On The Level Podcast
Some people think Freemasonry is on the decline, not if we have anything to say about it! Join On the Level Podcast as we explore that Esoteric side of Freemasonry. We talk about the inner workings of our Fraternity, how to apply it's teachings to your every day life to become a better man, and general current events. Join our host and guests as we explore Freemasonry together and bring our ancient craft into the modern age!
On The Level Podcast
Exploring Space, Art, and Masonic Journeys with Juan Sepulveda
Ever wondered how Freemasonry can shape a person's public speaking prowess? Brother Juan Sepulveda joins us to share his inspiring journey of overcoming public speaking anxiety through the opportunities provided by the Masonic fraternity. Host Chris also opens up about his own battles with public speaking and how the support system within Freemasonry has fostered his growth. Together, they recount memorable Masonic events and the pivotal role that effective communication plays in conveying the essence of Masonic teachings.
What happens when science meets mysticism? We traverse through fascinating discussions ranging from the evolution of stem cell research perceptions to the groundbreaking launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. We also touch upon the Catholic Church's historical resistance to scientific progress, the marvels and fears associated with particle physics, and the ever-shifting public opinion on scientific advancements. Personal stories and insightful commentary make this a rich exploration of how modern science continues to shape our understanding of the cosmos.
Art and symbolism take center stage as we explore the intersection of science, religion, and art in understanding the universe. Brother Juan Sepulveda, a Masonic artist and surrealist, shares his artistic journey and how it complements the intellectual exploration within Freemasonry. Dive into discussions about ancient texts, generational archetypes, and the profound moral lessons embedded in symbols. This episode promises to engage your mind and spirit, offering a blend of personal experiences, artistic insights, and timeless wisdom.
#freemasonry #freemason #astrology #astronomy
you've reached the internet's home for all things masonry. Join on the level podcast as we plumb the depths of our ancient craft and try to unlock the mysteries, dispel the fallacies and utilize the teachings of freemasonry to unlock the greatness within each of us. I have you now. Welcome back to on the level podcast. Today we have, uh, a frozen matt stone. He is an icicle of a man there. He'll probably come back. He's having some thunderstorms in the Turkey Creek area. Oh, he's bounced out. And our main guest today is brother, my brother, juan Sepulveda. I probably said that horribly wrong. Welcome to the podcast, brother Sepulveda. Thank you very much, brother, chris. Oh, hold your thought.
Speaker 2:Hold your thought. Yeah, so I put the strength in the pull. So it's.
Speaker 1:Sepulveda, sepulveda. Oh, that makes more sense, sepulveda.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to spend some time with you in different events and now finally get a chance to sit down and have a conversation over the podcast I'm I'm honored to be invited.
Speaker 1:Honestly, really thank you for coming, because I've been a fan of yours ever since I first. Uh, you didn't meet me, but I saw you. Um, and matt's back.
Speaker 3:He's unfrozen welcome back, matt. By the way, the whole I. I hopped in and you're like well, you didn't meet me. I saw you.
Speaker 1:What a way to make it real.
Speaker 3:Chris.
Speaker 1:I'm a creep. I wasn't even invited. I was creeping from a window.
Speaker 2:I knew I saw something weird back there, by the way, that new bed spread looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:You smell different when you're awake.
Speaker 3:This is going in the direction I like no, but seriously, I I actually.
Speaker 1:The first time I I met you in person was at the hillsborough lodge, and they were doing a masonic education symposium that we both spoke at. That's right. Um, I was nervous as hell but you were smooth as butter man. You did a great presentation that really touched I'm going to rephrase that for Matt's purposes that really spoke to me. I know that I was about to set him up for a good one and I did not want him to knock that one down First off.
Speaker 3:How rude.
Speaker 1:How dare you take the softball from me, sir? I really should have. Okay, it really touched me. He's not going to touch that one now. No, but I was watching you give a speech.
Speaker 1:I have an issue with public speaking that I've struggled with. One of the things that masonry has probably helped me with the most in my life is that issue, which I totally could never have expected. Man, like, when I came to a lodge, I didn't know anybody in Freemasonry or anything about Freemasonry. I met a friend that was a Mason and so because of him, I looked into it, and he's not even from our state. So I went into a lodge not knowing anyone or knowing anything about Freemasonry. So the only question I asked, the only thing that mattered to me, was hey, there's no public speaking in this right. And they were like no, no, of course not none at all. And I think I became an EA. And it was the same night.
Speaker 1:They're like okay, time to get ready for your give back. And I'm like what is a give back? And they're like, oh, you're going to stand in front of everybody and we're going to humiliate you and you're going to have to do from memory. I'm like what? I'm out. I did not sign up for this and I realized this is why I'm here I have to deal with this crap. So I've been on a journey of getting better at it, and so when I saw you speak and we were talking about this a little bit before the episode started I got like really, you know, it seemed effortless. You didn't seem to have a big ego. A lot of guys that are really good at public speaking have a. It comes across like they're really egotistical, and you didn't come across that way.
Speaker 3:And it was the same with Daniel.
Speaker 1:Molina. You guys both gave like some awesome presentations.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 2:I love that, dude, I do. I have been in love with public speaking for most of my life. I was the kid that whenever I had a grade that was kind of like flailing, I would approach the teacher and say any chance I can get some extra credit, maybe a presentation. You want to do a presentation? Yeah, On anything. Are you sure a presentation? Yeah, on anything. Are you sure on anything? Yeah, potassium it is. I did a presentation on potassium and I got to say Potassium On potassium. It was a chemistry class, so yeah.
Speaker 1:So you just came out the womb like look at me, look at me.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed, you know, going out learning, having the pressure, knowing that I have to be ready to present, and then standing up there and distilling what I learned. I've always enjoyed that and I have to say you did very well on that presentation, so you hit it. If you had any problems with it, I think you hit it very well.
Speaker 1:So that's very nice of you to say, yeah, no, I did. And so the guy I did it with used to be my co-host on the show, fred Packwood, and he could attest to you if he was here. Like I can start off strong and I bring a lot like try to disappear the longer it goes on, and he's pointed that out to me and I'm like, yeah, like if you're there, and you're paying attention, you'll see how terrified I am.
Speaker 2:That's interesting, like nerves and anxiety. All of that manifests differently for people. One interesting thing that used to happen to me a lot it hasn't happened recently, but it's happened within a few years is that I know I have to give a presentation. I'm not 100% sure when in the meeting or when in the event it's going to happen. So I'm waiting for the cue and it happens and I'm not nervous. I stand up, I deliver, I do everything, I try to close, make sure that I do the best that I could, and then I sit down and I get this rush of nervousness after I'm done with the presentation.
Speaker 1:I get all my confidence right after. I feel like, oh my God, I could do this every day. I'm the king of the world. And then the next day, someone's like you should do that again. And I'm like what?
Speaker 2:I'll tell you this One thing hearing your example, when you joined Masonry, you have this issue with public speaking.
Speaker 2:You were surprised by being able to return the catechism. You're not alone in that. There's a lot of brothers that join Masonry and they are not particularly fond of standing in front of a crowd and being examined. Basically, One thing to take out of this brief exchange is the fact that there are people at different levels in standing in front of a crowd presenting, and you know the benefits that come with being able to stand in front of other people and share an idea effectively because it helps you at at lodge, it can help you at work, it can help you in your church, anywhere in your own, your own home, at home, exactly.
Speaker 2:So just lean on a brother. If you see a brother that you like how he delivers the lecture, you know a brother and you like how he stands up and gives the charge at the opening of the meeting, ask them for some tips. Offer yourself as a sacrifice and do it yourself on the next degree.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's the only way I learned that as a sacrifice, and do it yourself on the next degree. It's the only way I learned that as a man, the only way, because I don't have a fear. I have a phobia. It's beyond a fear, it's an irrational fear.
Speaker 1:I have no control over it. My body reacts in a way that I don't want it to. Things start to shut down my mind. The first time I ever sat in the East, my vision got so tunneled down to like. It looked like I had like a one little hole I was looking out of like I'm pretty sure I was about to pass out. That's amazing. And so my first word from the east was this and everyone was like oh my god, is he okay? And I'm like I'm sorry I had to get that.
Speaker 1:I think I feel better now and then we proceeded like it's not a normal response to fear, but actually because of this phobia. I've researched it and it's the number one fear that people have is public above death. People fear public speaking. Yeah, so to have a mastery of it innately gives you a huge advantage over other humans, you know. You should have gone into politics. You could be running countries right now.
Speaker 2:Maybe someday I'll run a community club or something.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I just heard the door open to Juan running for Grandmaster one day I don't know if you're listening, we will. We'll set up a gofundme.
Speaker 2:He's gonna run for the grand line excellent goodness you heard it here first on the level podcast don't give me some, don't give me enemies, so early in the show the target just got huge no, I I do appreciate the no so your presentation was actually it wasn't just your speaking, but the content of your presentation that day kind of spoke to me.
Speaker 1:It was about communion with the divine and it was about astronomy. It was about the web telescope and what it's doing for us as a species and how science is taking the unknowable and making it knowable and that is bringing us closer to god. Yeah, uh, imagine that science is and I I am.
Speaker 1:I don't know how you guys, I I'm really curious how matt feels about this because he's the most devout religious of the three of us, but to I don't understand the religious people who kind of don't like science because it's bringing us closer to God in my view. Like you know, the more we understand the world, the more we see how complex and how, like, the rules don't really apply at the quantum level. So the tinier and the closer we look at things, the more I think it answers our questions and feeds into the idea that there is a creator, there is an intelligence behind this. So I'm curious how you feel about that, matt especially. Do you feel like science is getting you closer to your relationship or is it something to be feared from a church going man?
Speaker 3:yourself. No, I don't. I don't think science should be feared at all. And I started to form this opinion.
Speaker 3:I was in, I think, either middle school or early high school whenever the whole stem cell argument was coming across in the late 90s, early 2000s, that whole stem cell thing. They were like, oh, they're killing babies and they're, you know, they're using that to harvest stem cells. And it's like my daughter is going to be three in August and we actually were able to take part of the umbilical cord and save and freeze those stem cells so that way, if my daughter ever has a serious disease in the future, um, they can utilize those stem cells for, like, a bone marrow transplant or something along those lines. My dad passed away from complications with cancer. So this is all something that I studied very heavily. So I look at it and it's like all right.
Speaker 3:The people that were saying, oh no, they're killing babies, don't really understand. You can get it from the umbilical cord, you can get the stem cells from that. I think it's a, it's a matter of ignorance, and so you kind of have this like I don't know how to call it, but like a knee-jerk reaction of like they're killing babies and that's always the go-to for the church is they're killing babies and that's such an emotional, visceral connection people have to protecting children.
Speaker 1:Yes, when you say you're hurting babies, we're immediately going to hate that idea, whatever it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so I I kind of started to change my mind on the whole science conversation, Cause I know the, you know, the Catholic church has their whole history of like off with his head. Um, so I know they have that whole ordeal.
Speaker 1:Um. What do you mean?
Speaker 3:the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. Prison for 10 years for you, sir. Yeah, exactly so uh, I I kind of started to change my mind on it, and especially when it you know. So I kind of started to change my mind on it, and especially whenever they found the God particle, and so whenever they looked at the fact that whenever an embryo is fertilized, there's actually a flash of light that happens those sorts of things, no-transcript and it's like whenever we talk about that, we are the light of the world, and it's like, oh, there's actually a flash of light that happens whenever a a or sorry, whenever a, um, an egg is implanted. You know, it's just I think it's cool. I like science. I just wish CERN would stop all their stuff that they're doing, but that's for another time.
Speaker 1:You don't want a black hole to originate underneath the crust of the earth.
Speaker 3:No, I'm a huge fan of not starting black holes underneath the crust of the earth, actually.
Speaker 1:They're tiny and temporary, so no need to worry about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's totally the earth. Actually, they're tiny and temporary, so no need to worry. Totally fine, totally controlled. I'm not taking back what I said, no science is is amazing and frightening and terrifying.
Speaker 1:It's like everything all rolled into one for me, like I'm terrified by the fact that we, you know, these people doing science, are just meat flesh people like me. Like I know they're smarter than me, but they're not. They're not like magnitudes of intelligence smarter than me, and this is dangerous stuff. When you get into the quantum and you're talking about, like you know, generating microscopic black holes and trying to recreate a wormhole, and anti-gravity, which is going to involve insane amounts of magnetic fields which can rip our planet. This stuff is no joke. The atomic weapon itself is physics and I was just reading an interview where someone that's in the military literally said look, if this alien thing turns out, you know, to be interdimensional or something. We're literally going to classify mathematics, parts of mathematics, which is what we did in the 60s. They classified certain aspects of mathematics, like certain physics were classified by the us government and you couldn't learn it interesting, teach it or talk about it yeah, um, you mentioned.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that there's obviously there's an element of how much do we know of what they're doing?
Speaker 2:right and if you, if you go back to the root of where fear comes from, most of the fear that we experience comes from the not knowing. I don't know what's behind this door or I don't know what's making that sound. I don't know what this person is capable of doing. So a lot of the fear that comes or manifests itself against these kinds of search for light if we can keep it in the theme of the conversation that search for light is trying to answer some of these questions that we may have, so that we're no longer afraid or we have a better idea of what we need to be afraid and not. I do with the presentation of the James Webb telescope. When I start talking about it, I mentioned how I came up with the idea, and it was that I was waiting for many, many years for the Aaron's 5 rocket to take the James Webb telescope up to space. So when it actually took off, it was December, the 25th of 2021.
Speaker 1:It was after the day after Christmas it went up. It was Christmas Day, christmas.
Speaker 2:Day. Um. So here I'm in the middle of my living room looking at a tiny little screen of this thing taking off, uh in, into space, cause I knew what what was happening there. Nobody cared. None of my friends knew what was happening, yeah. I was in pins and needles. I knew that the cargo that was on the inside, the fairings of that, that rocket we had hubble in my mind.
Speaker 1:We got hubble. That's the best. Yeah, what else do? We need that's the best of my lifetime. It's already there like we're good, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:but no, this is. The capacity of this thing to look with more precision to the things that we got a hint about with Hubble is incredible.
Speaker 3:It is incredible.
Speaker 2:The size difference, the ability to remain perfectly still, which is one of the themes of the presentation, is remaining perfectly still, perfectly quiet, which meant this telescope is going to be put in a place of space, which is the specific location is called the Lagrange point. This is the Lagrange point number two, and it's just a pocket of gravity, if you can think that the gravity of the sun is pulling one way. The sun is pulling one way, the earth is pulling another, the moon is pulling here, the planets or anything else that's around, it's pulling, but there's these pockets where the pull of everything becomes like an equilibrium and you can put something there and it's not falling towards anything. It's just perfectly quiet, perfectly still. And in addition to that, the James Webb telescope one difference, main difference that it had from the Hubble was that it had this complex array of shields to cover the sun from its instruments for two reasons to prevent the light of the sun to contaminate the light that it's going to be receiving from other celestial bodies, but also the heat. So the instruments in this telescope had to get to such a low temperature that it needed this complex array of shields to protect it.
Speaker 2:And in the presentation I make a joke about. Okay, dork, what does any of this have to do with Freemasonry? Here you're holding me for 10 minutes talking about this stupid telescope. What's the?
Speaker 1:deal. It really did. I was thinking that, as you were giving the presentation, I was like where's he going with this?
Speaker 2:Get to the point, sir, but the thing is that when I started thinking about what this telescope is doing in order to see further in the universe, I saw so many parallels with our efforts to correspond with the divine, for us to communicate with what we call deity or God or whatever we want to call it the unknown, the unknown, the unknowable.
Speaker 2:That which some may be in fear of because they don't understand, and we need to search for light in order to understand it better and know what to fear and what to not fear. So it requires that we are able to shield ourselves from the terrestrial. So, just like the shields in the James Webb telescope are shielding the instruments of this telescope, we need to find ways for us to shield ourselves from the terrestrial distractions.
Speaker 1:The noise, the chatter this side and that side, and what about this and that? And oh, you got to recycle, but this and that You're like ah.
Speaker 3:Not only that, but to your earlier point and, chris, to your point where you're like oh, we have Hubble, we're fine, also to shield us from what we know is the current truth. And by the current truth and by the current truth, if you look out the James Webb telescope, if memory serves me right, correct me if I'm wrong, but the James Webb telescope has essentially shown where there are super earths out there capable of sustaining life. And so whenever you talk to Christians and you're like, hey, is there life on other planets? No, because it's not in the Bible.
Speaker 2:My response to them every single time is why are you putting god in such a small box? Is it, yeah, yeah? Is your god not strong enough, or capable, or not capable of?
Speaker 1:his answer, can you? Be, careful with that answer, because you may you may like crumble your whole philosophy system if you say that your god isn't strong enough to have put life on other planets. Is that it's like that?
Speaker 2:um, like that question said, can god create a rock so heavy even he couldn't lift it? And then some people go into shock and like get offline.
Speaker 1:It's like a robot malfunction. Like does not compute cannot.
Speaker 3:I call that the AOL dial up tone face. I know.
Speaker 2:But there's so much we don't know and the only way that we can learn about it is through a search. It's through looking up, looking out, trying to figure out. How do we get from a place of ignorance or a place of darkness and into a place of knowledge and light, so that parallel of the telescope trying to put itself in the perfect conditions to be able to even understand what god means. I mean god means something completely different to the three of us.
Speaker 2:You have a different relationship with deity than I do and then matt does like. It is something different to each of us, but the only way that we can get closer to the truth, wherever that truth lives, is through that search. And in our case, the effective search for light requires that we prepare our instrument so that analogy of perfectly still and perfectly quiet it's materialized in us, allowing yourself to shut down that cacophony in your mind, to relax to a point of meditation or prayer, so that now you are able to filter the noise from the signal. I don't know if you have have any of you tried to do like astrophotography before I have with my iPhone and it doesn't work out so well.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I tried to make magic with a telescope that I had and a camera, and I started researching and trying to inform myself. How is it done? And there was one thing that I knew If we are rotating right, so we have earth is rotating and what we're looking at is so far away from us that the light coming from it is so faint. You need to train your telescope to stay looking at it for a long period of time in order for all that light to be captured by your camera. Well, a lot of the astrophotography that is able to look so clear and so crisp is because the um, what do you call that? The, the lens, the? Well, what collects the information? The whole mechanism. So you have the lens and then you have the receptor back here. Whatever this thing is called, it has to be trained on the object with no movement at all, for the long.
Speaker 1:That's why they use arrays, right, they have like, uh, different areas of the earth where they have these things, so as the earth spins, they can keep it trained on that object exactly.
Speaker 2:That's one of the. That's one, one of the ways that it's able to do Like with Hubble, for example, because it's out in space. You can keep it pointing at whatever for the length of time that you can. But with a camera down here you spend five minutes, you know, with your lens and aperture, and whatever you were looking at has already streaked, you know, enough degrees that it's going to make your image blurry.
Speaker 2:So part of the process in astrophotography, one of the techniques that you can do is that you take multiple exposures Okay, multiple exposures in the same area and then you line all of the images together and you are able to run a filter so you blend all of those images together. Some of it is going to be noise and some of it is going to be real signal or light coming from these objects. So when you run this algorithm, it cleans out all the noise and then you're able to get the message. Basically it's like oh, yeah, look how I can, I can see the rings around this planet. Yeah, you know. Now think about how could that apply to us? You know you can, I can tell you exactly how.
Speaker 1:Tell me, I want to hear, I want to have moved to a very hidden away place in south carolina. I have surrounded forests. I have no people near me. I don't go out anymore. I don't go to lodges, I don't go to work. It's quiet. When I go outside at night, it's not quiet because there's life everywhere. I'm surrounded by life, but it's a different kind of life than I was surrounded by when I was living in a city.
Speaker 1:That's human life, human life is is a whole nother kind of busy sound Now that I'm out here in the quiet. I spent a certain amount of time adjusting my life right, like physically, monetarily things I had to do. Once that was over, the biggest challenge I dealt with was my mind. It was so quiet that I had to deal with all the voices in my head that I subconsciously was filling up my life with noise so I wouldn't hear it. And the biggest challenge I had moving out here was dealing with myself. That's the truth To deal with those voices that you don't want to listen to from your past, from the things that you've done, like all the bad things in life that we run from. From the things that you've done, like all the bad things in life that we run from, we don't want to face. When you're alone in the quiet, that's what you have to deal with, because that's all you've got.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. And think about you know another way to look at the whole noise to signal ratio. You have, let's say, the three of us have this conversation and we're done. You know, we hang up, we go sit down, drink something. You're like you know what, like, like what Matt said about um, about the stem cells and the, the embryos.
Speaker 2:Like you know, I think he was onto something with that, and then I'll start churning on that little bit of information that I gleaned from this conversation and then we'll have another exposure to a similar theme when I go and hang out with my friends after lunch and you have all these exposures of conversations related to this search for light, and when you put put all those together, you may be able to also discern a pattern from that whole noise. Just like you stacked all the images to create an astrophotography that was clean and crisp about these celestial bodies in the. In the extent to which you are having these conversations with other men that are also searching to become better fathers, better husbands, better entrepreneurs, you are giving yourself the all these layers that you're going to combine and try to filter out the noise and find these nuggets. I can see it with clarity now that this is what's valuable. This is what's important. This is what I was looking for.
Speaker 3:If I may, I have a story that would add on to that. So the church that I was most recently attending I had been there for 15 years Met my wife there.
Speaker 1:Wait, wait, wait, wait wait, are you not attending that church anymore? Okay, we have another podcast. Oh episode two, let's do it. I didn't know that.
Speaker 3:Okay, go ahead and my wife and I are currently looking for another church. I mean, we're not giving up on the institution known as church. But whenever I was able to step away from that church, because I was so heavily involved with leadership within that church, with, uh, organizing within that church, with I was trying to organize a men's ministry, um, I was their only song leader. Um, you know, and the church that I was going to is all acapella. There we don't have instruments. Oh wow, um, so I was their only song.
Speaker 1:You don't have a drummer in a cage and smoke everywhere. You don't have instruments. Oh well, really, so I was their only song. You don't have a drummer in a cage and smoke everywhere. You don't have all that stuff that churches have these days.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, the, the preacher doesn't come down on like a zip wire. You know none of that. Wow, yeah.
Speaker 3:So, so either way it was. It was so interesting because whenever I was so worked up and I found myself angry and I was was angry because I had a disagreement with the elders and so I found myself angry. But whenever I left the church and it was like a burden was taken off of me, it's just like weight off of my shoulders, and then I was able to just sit back and I went. I totally lost the focus of what church is meant for Because I got so wrapped up in the politics of church. I lost the worship of God, right, and that's a problem.
Speaker 1:Wow, this is what happens to most elders, I think, in most organizations. Yeah, they get caught up in the mundane, they get caught up in the political BS, the bureaucracy, and they lose sight of what it's all there for in the first place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sometimes you have to be perfectly still and perfectly quiet so you can reconnect with whatever that purpose was. What did you come here in search of? And it was the stars and anything in them.
Speaker 1:How did that start for you? Where did your interest in astronomy come from originally?
Speaker 2:Great question. One of the earliest memories I have of astronomy was when Comet Halley was the Halley-Bopp comet. Is that what that is? No, no, this is before that Comet Halley.
Speaker 1:This isn't the one that the cult uh drank the kool-aid and cut their nuts off and all that no, no, there's a whole religious group around the haley bop comment.
Speaker 3:I think that's yeah, the hail bob. Uh, this one, you mean an outdoor degree in masonry the one I'm talking is halley's.
Speaker 2:Halley's comet. Uh, yeah, it has a an orbit that is 72 to 80 years around the sun, so I may not see it again, because I remember I'm trying to find here in google what year it was when it last came, but I remember there was a little robot when I was a kid called 2XL.
Speaker 1:It was a little toy you could buy and that was one of his facts was the Haley Comet. That came like every 75 or 80 years, that's it, and it was coming around the time I had that toy. So I'm 49. You're like 44,. You said 45. 45. So I'm guessing you were probably like very young. I was Five or six years old probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just checked here. 1986 was the last perihelion. Yeah, so no, you mean the year I was born Really 86?
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, oh look at that you were, how old 37.
Speaker 3:Going to be 38 in August.
Speaker 2:You're a spring chicken. I know that's awesome. But I remember this comet was coming and my family was making arrangements for us to go and a few families stay in some cabins up in the mountains in Puerto Rico. There's like a mountain that had like either an observatory or somewhere where they could put their telescopes to check this thing out. And I was so excited to see this thing. I knew there was gonna be a comet and I this was gonna be the first time I was gonna see a comet and I was so excited. But it was gonna be very late at night and they had to like either hike or something like that to get to the location and I'm ready to go.
Speaker 2:And my dad's like no, no, no, you can't come. You got to stay here with your mom. And I was in shock. I'm like what, what do you mean? Like we came here to see this thing and like I have to stay behind and they wouldn't let me go. I didn't go see it. Oh damn yeah, oh damn yeah. So I was like oh my god, that was so like. I was so close, I thought I was gonna see it. I couldn't see it. You know, to make a a long story short. They didn't see it either, so huh, take that, daddy jokes on you yeah, how do you like that?
Speaker 2:but the point is like that kind of I think, set off some interest in it and my dad had a telescope so we would look at the moon Anytime there was any kind of celestial occurrence that was of significance. I remember us bringing our telescope out and setting it on the hood of our car and having these like awe-inspiring moments, looking at the craters of the moon and everything. So that's how it started for me and I've never lost it. I live in central Florida and I rarely miss a rocket launch from the Cape. I can see them from my front yard. So I watch them online as they're counting down, them online as they're counting down and whenever you know, I take my phone, keep the recording playing on my phone and I walk to the front of the house and I see it go to space my wife does the exact same thing.
Speaker 3:It does not literally wake me up in the middle of the night, really. Oh yeah, oh yeah, she, she's a huge astronomy nerd huge like I would almost want her on this podcast to talk to you. She'd check your ear off.
Speaker 1:Well, bring her in. The thing is like it's not like you just standing there talking. He backs it up with experiments, like you did live experiments with.
Speaker 2:I can explain one of them that I did. I wanted to further illustrate that whole noise to signal ratio and how having too much noise makes it difficult for you to get the signal. And what I did? I got volunteers to line up and then I got the first brother in the front of the line to start reciting three numbers and he would mouth the numbers just very softly, say those numbers over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:I think in our case you had them singing a song. Mary had a Little Lamb, I believe, is the song you had them singing, that's true, but here's another little insight into public speaking.
Speaker 2:I'm always tweaking it and I realized that having people do something that everybody knows is what's important. If you tell them, oh, just say anything. They forget language, they don't speak, they have no recollection of letters and numbers, and none of that it's amazing to see. So you have to be very specific, very precise, very decisive and assertive, and you're going to say this over and over again.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, there's a little pro tip for public speakers out there. Yeah, really. For public speakers out there yeah, really.
Speaker 2:So I had the brother say imagine this brother here saying a sequence of numbers over and over and over again. And then I have this one at the very end trying to decipher what this brother is saying. Well, this is the signal and this is the receptor. And in between them I had five other brothers, like you said, singing a song and waving their hands, hands. So all of that interference made it almost impossible for that brother to hear what the other one was saying. But the moment that I tell all of them to be quiet and still, then the signal came through and the brother oh oh, yeah, he's saying 357. Of course, that's exactly what happens.
Speaker 2:I don't know, Can you see the image that I shared? Yeah, okay, so the same thing happens with astrophotography happening and the, the sensor that's receiving the light, can distinguish what's noise from what's light and and shadow. It's just reacting to whatever it sees. So, like I said earlier, the longer the exposure, uh, the greater the light collector, the better, which is one of the reasons why the Webb telescope is better. Here's the comparison of the sizes. So you have 2.4 meters across the Hubble telescope compared to 6.6 meters, and there's another big difference the Hubble orbits around the sun. So what you're?
Speaker 1:saying here is size, does matter.
Speaker 2:It does matter.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You have to be perfectly still.
Speaker 3:Chris just couldn't help himself. I know, if I have a chance to be an elementary school student, I will.
Speaker 2:But also look in this graph. You can see the Hubble is only 350 miles above the surface of the Earth, while the Webb telescope is almost a million miles away. Yeah, so it is in the perfect place to be quiet and still and looking at the light. But what I was going to show you is look at the difference in quality of these two images, one taken by theble telescope and one by the james webb telescope, and I encourage you to go out there and look at the comparisons of these two. And if you ever come across an image like this and you don't know which telescope took it hubble telescope because of the shape, because of the architecture of the lens and the structure the stars that are part of the image have four bursts star bursts. You see them? Meanwhile, the shape of the James Webb telescope is a hexagon and you have six star bursts. Can you see them?
Speaker 3:Now for those listening on Audio One what is it that we're staring at? So that way they can Google the images.
Speaker 2:Oh, perfect. So we're looking at the Pillars of Life image from the James Webb Telescope. So this is a nebula formation. So this is so gigantic Like you can't.
Speaker 2:Obviously, just by looking at it on the screen, you can't understand what you're looking at. But inside of these structures of gas that are floating out in unimaginable distances, stars are being born, and one thing that you'll notice when you see these, these two different images, is that in the one taken by the hubble telescope, you see these stars sprinkle throughout the image and you can tell they're stars because they have these little starbursts. Yeah, of course, on the one from the james webb telescope, if you look really carefully, in all the empty space between the stars, you see all these other little lights. Those are galaxies. So, wow, it's not just a star, we're talking about galaxies that have billions of stars in them.
Speaker 2:Wow, now we couldn't see that far when we put the Hubble telescope up there. It required better preparation, better tools. No-transcript. All of these are methods and tools that we can implement so that we can have a better communication with the divine, because, in essence, we're getting rid of so much of the noise and so much of the interference so that our eyes can really perceive that which lies beyond Not only that, but also to your point.
Speaker 3:One of the things that I've discovered in Mesa Dream is when I take my day-to-day interactions and I take how I conduct myself. Chris had mentioned and, by the way, he'll be back on here in a second he just lost power at his house, but Chris had mentioned about getting the wives on, and so since I've joined Masonry, one of the things that I have really focused on is keeping my temper, my anger, all those things in check. And so one of the things that she said to me recently she looked over at me in the living room one night and I was catching her over at me in the living room one night and I was. I catch her staring at me and I'm like what do you want? And she goes. You know, it just hit me Cause we had just had a difficult conversation about something and I was like what's that? She goes. I like this version of you.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's nice, the fact that I'm able to circumscribe and the fact that I'm able to chisel at myself, that I'm able to look at my interaction and look at my wife and say, hey, that's another part of me. I don't want to make her angry. My war is with the world. My wife is my peace, but also it's the same thing with my brothers in the lodge. With my brothers in the lodge. I don't want to intentionally hurt my brothers in the lodge, people that I'm interacting with on a day-to-day basis. I don't know what they're, what they're dealing with. I have no idea what they're dealing with. It is so simple for me to just be a consistent man the entire time be nice, be polite, be courteous and hey, how can I help you today? I love that. What can I do to make your day better?
Speaker 2:That's awesome, and if we only had that perspective more often.
Speaker 3:it would be such a better place to live in. It would, it absolutely would. And I think there's a lot of those tenants that and again, I'm not beating up on the institution that is the church I want to be very clear on that but I think the church has lost some of those teachings somewhere along the line and it's turned into. For example, there's this whole new faction of I think it's called New Age Christianity, where they're referring to God as daddy. Oh, that's gross, right, that's gross Disgusting. And so I kind of look at it and it's like all right, like if, hey, chris is back, welcome. Um. I kind of look at it as all right if church were to be teaching those exact same tenets, because the tenets that we have in masonry aren't too dissimilar from the tenets that are found in the bible. They're really not.
Speaker 3:And so if they were to be teaching those tenets of hey, here's how you be a better man, a better woman. Here's how you interact with people. Here's how you be a better man, a better woman. Here's how you interact with people. Here's how you control your temper. Here's how you keep your mouth shut whenever you say things that you really want to say, and you probably shouldn't say it unless you want to get smacked in the mouth those sorts of things. I honestly do believe with all my heart that the world would be a better place. Masonry has helped me with that.
Speaker 1:That's something that I was missing in church. The thing is that it is in your dogma, it is in the book, it's all over the book. The problem is that these books of faith, in my mind they're really good vessels of moral lessons. That's really what they are. If you read through there, there's like moral lesson after moral lesson after moral lesson. Through there there's like moral lesson after moral lesson after moral lesson. But we don't focus on the lessons, we focus on these little details and we twist them and we make them something that maybe they are, maybe they're not, maybe they are today and they weren't yesterday, like it's called, that's called legalism, but the lessons are timeless yeah, the lessons never change.
Speaker 3:The. The hang-up is, and to to kind of bring it back to Juan's point and want to being able to look at something like the telescopes in this presentation that you just gave, and the fact that you were able to take a moral lesson from just basically a science experiment. You're the. You block out the noise. That way you can see the picture more clearly. You block out the noise, that way you can see the picture more clearly. Every single person that has traveled to the mountains and looked up at the sky knows exactly what you just said and has not put it into such eloquent words.
Speaker 3:Because you go up to the mountains and you're like, oh my gosh, the stars are beautiful. And it's like well, because you're not getting the light pollution of the subdivision. That's why.
Speaker 1:Matt, you touched on something that was going through my mind as I was seeing this presentation given live, which was where did he formulate the idea for this? Like this didn't happen like in one sitting. I imagine this took you a bit. And like, how do you like I want yeah, I'm curious like how you had the idea, how you ran with it to create a whole presentation out of it and then had the balls to stand up and tell your personal thoughts to people Like well, it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:I appreciate the question because it's one aspect of public speaking that I really love and nobody gets to see it. This is super mine, you know it's like yeah yeah, yeah. And I'll run you a little bit through the whole thing. I belong to a Masonic group that required that there was some sort of labor done. I had to do a paper in order to continue.
Speaker 1:Is it still a legal Masonic group according to our great grandmaster?
Speaker 2:Very, very legal, yeah, okay. Just checking Um, so it it. I started looking okay, what things I'm interested in, that I could create a presentation that it's going to meet the requirements of of the request but also not feel like a boring thing that's too far out of my wheelhouse. So I started looking at. The principle of hermeticism is what I was, that's what it all started with, and you'll find that replete throughout Freemasonry the principles of hermeticism.
Speaker 1:Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2:This is that as above so below. That's the second principle of hermeticism, which is the principle of correspondence, and it just takes a little bit of connective tissue to go from as above so below to see the connection of what's out there and what's in here. So you're able to see that there are patterns that repeat themselves in the cosmos as well as in ourselves, right, and I've always been fascinated with that synchronicity. It's like you have um. One of the things that I say is like in space, why are all these planets going around the sun? Well, because the sun is the most massive item in the solar system. It contains the most mass. Thereby it has the most gravity, and I find that the fatter I get, the more people like me. I don't know if it's there's a connection there. I don't know if you noticed it.
Speaker 1:Listen, it's because you're less threatening. Okay, Everybody wants somebody. Everybody wants a fat friend. That's right. All right, everybody wants a fat friend.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants sharp edges, soft cheeks rounded.
Speaker 1:Well, it's true. I mean, there are certain things that are ingrained in our DNA. Like you're an artist, so I know that. You know this, I don't even have to tell you. But when you hear a very low, deep sound, like a really low, deep sound, your brain is wired to understand that's dangerous, because that's an animal bigger than me that can eat me. And you hear a tiny, high-pitched noise. We love it because we're like, oh, harmless, like I could eat it. Like, at our most basic core, it's that simple we fear things and we don't there's things that should fear us, right, like at our most basic core. It's that simple where we fear things and we don't, there's things that should fear us, right, and so I think that plays a little bit into this. Yeah, is is that like core thing that we don't, we don't think about, but it's in all of us, at our, at our core, that keeps us safe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and think that we may be getting away from being in touch with a lot of these intuitions. Yes, and sometimes it's not by choice, sometimes it's just by the sheer amount of stimulus that we're exposed to. In the presentation I gave yesterday, I had the privilege to speak at Pine Castle Lodge and the presentation I was talking about the entered apprentice degree and the tools and how to effectively use all these tools, and so there's a part of the presentation where I talk about the specific numbers, the numbers of how much media, and when I say media, media I'm not being uh, I'm not attacking the news or anything. I'm saying like content, like digital content.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're at a point that there are groups in our society that are spending 13 plus hours a day consuming, and you'll be in shock. Can you guess what group is the one that I'm talking about specifically that's spending? Oh, it's definitely children. It is the boomers. Tell the boomer. It's like chill, boomer, like they are 13 plus hours consuming me the boomers boomers so next time people wait the boomers older than me, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, they are.
Speaker 3:So, but because the media, you just got Chris really excited, given what he does for his occupation, such ammunition.
Speaker 2:Now he's going to come back.
Speaker 3:That's it. We're going to start advertising newspapers again.
Speaker 2:As a representative of the generation X. We are really far behind the amount of consumption that they have, but it's still embarrassing to admit how much it is. But the point is we're talking about live television. We're looking at screen on your cell phones, on the laptop. It's all the amount of time that we're spending looking at a screen. The more you're doing that, the less you have an opportunity to just be quiet and just chill and just relax. You know, just tell me this and I'm guessing. But is it easier or harder for you to sit down with a book to read?
Speaker 1:Honestly, I've been doing it for the last six weeks, nice, and I'm in a different situation than Matt, like I'm disconnected a little bit. So it's, I'm enjoying the hell out of it Nice.
Speaker 2:But are you having any trouble staying focused, or you're, you're good.
Speaker 1:I've worked through some stuff, so I feel pretty good about it, right? Now yeah, but it wasn't easy in the beginning.
Speaker 3:You're right, I've been doing it more recently, but that's because in October I have to sit in the East for an EA degree. Oh boy, Good luck.
Speaker 1:I don't think active memorization is the same as reading.
Speaker 3:Yeah, normally, whenever it comes to books, I typically do audiobooks because I drive so much. My truck's a year old. I got almost 30,000 miles on it.
Speaker 1:No, I actually look forward to it because there's something about getting lost in somebody else's reality. You know what I mean when I pick up my book. The last book I read was about I'm a nerd, so I'm reading about quantum physics. To me that's fascinating. I want to get lost in that world. I get lost in it. I wish I could be a quantum physicist, but I never went to college, so it's not the stars for me. But that doesn't mean I can't like learn about the concepts, right Like I can't practice it, but I can learn about it. I love it. Are you on Goodreads?
Speaker 2:Anybody who uses Goodreads that listens to this, look me up on the winding stairs and give me your username. Goodreads is where I keep a catalog of all the books I own, all the books I want to read all the books I've read, all the books I'm reading, so I'm able to quantify how much I'm reading year by year. I can tell you when I read what. I can tell you it's called Goodreads. Goodreads, yeah, it's an application.
Speaker 1:I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2:It's a website and an application, okay. So it even scans the UPC code of your books so you can go in your library, go book by book. This is in my collection.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:This is my collection this is my collection and then you can share that with other people. You can share that with other people. That's fascinating. You can discover what your friends think about some books. It's like I didn't know that you were into those books.
Speaker 3:Now I'm super curious about what it is. Yeah, the last hard book that I read, of course, outside of the scriptures but the last hard book that I read was actually the Fourth Turning by. I think his name's Neil Howell, but that's also a somewhat religious kind of a book, right?
Speaker 3:No, no, that's actually a history book so it's written by two historians and I think I've told you about it before, but I would suggest anybody read it because it helped my cross-generational communication better than anything I've ever done in my life. It's insane what it does. It goes back to 1450 and it tracks four archetypes that just repeat themselves every 20 years or, sorry, every 80 years. They just repeat themselves over and over again, and it was two historians that wrote it and so whenever you look at it and you read about the archetypes for example, the Gen X archetype is known as the nomadic archetype, more laid back, more easygoing, just kind of go with the flow type people.
Speaker 1:We're the forgotten generation.
Speaker 3:We have to find our own way. Yeah, well, honestly, and that's because you're between two very headstrong archetypes yeah, you've got the boomers, which are the prophetic archetype, and they are very emotional, they're very headstrong, they're very take charge, they were raised in a blooming and beautiful society.
Speaker 1:Those are the people running all governments in the world right now.
Speaker 3:Yes, they are running governments, they're running lodges, they're running churches, they're running everything right now. But then you also have my generation, which are the millennials, which are known as the heroic archetype, and the heroic archetype and the heroic archetype are the ones typically you'll find. The heroic archetype yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't remember Hercules living with Zeus until he was 30.
Speaker 3:But generally what happens and this is what we're seeing is you'll see the heroic archetype kind of do like an aggressive takeover of everything. Yeah, and the nomadic at that point is starting to age out as well. They'll go along with whatever the next guys are doing. Okay, let's do it just. It's a great book.
Speaker 1:I grew up like reading a lot of science fiction, a lot of isaac asimov, frank herbert, um, you know everything, star trek, like that's kind of where I learned I didn't have a father. So that's kind of where I learned about how to be a good person is from science fiction, because it always it was always centered in some morality. You know, it was always wild and crazy, but it was centered around some kind of like societal thing and it was teaching you like a moral lesson so my wife is extremely religious and she showed me a book she got when she was a kid and that's how they wrote the bible.
Speaker 1:It's like for kids. So everything's dumbed down, like not dumb, but simplified. I guess you should say for children. You got to go to their level, you got to go where they're at and try to communicate with them. Talking about communication.
Speaker 2:Right I was going to show you here I don't know if I share that with you so that image right there. I tried to put some of the elements from the presentation. So I have a stair going up into the heavens, so it's almost like Jacob's ladder, and then you have the rocket going up and you have the rocket. Okay, so you have the pillars in our conversation today. Obviously, this is what we talked about today. It was very little compared to all the content that's in the presentation. So if anybody's interested in hearing the full presentation, with all the little secrets and Easter eggs that you can see on this image, just reach out to me and we can coordinate how to make it happen.
Speaker 1:Well, interestingly, is that underneath the B column. I won't say the word of the B, but is that a representation of an atom?
Speaker 2:It is Okay. So below and then as above, and then you have on the sun in the yeah. In the opposite it could be interpreted as the sun and if you look, it's also a circumpunk so I just posted yesterday about the circumpunk on our.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you saw it, I missed it, but I've got a tattoo of a circumpunk because before I joined, way before, like, I was fascinated by symbology and um, I did research on the circumpunk and it you can trace that back far, far back and it's represented it. It represents the symbol, gold represents the sun. It was literally the hieroglyph for Ra, which is the sun, god, the name of Ra. All throughout history, the circumpunked has represented light, sun, knowledge, information. I love that.
Speaker 1:And Pythagoras actually adopted it. He made a whole little culture around that. That's awesome. And it represents the, the beginning, right. So he talks about how, from a point to a line, from a line to super feces, from a super feces to a solid, is all represented in this one symbol and has a group of scientific followers behind that, and we represent it in every lodge in the state of florida. Um, no one knows that it's a circumfunct, but it certainly is a circumfunct with with two lines on the side.
Speaker 1:And you talk about hermeticism. That's like blatant hermeticism. Right here we've got like one. We've got the animals side and we've got the educated side. Um, in, you know, and you've got this man who's like I get you're wrapping christian symbols and that satisfies certain people on a surface level. But the concepts both in christianity and in masonry are very synonymous back throughout history, to the beginning of civilization. This is what fascinates me about masonry, because it uses symbols to communicate ideas. And we explain that symbol in the inner apprentice lecture. Right, we do. We say this is this is what fascinates me about masonry, because it uses symbols to communicate ideas. And we explain that symbol in the inner apprentice lecture. Right, we do. We say this is what this all means. And then you hear the fellow craft lecture and we talk about Pythagorean ideas of the point and the line and the superficies and the solid. Nobody has any idea that that's what's being explained to them. This is like all human knowledge is contained within freemasonry.
Speaker 2:But that's why the conversations that happen outside of the lodge are so important because, like now, we're just, you know, gathered around having this conversation, geeking out on astronomy and philosophy and hermeticism and all that kind of stuff. We are hashing out some of the things that we were so swiftly presented during the degree, yeah, so it's just a. It's just a faint memory of a symbol, but that's fine, because then we have these conversations uh over uh and a capri sun and a capri sun I think that was before we started recording but one it was, but I referenced the capri sun, as in my puerto rican accent okay.
Speaker 2:So when I say capri song, I say capri sun because I say from puerto rico.
Speaker 3:you know, actually, and and just hearing you talk about this one and looking at some of the symbology and everything, I know a lot of what the profane have a problem with. Masonry is is our symbology and some of the phrases like you've referenced, as above, so below a couple of times, and that phrase has been hijacked and it's been hijacked by certain groups. Christianity let's be honest no, Christianity wants nothing to do with that phrase.
Speaker 1:That's what I mean. They turned it into something bad because it's actually now mostly associated with the Baphomet Right. The Baphomet is a symbol literally pointing up and down, and it means as above so below, and it's got a goat head and it's half man and half human.
Speaker 3:What I'm saying.
Speaker 1:It means as above, so below, and it's got a goat head and it's half man and half human and it first came into the reference at the Templars, when the Templars were actually being persecuted and they were put under torture. A lot of them confessed to worshiping the Baphomet right and the Baphomet then became a bad thing and Christians generally look at the devil as the baphomet. So there's now a correlation because of generally because of christians and not not you. I'm talking about going back to the 1300s now, yeah, I'm talking about like those catholics, um, that assign that to be this negative, evil thing, but it really is with ancient wisdom, yeah yeah, and it's more ancient than we give it credit for so and it.
Speaker 3:Well, no, what I was getting at is, I would love to have one on and and and us do a deep dive on some of the symbology and its origins and its roots, and so that way, if you do have somebody, that is like okay, if you're the as above, so below thing or um yeah just some of the stuff they harp on, you can literally say no, actually this is the actual origin of whatever that was and it twisted at this time.
Speaker 2:It's just, it takes a little more thinking and a little more listening, and most people don't want to do either of those things, and I what I thought you were going to say, chris, earlier, was that the issue that some people may have with our fraternity was because, when you said the symbols, I thought you were going to say because the fear that some of the symbols present, you know, if you have symbols of mortality, symbols of you, had a coffin on your picture exactly, and you had skull and crossbones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and those are associated with death and that death is bad, and yeah, and people forget that everybody's carrying around a skull right behind their face. Uh, so I just covered it with the meats. Uh, that's why it's not so scary.
Speaker 3:Well, and even still and, Chris, we can kind of hint on this a little bit. So I'm a York Rite Mason, and right before you go through Commandery to become a Knights Templar, they place you in a dark room, and so they have certain items laid out on the table in front of you, including a Bible open to a passage.
Speaker 3:It's essentially a chamber of reflection, is what they're putting you in, so and I'm not going to say everything that's on the table because I don't want people to freak out but, um, but the the thing is is you're supposed to draw a moral lesson from that? If a person did not want to use the two brain cells they have left, they could be like, oh no, that's bad and evil, and it's like, no, it very beautiful. Yeah, because what I took from that entire thing is the finality of death, and what am I going to do with the time I have here on this earth?
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, actually, but there has to be a genuine desire to search for light. So sometimes people they complain it's like, oh my God, there's so many people dying and like why are we spending you know less money and sending rockets up to space and putting these telescopes up there? The James Webb telescope is a project that was billions of dollars in the making.
Speaker 1:And it involved like how many nations? Yeah?
Speaker 2:And the time, the manpower, the capital, all of that it involves. But it is a genuine search for light in the literal and figurative sense. We are trying to understand the universe better and we should have that kind of approach. When it comes to trying to understand, it's not like with religion, for example. I can understand how someone would who was born in the united states, of course, is going to be exposed to a specific set of religious dogma and history and that becomes the religion that they follow. But someone who is born in India, it's very unlikely to be exposed to the same story, the same. But you will find some threads of truth within both of those paths and you may have an individual that's born in Calcutta that goes through life exemplifying the teachings of Jesus and lives a high moral life and eventually is remembered as someone exemplary. That is possible.
Speaker 2:So sometimes we demonize the opposite and many times is because we do not understand what it entails. We don't understand their symbols, we don't understand the story, uh, but that genuine desire to know it's like like why do they practice this? What do they do here? How do they feel about this? What do they believe about this? Other thing, that genuine search for light is what allows you to then really focus and get to see what lies beyond the noise, if you may good way to bring it all together there Could not put a more perfect bow on the top of that package.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was beautiful. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:That's cool. Yeah, this is something that we can, definitely A conversation we can have over some N3 ruffians.
Speaker 1:This message brought to you by Some cigars. Okay, and he knows how to plug Right?
Speaker 3:Well, Juan, look, I cannot thank you enough. That phenomenal concept, everything, and the fact that you're able to look at a telescope and derive a moral lesson from a telescope, I mean that takes a special switch. And not only that, but it was actually a very good concept. I appreciate it. It wasn't just like, oh, telescope, neat. And then it was like, man, this is a snooze fest. No, like that's actually a lot to think about. Thank, you.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It would be my pleasure.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. Well, listen, got a lot to go home and chew on at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we both lost power. He's the only one that hasn't, so he's obviously no better. We are one. When we do these podcasts, we don't know who's going to be listening. We know that they're probably Masons. They might not be Masons. This podcast, in particular, is meant for people that aren't Masonry, that want to learn about it. So, with that in mind, is there anything that you would want to say to the listeners out there, as a man, as a Mason, as a dad, as an artist?
Speaker 2:Of course, I do appreciate spending the time with us in this conversation. One thing that's really important to me is creating things that are going to be a catalyst for conversation. I love to talk and through my paintings, through my speeches, through the content I create, what I'm attempting to do is to have that little spark of curiosity so that we can engage in a conversation. Hopefully, one day we come across each other and we're able to have a more personal, more profound conversation about these things. But it fulfills me to hear that you know what I am creating, what I'm putting out into the world, is starting some conversations. So if you found any of this valuable, I would love for you to follow the work that I do, if you're a Mason, and where can they do that?
Speaker 1:again. Where can they find your art? Where can they follow you?
Speaker 2:So if they're interested in Freemasonry and my Masonic art, they can go to the winding stairscom. I started the winding stairs in 2012 as an effort of self introspection and as an outlet for me to teach, to me, for me to learn and teach, and I've been fortunate to connect with a lot of people and you can see the art, you can see the content about Freemasonry there. But I have been a professional artist for 20 years this year and my art is not limited to Freemasonry. I am a surrealist. I do oil paintings, sell them through galleries to collectors, and you can see my collection by going to JuanSepulvedacom. Juansepulvedacom is where you can find a little insight into what got me here.
Speaker 1:We will put links in this podcast to the Winding Stairs and to Juan Sepulveda. That's how it is, sepulveda, and you know, a Capri Sun on us. We'll have it delivered to you, one with a three-rucking cigar. I dare you to try both at the same time. Challenge accepted. Actually you are a Masonic speaker, so if people want to book you for a Master Mason Association, a lodge education, that's something you're open to doing. Correct? Yeah, I do them often. How can they?
Speaker 2:reach out to you for that. If you can reach out to me through any of those websites, the contact form in there goes to the same bucket, basically. So just reach out to me there at juansimplemailcom or thewindingstairscom, and just fill out the contact form and we'll take it from there.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thank you, brother. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing time with us and talking about this topic. I'm so happy that we got you to come on and do it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for the invitation, matt. It was a pleasure meeting you and spending some time with you. Brother, absolutely, you're not too far, so I'll see you soon. Mason, you're a phenomenal guy. You're not too far, so I'll see you sooner than later.
Speaker 1:For sure. He's doing some interesting things at Turkey Creek. So give him a couple years before you go out and see his lodge. He'd be embarrassed if he came today. I know A couple of years of past masters.
Speaker 3:They'll have it straight, oh no that's not what's going to happen, chris.
Speaker 1:I'm the level podcast.
Speaker 3:Out.
