlays with a lot of the working tools of the craft.

So we know as workmen on the temple that it is not anyone swing of a hammer that build

to the temple.

It is the perpetual judicious application of behavior.

By not getting attached to the outcomes of any one bit of work, we get to be free of

that expectation.

And we do things like we go to the gym.

It's unreasonable to expect that a single pressing up of the weights is going to create all

of the outcomes.

And in fact, it's unreasonable to understand that any one of those trips of the gym is

any more important than any other.

We're not able to figure out as a society or as a scientific-minded folks which time

you went to the gym made the difference.

In the same way, if you were gardening, we can't tell which time you watered into plants

or which moment of sunshine the plant got contributed to the growth of the flowers or the

fruits.

So this is really instructive for us as Mason's because it helps us understand that what we're

really doing is cultivating our behavior in a way that allows us to shape the probability

of outcomes by shaping the behavior that we execute.

And then that probability of outcomes, again, at no point is any of it guaranteed, but

essentially we're narrowing the window.

So we do that through the careful application of the Masonic tools.

We use the square root of square root actions against the square root virtue is what I'm

doing going to make sense relative to the goals I'm trying to achieve.

Am I plumb?

Am I doing this with rectitude?

Am I doing the work that I'm doing in a way that is the most upright performance relative

to my character and the intent of the Grand Architect of the Universe?

Again, how all these pieces fit together?

The behavioral sculpting conversation becomes central to our sort of application understanding

of the work.

And we stop getting focused so much so on this sort of perilous attachment model to outcomes.

As we move to higher virtue work, higher ways of working, we get to a point where the

execution of the work becomes the value itself.

The delivery of the effort is its own reward.

In a way that transcends the outcome you're going to create.

Now yes, we all have to go and we have to work for a living and we have to make money

and do our stuff to be successful in whatever society you live in.

At the same time, if that work is not bringing you the growth and the reward and the sort

of inherently in the work itself, the value, then no outcome is sort of conversely going

to be worth the work that you're doing.

And this helps us demystify some of the things with like the hustle grind culture or

the kind of magic pill solutions as well.

You really can move past a lot of that noise when you understand that the work is in

love itself, its own benefit and its own reward, its own mechanism for growth and development.

So as you are going about your day to day, remember chapter 2 verse 38 of the Gita, don't

get attached to the outcomes.