In this episode, we continue our symbolic reflection on The Book of Five Rings by exploring the Wind Scroll—Musashi’s fierce critique of illusion, distraction, and reliance on superficial technique.

This conversation draws parallels between martial philosophy and the Masonic journey, revealing that both traditions demand clarity of purpose, internal discipline, and rejection of showmanship. The work is not in the flourish—it’s in the sustained attention to transformation.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Musashi warns that technique can become a distraction from true mastery.
• Freemasonry also rejects illusion—favoring direct experience and inner alignment.
• The path requires clarity, not cleverness.

💬 Featured Quotes

“Including Musashi’s own school regarding the long sword… if you're focusing on the techniques, you're focusing on the wrong thing.” — [00:00:59]
“Of the shortcomings and challenges of the other schools… people with longer swords, people with different kinds of techniques…” — [00:00:29]
“As you're evaluating kind of your cognitive processes… it's really easy to pick the easy-to-grab-onto concepts… as if that's going to be the keystone.”  — [00:04:35]
“The work is the work. It’s always been the same. The right behavior is going to get you the right outcomes.” — [00:04:55]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 76 – The Square and the Sword: Lessons from The Book of Five Rings
Introduces the symbolic alignment between Musashi’s elemental texts and Masonic working tools.

🎧 Ep. 73 – Geometry as truth between things
Focuses on structure and relationship as deeper truths—not surface patterns.

🎧 Ep. 69 – The Grammar of the Lodge: Structure, Symbol, and the Spoken Word
Explores the symbolic function of structure and intention in all communication.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we explore the Fire Book of The Book of Five Rings and its symbolic alignment with the Masonic lodge as a mental and tactical space. Drawing from Wilmshurst’s description of the lodge as an inner sanctum, we examine how Musashi’s combat language can be read as guidance for situational awareness, presence, and real-time discernment—not as aggression, but as self-mastery in motion.

Musashi’s fire is not wild or flailing—it is deliberate, tuned to the moment, and grounded in symbolic integrity. So too is the work of a Mason operating at their best.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• The Lodge can be seen as an internal headspace where all faculties are active and aligned.
• Musashi’s Fire Book is a toolkit for situational clarity, not for domination.
• Presence, adaptability, and conscious response define meaningful Masonic work.

💬 Featured Quotes

“In the Fire Book, the parallel… is the lodge itself.”  — [00:01:00]
“When confronted with situational information, how do you respond?” — [00:01:47]
“Don't get stuck with your favorite little flourish… It has to serve the objective.” — [00:02:41]
“We are really, at the highest levels of attention, trying to bring our best self to the table—in our personal lives, in our headspace, and in our lodge.” — [00:05:25]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 76 – The Square and the Sword: Lessons from The Book of Five Rings
Introduces the symbolic alignment between Musashi’s elemental texts and Masonic working tools.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Explores how symbolic interpretation elevates reflection and enables clearer behavioral insight.

🎧 Ep. 55 – The Trowel and the Practice of Care
Demonstrates how intentional action and inner awareness are the true hallmarks of Masonry.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we continue our symbolic alignment between The Book of Five Rings and Masonic working tools—turning now to the Water Scroll, paired with the Fellow Craft degree.

The Water Scroll invites us to explore adaptability, responsive effort, and continuous skill refinement. Through the lens of the Fellow Craft, it becomes clear that learning is not a passive task—it is the practice of recognizing context, applying tools in real time, and developing symbolic awareness through action.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• The Water Scroll emphasizes adaptive behavior and situational mastery.
• The Fellow Craft mind is constantly learning what good work looks like.
• Conscious attention in motion defines the working Mason’s growth.

💬 Featured Quotes

“Personally, as an individual… you're in that Fellow Craft space where you're understanding how the tools work and where to apply them.”  — [00:01:21]
“As you go through the Water Book… you really can benefit from bringing that Fellow Craft Mason’s mind to the work itself.” — [00:02:01]
“The Book of Five Rings… is a heightened and perpetual state of attention. It is about consciousness in motion.” — [00:02:33]
“You are instantaneously evaluating everything that's happening… while building the repertoire of skills and understandings to solve problems.” — [00:03:49]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 76 – The Square and the Sword: Lessons from The Book of Five Rings
Introduces the symbolic alignment between Musashi’s Five Books and Masonic tools, beginning with The Square.

🎧 Ep. 71 – Logic as the groundwork for discernment
Focuses on mental structure and decision-making—essential foundations for adaptive strategy.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Invites listeners to approach symbolic frameworks like the Water Scroll as tools for dynamic awareness and adaptive behavior. 

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we begin a new reflection series pairing Masonic symbols with chapters from The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. The Square takes the lead—serving as both a moral compass and a symbolic framework for cognitive clarity, structural thinking, and precise evaluation of action.

By linking Masonic tools to warrior philosophy, this conversation invites listeners to consider what symbolic excellence looks like, and how intentional structure enables real change.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• The Square helps clarify which behaviors are structural versus reactionary.
• Tools like the Square and Musashi’s writings both emphasize disciplined self-evaluation.
• Symbolic excellence begins by defining your operating structure with precision.

💬 Featured Quotes

“The Square will help you look at your current behavior set and evaluate what's important and what isn't… what's structural in your beliefs.”
 — [00:01:57]“The Book of Five Rings… helps you understand from a structural level what behaviors are going to help you achieve your objective and what isn’t.”
 — [00:03:16]“The Square as a concept is very much a cognitive slicing tool.”
 — [00:01:37]“None of these tools are really designed to be used in isolation… I think you’ll find the Square has a lot more to teach us than meets the eye.”
 — [00:04:23]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 69 – The Grammar of the Lodge: Structure, Symbol, and the Spoken Word
Explores how linguistic structure reflects internal discipline and symbolic thinking.

🎧 Ep. 71 – Logic as the groundwork for discernment
Focuses on how clear evaluation and structure guide personal refinement.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Invites listeners to approach symbols like the Square as tools for deep introspection and clarity.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we conclude our exploration of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences with a reflection on Astronomy—not as mere stargazing, but as a profound symbolic study of movement, pattern, and transformation.

By examining gravitational laws, celestial patterns, and the timeless rhythms of the heavens, Masons are invited to understand themselves as beings in motion—subject to forces, patterns, and cycles—yet also capable of choice, adjustment, and becoming.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Astronomy reveals patterns above us that are mirrored within us.
• To change outcomes, we must first work within the rules that shape reality.
• Awareness of natural patterns empowers intentional transformation.

💬 Featured Quotes

“Astronomy follows certain rules and behaviors… and those rules are in many ways quasi-mysterious.” — [00:00:27]
“Gravity controls things within its influence… and there are patterns in behavior like gravity you can’t just will away.”  — [00:01:58]
“Above, so below—the understanding that these patterns mirror themselves in a fractal pattern.”  — [00:02:30]
“The charge of astronomy is to learn how the world works—and bring that understanding into your everyday life.”  — [00:04:29]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 73 – Geometry as truth between things
Explores spatial structure and relational understanding as symbolic models for growth and movement.

🎧 Ep. 72 – The symbolic nature of arithmetic
Reflects on precision, pattern recognition, and how underlying structure informs perception.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Examines how symbolic thought extends across disciplines like astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic to support deeper self-reflection.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we explore Music as more than melody or ritual ornament—understood instead as a nonverbal system of emotional communication. Continuing our series on the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, we investigate how music functions as a symbolic and cognitive tool for Masons.

Through examples drawn from daily life, media, and symbolic practice, this conversation explores how musical structure shapes memory, communicates feeling, and complements the intellectual work of self-development.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Music is emotional communication structured by symbolic rules.
• Musical thinking can enrich even "dry" subjects by engaging the heart.
• Masonic music points us to harmony, memory, and shared emotional understanding.

💬 Featured Quotes

“Music is the language of emotional content, a nonverbal language of emotional content… it has rules and patterns and behaviors just like everything else.”
 — [00:01:21]“When we talk about music and Freemasonry… we're really talking about emotional content.”
 — [00:01:05]“There’s a standard chord progression… it makes 80% of the hit songs. Music is effectively a means of emotional communication.”
 — [00:01:37]“If you can communicate the emotional content of accounting through music, things change.”
 — [00:02:14]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 73 – Geometry as truth between things
  Explores how structure and relationship form a framework for understanding the self in space and time.

🎧 Ep. 70 – Rhetoric as a lens for bias discovery 
Considers how persuasive communication reveals our internal frameworks and emotional filters.

🎧 Ep. 45 – Journaling Your Way to Clarity and Insight
Explores personal methods for externalizing and processing internal content—including emotional and symbolic material.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

   Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we examine Geometry not simply as a spatial discipline, but as a symbolic science of relationships, continuity, and structure. Continuing our series on the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, this conversation invites Masons to reflect on how points, lines, shapes, and vectors model not only the world around us—but also our experiences, identities, and internal logic.

Geometry becomes a language for making ideas visible, creating coherence in memory, identity, and behavior by exploring how things relate to one another over time and space.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Geometry is symbolic—it reveals how things relate to each other, not just where they are.
• Applying geometric concepts like parallelism or vectors helps clarify identity and personal history.
• Geometric thinking externalizes and stabilizes thoughts, giving form to complexity.

💬 Featured Quotes

“You take simple geometric concepts like parallelism… and start to compare interesting ideas and concepts.”
 — [00:00:33]“The externalization of concepts into space allows you to operate on those concepts in meaningful ways.”
 — [00:01:34]“History, for example—let’s say you’re born, and that was a point. And you are traveling on a line in a direction. Now it’s a point and a line and a vector.”
 — [00:02:07]“Most relationships, for that matter, are triangular or more… and you start to understand that there’s relationships and ratios there that are fundamental and really important.”
 — [00:03:02]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 72 – The symbolic nature of arithmetic
Explores how numerical structure helps clarify thought and align internal models with external action.

🎧 Ep. 69 – The Grammar of the Lodge: Structure, Symbol, and the Spoken Word
Focuses on language structure as a reflection of internal discipline and symbolic function.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Discusses symbolic tools and their power to shape self-reflection, transformation, and communication.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we explore Arithmetic not merely as a tool for quantification, but as a symbolic practice of precision, clarity, and pattern recognition. This reflection continues our series on the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, revealing how arithmetic helps uncover internal misalignments and offers a direct lens into the mechanics of our thinking.

More than numbers on a page, arithmetic in the Masonic context is a way to understand the structure of self, refine definitions, and pursue truth that endures across minds and generations.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Arithmetic is about precision in understanding, not just calculation.
• Many challenges come from unclear definitions—arithmetic helps clarify them.
• Applying arithmetic symbolically helps Masons work through personal and philosophical complexity.

💬 Featured Quotes

“It's really about precision… are we driving to a level of precision in our understanding of the way something operates—yourself, your perspectives…”
 — [00:01:29]“When you're struggling with things… driving to that arithmetic level of understanding starts to really make sense.”
 — [00:02:19]“Until you can get to that one-plus-one-equals-two kind of understanding about the mechanics in your life… you're going to come up with a lot of mushy-feeling things.”
 — [00:01:51]“Some of the symbols of the craft—really focus on making these definitions your own… then use the other tools to expand.”
 — [00:05:15]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 71 – Logic as the groundwork for discernment
Examines the role of logical structure in reframing assumptions and seeking objective clarity.

🎧 Ep. 70 – Rhetoric as a lens for bias discovery
Explores how persuasive framing interacts with emotional truth and internal bias.

🎧 Ep. 60 – Thinking in Symbols
Focuses on how symbolic tools like arithmetic function beyond their literal meaning to support introspection and transformation.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we continue our exploration of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences with a focus on Logic—not as a cold academic tool, but as a lens that reveals assumptions, clarifies self-perception, and challenges internal contradictions.

We consider where logic applies, where it breaks down, and how it interacts with emotional experience. In the Masonic journey, logic becomes not just a thinking pattern, but a way to interrogate bias, reframe problems, and access truth with humility.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Logic helps reveal faulty assumptions beneath surface-level reasoning.
• Not all experiences are logical—recognizing that boundary improves discernment.
• Writing and externalizing thoughts sharpens objectivity and reduces internal distortion.

💬 Featured Quotes

“Logic as a lens is really determined… the intent here is to evaluate for an objective truth.”
 — [00:00:14]“Kind of the first litmus test is: does logic apply in this situation?… because logic applies everywhere—until it doesn’t.”
 — [00:01:41]“You’re struggling with… what logical assumptions you’re making about the baseline of the current situation, and what of those assumptions can be challenged.”
 — [00:03:58]“The subjective interior space is not a great location for objective rational thinking. By writing it down… you’re getting it out of your noggin.”
 — [00:03:24]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 70 – Rhetoric as a lens for bias discovery
Explores how persuasive framing reveals emotional filters and unconscious assumptions.

🎧 Ep. 53 – Mastery Continued: Agency through Language and Social Skills
Considers how structured expression and communication habits support clarity and personal growth.

🎧 Ep. 45 – Journaling Your Way to Clarity and Insight
Discusses techniques for externalizing thoughts, improving emotional regulation, and uncovering inner logic.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

   Click here to view the episode transcript.

In this episode, we continue exploring the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences by turning our attention to Rhetoric—not merely as persuasive speech, but as a subtle force that shapes perception, evokes emotion, and reveals unconscious bias.

Through symbolic reflection and modern examples, we investigate rhetoric as a performative function that coexists with grammar and logic. Whether in lodge, online, or in daily life, rhetoric becomes a way to both influence and uncover the internal frameworks that guide our actions and beliefs.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Rhetoric is always operating. Even silence or images can be persuasive communication.
• Bias filters perception. We often respond only to the language that fits our worldview.
• Emotional framing matters. Much of rhetoric’s power lies in its ability to stir feeling, not just convey logic.

💬 Featured Quotes

“You're always being communicated to in some way or another… Your own biases, for example, [are] screening only the words that you relate to or don't relate to.” — [00:02:31]
“That is all people trying to evoke a certain type of response… a slow boil towards some level of action.”  — [00:03:08]
“Rhetoric… is the ability to convey information in a way that stimulates productive argument.” — [00:00:15]
“There is a sort of rhetorical analysis function… when you're sitting there scrolling through your phone—that’s all rhetoric.” — [00:02:52]

🔗 Explore Related Episodes

🎧 Ep. 53 – Mastery Continued: Agency through Language and Social Skills
Explores vocabulary, framing, and social interaction as key tools in shaping influence and reducing misunderstanding.

🎧 Ep. 35 – Reclaiming Emotional Sovereignty
Focuses on emotional self-awareness and the subtle cues that shape our decisions—closely tied to rhetoric’s emotional layer.

🎧 Ep. 54 – The Trowel: When Is Care Appropriate?
Considers the ethics and timing of expression, asking when persuasive or caring speech is symbolically appropriate.

Creators & Guests

Brian Mattocks - Host

Click here to view the episode transcript.