Pure Sensation Before the Story Begins

Show Notes

Most of us move through our days labeling experiences so quickly that we never actually sit with what is happening before the label arrives. In his book A Mason's Work, Brian Mattocks argues that the tools of Freemasonry offer practical frameworks for exactly this kind of self-examination. This episode opens a week-long exploration of conscious awareness by mapping the five classical orders of architecture onto stages of human consciousness, starting with the Tuscan.

The Tuscan stage is pre-evaluative. It is the sensation of brightness before you call it sunlight, the feeling of cold before you name it cold. Brian makes the case that cultivating this baseline level of awareness, without imposing labels or judgments on top of it, functions like calibrating an instrument. The more you practice sitting with raw sensation, the more sensitive you become to the subtleties and nuances that higher-order thinking tends to smooth over. The week's arc moves toward what Brian calls integrated agency, where pure awareness and conscious choice finally operate together.

There is also a clear warning here. Staying at the Tuscan level indefinitely is not enlightenment. Without the evaluative layers that come later, awareness alone leaves you in a state of perpetual reaction, with no real ability to choose your response. This episode lays the foundation everything else this week builds on.

• What the Tuscan order of architecture maps to in terms of human consciousness
• The distinction between sensation and the naming of sensation
• Why pre-evaluative awareness is a trainable skill, not a passive state
• Practical entry points for cultivating Tuscan-level awareness, including body scans and time in nature
• The Ouroboros as a metaphor for where the week's arc is headed
• The risk of staying stuck in pure awareness without developing agency

If you want to understand where your interpretations of experience come from, you first have to get beneath them.

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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] This week, we're going to talk about conscious awareness, which for some of you might be
[00:06] a very weird conversation to have because conscious awareness isn't something that we
[00:13] often talk about.
[00:14] It's there's not a class on it.
[00:15] The places you'll find education on things like conscious awareness are typically your
[00:21] meditation centers or maybe even in abstract at your church or synagogue or temple or what
[00:28] have you.
[00:29] When we look at conscious awareness, though, we have an advantage as Freemasons because
[00:35] we have a ton of structural components we can use to talk about what it is and even perhaps
[00:42] map some of the stages of conscious awareness.
[00:47] Today, we're going to start with the sort of Tuscan stage of conscious awareness.
[00:52] This pre-understanding of the way the world works, the things that are happening.
[01:01] It is not evaluative.
[01:04] Okay.
[01:04] So what does that mean?
[01:05] That all sounds crazy complicated.
[01:07] When you wake up in the morning, there is a series of sensations you're going to have.
[01:16] If you remember this morning when you woke up, you probably were first aware of brightness
[01:24] or light of some kind.
[01:27] You don't give it a label.
[01:30] You don't name it as the sun or the room light or any of that kind of stuff.
[01:34] You are at a Tuscan level of awareness.
[01:38] It is just a sensation.
[01:40] Everything that you're going to experience throughout the day at a Tuscan level of awareness is just
[01:47] sensation.
[01:49] It is not even labeled mentally in your head.
[01:55] It is the sensation before labeling it.
[02:00] So it is the feeling of cold before calling it cold.
[02:03] Tuscan awareness or that level of just conscious awareness without any additional function to it
[02:14] is a vital thing to develop.
[02:19] Being able to note what is happening without giving it a name, without giving it an evaluation,
[02:27] without any of those extras, the impositions of other levels of consciousness on that awareness,
[02:37] cultivating that makes for a very valuable sort of stage in the process of developing.
[02:44] If you can begin to have experiences and increase your awareness of those experiences,
[02:50] again, at a pre-naming, pre-evaluative state, you then set up the stage for additional levels
[03:00] of development moving forward.
[03:01] What happens through this process as you begin to cultivate this awareness, your ability to
[03:11] sense things will increase over time.
[03:13] Like any instrumentation, your ability to understand the smaller fluctuations, the subtleties and the
[03:22] nuance will develop again through this exploration.
[03:27] So when we look to develop this for ourselves, there are fundamental practices.
[03:34] Most folks will consider things like going for a walk in nature or sitting in meditation or even just
[03:45] laying down and kind of doing a mental bodily scan is a great way to begin the process of cultivating
[03:54] that level of awareness.
[03:56] And without trying to ruin or spoil the story here, what happens as you go through these stages
[04:02] of consciousness?
[04:04] And again, we're mapping them to the principal orders of architecture for convenience more than
[04:08] anything.
[04:08] There's not, uh, there's no sort of symbolic reference here in any of the, uh, the ritual
[04:15] or any of that kind of stuff.
[04:16] So, uh, we're using the frameworks of Freemasonry essentially to just give us that apparatus that
[04:21] we can use, uh, without again, connecting this to any historical, historical reference or any
[04:26] that kind of stuff.
[04:27] Um, but using it as that apparatus, what will happen is as you move through these various
[04:33] architectural stages of consciousness, uh, you'll note that they start taking on, uh,
[04:38] this sort of recursive similarity so that this level of conscious awareness, uh, that you
[04:44] have at the Tuscan level also maps to a, uh, a level of conscious awareness that you have
[04:50] actually at the very end of the composite level.
[04:53] Uh, and it's almost like an Ouroboros or a snake eating its own tail.
[04:57] Uh, when we cultivate this consciousness, we're going to be moving through these stages to
[05:03] help us grow and evolve and advance, uh, so that we get to that point of enlightenment where
[05:08] we are both consciously aware and have complete agency.
[05:12] One of the perils of awareness alone without any of the evaluative context over top is that
[05:18] you don't gain mastery over your ability to respond.
[05:21] It's just response.
[05:24] And so in that way, there's a certain amount of perpetual sort of victimhood in that process.
[05:28] And we're going to move past all of this, uh, and explain it more as we get into some of
[05:33] the, uh, more discrete stages in the middle.
[05:36] See you then.