Emotional Logic: Understanding the Causes of How We Feel

Emotions feel immediate and uncontrollable—but Freemasonry reminds us that our long-term responses are shaped by our own discernment. This episode explores the logic behind our emotions, showing how circumstances may spark a reaction but our interpretations sustain it. By understanding emotional responsibility, we discover the power to refine our responses and align them with virtue.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Initial emotional sparks are circumstantial, but sustained emotions are chosen
• Anger, fear, or sadness often stem from misinterpretations of events
• Emotional responsibility is the foundation of maturity and self-mastery

💬 Featured Quotes

• 0:00:00 – “One of the things that’s important to learn… is that your emotional responses to all things while initially might be happening beyond your control, the longer term emotions you experience are entirely created by you.”
• 0:00:12 – “That means when you are angry, you are responsible for being angry. You’re the reason, the fault, all of that.”
• 0:00:20 – “The circumstances you’re in may evoke an anger response… but the anger is really a result of your evaluation of the situation.”
• 0:00:33 – “You may have had this experience… where you get angry about a given situation, but you have misinterpreted it.”

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

• The Hoodwink and the Unknown: Learning to Trust Yourself (Ep. 126)
  — On risk-taking and self-trust, which parallels the idea of interpreting and reframing experiences.
• The Rough Ashlar and the Burden: Making Sense of Challenge and Suffering (Ep. 127)
  — On interpreting adversity, directly tied to misinterpretation and emotional reaction.
• Depression, Endurance, and Growth: How to Know Which Is Which (Ep. 128)
  — On discerning between different internal states, complementing the idea of emotional logic.

   

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.

One of the things that's important to learn as you are working through some of the early

sort of levels of emotional intelligence is that your emotional responses to all things

while initially might be happening sort of beyond your control, the longer term emotions

you experience are entirely created by you and your responsibility. So what does that mean?

That means when you are angry, you are responsible for being angry. You're the reason, the fault,

all of that kind of stuff. Now, the circumstances that you're in may evoke an anger response.

It cuts you off in traffic, you get angry. But the anger is really a result of your evaluation

of the situation. And you may have had this experience. I know I have on numerous occasions where

you get angry about a given situation, but you have misinterpreted that situation in its entirety.

You get angry for the person cutting you off in traffic, but that person is cutting you off

because they have somebody in their passenger seat that's having a baby or choking or something.

All of a sudden, your anger seems absurd and ridiculous. And like it came, it typically vanishes

very quickly. As an emotional human being, it's important to understand the way these emotions

work because if you fabricate them all, if you are the person who creates these emotions out of

sort of thin air or out of a conjuring of the way you think the world works, then you can very

easily make them go away for in the same sort of puff of smoke. As emotional human beings, if you

know that this is the case, you can start to work with that and grow your capacities to process,

create or eliminate emotions that don't serve your needs. Now, we can talk about, what does that

mean and what emotions serve your needs and when and why and how. And some of that will cover

in future episodes. But we want to talk about the strong emotional responses that you have now

in any given situation. So if you know somebody who's regularly flying off the handle for whatever

reason or if you know somebody who is regularly upset or frustrated for, you know, seems to get

frustrated for even the smallest sort of slight, this is the place where you start. And the first

thing you do is you say, why am I feeling this? What is this feeling that I'm having accomplishing for

me? Every emotional response you have is delivering some immediate value to you as an individual.

Being angry allows me to feel self-righteous. Being self-righteous makes me feel important.

Therefore, every time I feel angry, I feel important. Is a good kind of analytics sort of step by

step that you can go through. Every one of your emotions is going to have this kind of causal chain.

I feel X because it allows me to feel Y and I feel Y because it makes me feel Z.

It is very, very uncommon that you're going to have an emotional response that doesn't have a

benefit to you personally, even if that emotion is uncomfortable. You might get visibly sad and

depressed and that garners sympathy from the people around you, which garners you the attention

that you were looking for, which is why you regularly feel depressed or look sad. Again,

and I'm not trying to trivialize, you know, meaningful mental illness and all of those other things.

But if you look at the emotional content of your day-to-day life, it is important to understand that

there is something going on here. You're not just idly kind of feeling stuff and you are not

the victim of those feelings. The things that you feel have a purpose that purposes to satisfy either

a known or unknown sort of underlying need and the reason that it keeps happening is because it

keeps doing that well. So as you go through your investigative process to try and figure out

kind of your own emotional underpinnings and how that stuff works, start to figure out

and you do this by study and reflection by externalizing your thought processes in places like

journals or using the Masonic Zimbals deck to start figuring out some of the sort of mechanics

of this emotional understanding. And as you do this, you'll get sort of emotionally more competent

and able to handle even more and more subtle emotions as they arise, complicated emotions that

have, you know, double-sided nuance, bitter sweet, things like that. You'll be able to work with

these in a way that helps you essentially not be a slave of your emotional states but be the master

of them, which is really one of the main objectives here of becoming a fully automated and agent

agentic human being, somebody who can respond to the world around them and create the kind of

change they want to see in the world without essentially doing it accidentally. So that's the plan.

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