Three Questions That Test a Fear's Credentials

Show Notes

Not everything that feels like your fear actually is. Brian walks through the examining room as a structured process for interrogating incoming fears before they are allowed to direct your behavior. The examining room does not judge what shows up. It tests it, the same way a potential brother is tested rather than evaluated abstractly. Three sequential questions do most of that work.

The first question is whether the fear is actually yours. Fears travel across generations and families, and a father's unspoken anxiety about money can become a son's inexplicable dread of financial conversations without either person ever naming it. The second question is whether the fear is current. A fear that had a legitimate origin in a younger version of you may be operating on completely outdated information. The third question is whether the fear is proportionate. Without information, everything in a dark room looks like a snake. Running all three questions gives the lodge what it needs to make a calibrated, honest response rather than a reactive one.

• Why the examining room tests rather than judges
• How inherited fears masquerade as personal ones
• Identifying fears that were once valid but are no longer current
• Proportionality and the tendency to magnify fear in the absence of information
• How the examining room feeds clean data to the lodge floor

The details gathered in the examining room do not slow the process down. They make everything that happens afterward more accurate and more useful.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] All right, the Pursuiant has done their job. The Inner Guard has done their work. The fear that you're experiencing that was knocked on by the outside door has passed the Tyler, has moved from the Persevant into the examining room.
[00:18] This is where we start to do some real meaningful work, the examining room.
[00:24] In the lodge, the examining room exists for one purpose. It's to determine what is presenting itself, what it claims to be.
[00:34] A potential brother goes there to be tested, not judged, not evaluated, tested.
[00:40] The question whether he's worthy isn't something abstract. It's a reality.
[00:47] It's whether or not it meets the standard to allow him to enter the lodge and contribute.
[00:55] The fear that you're experiencing that you may have experienced in the past is now going to get the same treatment when you bring that into the examining room.
[01:03] Again, it's not judgment. It's not evaluation. It's a testing.
[01:07] Three questions that when you apply them in a row, get enough insight to determine whether or not you're working it with something real or something that maybe needs some more refinement.
[01:21] The first question, and this is really weird for a lot of us, is, is the fear I'm experiencing actually mine?
[01:29] It sounds obvious until you sit with it, but fears travel.
[01:36] They travel across generations. They travel across families. They travel through cultures.
[01:44] They travel because people who behave in an unexamined way share their fear or the consequences of their fear with others.
[01:57] So a father's unspoken terror about money becomes a son's inexplicable anxiety about financial conversations.
[02:07] Or a mother's fear of being seen becomes a daughter's reflexive sort of retreat from visibility.
[02:16] Fear feels like it's yours sometimes, but if it's somebody else's, it does not have validity and really shouldn't go into your lodge to be processed.
[02:30] It should get rejected outright as something that you don't own.
[02:36] That fear does not get to determine and direct your work.
[02:40] The second question is, is the fear you're experiencing current?
[02:46] Is it, is it a now thing?
[02:48] Um, fear with the legitimate origin that's yours from a real experience, um, may still be operating based on outdated information.
[02:58] The conditions that you had sort of back when that fear was developed, a younger version of you that needed to be afraid of these things, uh, whatever they might be probably doesn't need that anymore.
[03:11] And when the fear is obsolete, you can just kind of reject it from the lodge as something that needs to be processed.
[03:18] Um, or you can bring it in, work through it very quickly, because again, it's no longer valid and appropriate and use the lodge for what it's for, which is determining your calibrated response to how do you're going to process this fear.
[03:35] The third question is in the examining room that you're going to experience is, is the fear you're experiencing proportionate?
[03:42] Is it yours and current and appropriate?
[03:48] More often than not, our fears get magnified.
[03:51] Uh, this is something that happens, uh, kind of in the absence of information.
[03:58] Uh, I liken it to being in a dark room, uh, all pieces of rope.
[04:05] Tend to look like snakes, right?
[04:07] So when you are having a, uh, a fear reaction or a fear response or something that's triggering you and knocking on that door is your response.
[04:19] The appropriate one.
[04:22] And again, this is all information that passes from the examining room through to the lodge room.
[04:30] The lodge is where you're going to take all of that information, determine your best course of action, the worshipful master, your internal sort of governance process.
[04:41] And, and all of that, we'll figure out how to best respond.
[04:44] But what you're going to do by routing some information through the examining room, some of these knocks through the examining room is get more details.
[04:54] Those details, uh, help a ton when it comes to processing later.
[05:00] And we'll talk more about what that looks like more often than not.
[05:04] Uh, again, and I can jump to outcomes here, but, uh, the, the place where you go with all of this work, um, does essentially determine how you respond.
[05:18] And the cycle time between that first knock and how quickly it makes it to your internal lodge floor to be processed.
[05:29] That one of the sort of first goals is to shrink that as much as you can so that you can go from first knock, the lodge floor triage in an instant.
[05:40] If you can do that in 30 seconds or less, uh, this means a couple of things.
[05:46] It means you've increased your agency.
[05:47] You've increased your capacity.
[05:48] It means you've identified the fear as opposed to it being invisible.
[05:52] There's tons of good stuff that come from this, but we'll get into a little bit more how to process and how to work through all this stuff.
[05:58] As we go through the balance of this process over the course of the next couple episodes.