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Sep. 27th, 2012 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonSome Journeys.
I'm already starting up the Phones/Rods and yet, I'm not yet ready to let the cups go. There's more to be said, and there is more to feel. See, I have a few things to explain, just right up front. The 4 minor arcana link up with the 4 Hermetic elements, the Humors. This project, what I've decided or what I want to get from this project... Well, a lot of things.
First, I'm a Father and Wotan is my archetype for the Father, he plucked his own eye out so he could see the future, so knowing the future becomes an important rite of fatherhood. I'll just put that out there and not address it again - that's purely my idiosyncrasy
Second, the second thing is, probably the main thing, and that's aligning myself, being foursquare and solid. Here we are, assembled of these states, material forms comprised of elements. In my spare time I theorize about different elemental systems, I'm not all-in on the hermetic construction, the classic four, or the classic five or the classic one - depending on which classics you're reading. Nevertheless - there is a compelling mote of persuasion in the hermetic system. There are feelings, but there are also kinds of feelings. So what are the kinds of feelings? A person, a personality - they have all of them no? In proportions, densities and admixtures. So you're a kind of person? Well? I'm not exactly persuaded that there are kinds among people.
So, Kingtycoon, you're saying - You don't think there are kinds of people?
"Well," I respond, "It's more sophisticated than that, there are feelings, and people have them, and those are the things that are mixed and different. You can have different feelings and then you'd be a different person." Now - I'm not married to this thesis, but I like it, I'm putting it out there. So let's say that there are feelings, and they have kinds. The Tarot, and the Alchemists suggest that there are 4 flavors of feelings.
So first up is the Cups, and this is sort of my journey with the cups. Big Story.
The cups are meant to be evocative of emotion - that's what it says on the box anyway. Now, I don't buy this, not because I think they mean something else - rather that I think it is a failure of descriptive ability to call the Cups Emotion. The Cups mean water, the Receptive power that overwhelms. They aren't just emotion or only emotion. The Rods/Phones and the Coins/Money - they're about activity and acquisition and work - it's not like you go through life doing things and earning a living and there's no emotion in it. You can't remove your emotions from the things you do, that's dumb. What the Cups signify is a kind of passive absorption, fixation on things, people, the way the sea absorbs you, the way the water soaks up everything in it. The Cups are a receptive quality of perception and awareness - they are Sensitivity.
So the cups are absorbing, and I'm absorbed. I've turned my sensitivity up to 11 and now I'm not yet ready to step on through without recounting the journey. Because this heightened sense, the engrossing awareness of your own absorption of the world? It's like any vice - hard to shake.
When I was young, and I start a lot of stories this way, having middle-aged myself into an existence with some wisdom but not a lot of action, I have to recollect past times and narrate them. When I was young I was very, very sensitive. Just like you probably, just like you when you had to become a teenager, when you couldn't do one thing right and everyone was mad at you. Just like you when you were always worried about how people would react to you - because you, like me, were all reactions, receptivity - you figured everyone else was too. You didn't know that people might be as absorbed in themselves as you were in yourself. You were sensitive - you could feel the sun's rays cutting through you, you could feel people looking at you across a room. And everything was much more vivid and real. But not quite better for it.
When I was young I was hyper-aware. I grew fast and I felt an expectation on me. That giant kid should do this and sports and that and sports or be dumb because he's a giant kid or tough or mean or brutish and slow. There's still that tacit disapproval in a person's eyes when I confess that I never did play or care about basketball. And that's the start of it - the first step on Cups Road - hyperawareness, sensitivity -The Ace of cups.
Now that all faded. I lost the sense of my own alienation when I started to feel attachment. You find that person and you fall into love. Love has not been as strong or meant as much all those later times, the first time is the one that counts still, because it was the one that knocked the sense into me, maybe into you too. The first time was the first time I ever really understood about something that's really weird in the world: Other People. Seriously, you guys are freaky. But the only way to get to the bottom of Other People is to get caught up with one, the first one. The First one is the The Two of Cups
I've not been lucky, in fact I've not even been sure of how to be capable or good at love. That's just something, something I don't do well, so I can say that I didn't form up into myself from out of love, out of the dawning awareness of the other - and of the terrible, terrible vulnerability that there is between you and a person that you love. Now, you add another leg and there you have a stool!
The Three of Cups is all about this - the idea that you draw like to you, like with like, and the acceptable other - the first stable formation, there's no worries, no guessing - there's enough people, here together, that you can - say, go on a weekend roadtrip to an unknown city, fearless of dangers and consequences and police. There's that! The formative human experience of adventure - which is a matter absorbed with the few who feel as you feel, who have joined and with whom you have joined.
Segue into The Four of Cups Which is a lot of things. It's a different absorption - you've gone from self-obsession, to obsession with another - "If only someone understood me!" to "If only she could know how I feel about her." to "We are all in this moment together, we all must feel the same thing!" To... this. Rest? Relaxation? It's like a breath drawn - a wave, from being self-obsessed to being outwardly aware, to being withdrawn again. Here the withdrawal is intentional. You've chosen to become fascinated with art, with some other thing - to become absorbed by something that has the veneer, at least, of not affecting you back.
This is where you work out your alienation - because you've been so caught up with Other People.
The Five of Cups Comes after that - exhaustion, exasperation. You've withdrawn, and she's withdrawn, she's finished with you and regretful - you thought you had something that could stand a bit of disengagement? Or you are faced now with the real consequence of your immersion in what seemed to be a mirror that didn't stare back. Withdraw, collapse inward and you're back to where you were - the inverse of the 2 of cups - you're at a place of breaking up. You'd been sensitive, withdrawn, fragile maybe, overwhelmed? You went after easy sensation and that was sufficient to break the ties - that is to say - all your absorption has a consequence. Forlorn distaste right here - what is lost and what is missed and what is destroyed by too much absorption in the wrong things. But here there is self-pity too - the most engaging sensation at times, you're caught up in what if and what might have been, in considerations of IF! the worst recursion.
So how do you snap out of it?
Why you get back on the horse. The first time was the only first time, but the next time is better. The Six of Cups relates to that - to another attempt, to wiser heads prevailing, to a nostalgic, hopeful recapitulation of the whole long affair of growing up. The people, they're not at the start of their life, but they'll act like they are, they're aware again, but not so acutely, not so self-consciously, they're capable now, capable even of remembering when they weren't. They give up - You give up the regrets and conceits of your experience to act again like you did when you were inexperienced, when you were pure. It's a fantasy, but a fair one. You were never pure and the world was never better, but in your self-absorption you never did see the world for what it was. Now you're starting to.
There's a step back though - recursion is all over the place here. You're aware, you percieve, and your perceptions breed a new feeling - insecurity. The Seven of Cups is all about that. Not having enough of what everyone wants more of anyway. You, and me and everyone - we're wishful, wistful, aware - very aware of what we want more of, here's we're confronted with it - with our desires, but it's an idle feeling, not acted upon - not real fear - but a sensation of want unrelated to want. Confusing? Maybe - but you're confused. You need more money! You need more time, more health, more of something... Anything! You're aware of what can be had, and you're aware of what you haven't got. You might even go crazy hoping, wishing, dreaming, you might even get caught up in this fantasy so that you're crippled by the sensation.
Or you might just grow up and shout "Fuck. This." The Eight of Cups is this - when your awareness finally hits a bone within yourself, when you finally realize who you are and have the sense to place yourself in the world on your terms. This is the point in the journey where you've finally broken from any anxiety you have regarding the expectations of others - you've learned that they're like you - that they want and need and will experience it all just like you. Because there aren't kinds of people - there are People and they have kinds of feelings.
Which is to say - you don't have any ill will. Heck, you've made your peace with the sensational world. It's yours, more or less to inhabit as you want. You've got what you need - you finally noticed. Why not tell everyone? Why not invite them over, why not be happy if they don't show up? Why not throw yourself a party? The Nine of Cups is throwing himself a party. You're invited- if you want to come - no big deal. It's his party, come if you want to. Here - victory is at hand - victory over sensitivity, this is the point where there is a real accounting - (not avoidance as in #4, not regret as in #5, not delusion as in #6 or even the petulance of #8) a reckoning. "This is me, in control of how I feel. In control of what I feel."
The Ten of Cups and it all goes kind of haywire right? Where feelings and sensation, where your absorption into and with the world is on your terms, where you are free, and you have the correct amount of attachment, the correct amount of hope, withdrawal, innocence, love, assurance, certainty - where you are balanced in your awarness of the world and your place in it - and it's place within you - since, after all this time - you've absorbed the world, contained it. You've become True, made true by absorbing enough true things.
So that is the journey. Those are the Cups.
I'm already starting up the Phones/Rods and yet, I'm not yet ready to let the cups go. There's more to be said, and there is more to feel. See, I have a few things to explain, just right up front. The 4 minor arcana link up with the 4 Hermetic elements, the Humors. This project, what I've decided or what I want to get from this project... Well, a lot of things.
First, I'm a Father and Wotan is my archetype for the Father, he plucked his own eye out so he could see the future, so knowing the future becomes an important rite of fatherhood. I'll just put that out there and not address it again - that's purely my idiosyncrasy
Second, the second thing is, probably the main thing, and that's aligning myself, being foursquare and solid. Here we are, assembled of these states, material forms comprised of elements. In my spare time I theorize about different elemental systems, I'm not all-in on the hermetic construction, the classic four, or the classic five or the classic one - depending on which classics you're reading. Nevertheless - there is a compelling mote of persuasion in the hermetic system. There are feelings, but there are also kinds of feelings. So what are the kinds of feelings? A person, a personality - they have all of them no? In proportions, densities and admixtures. So you're a kind of person? Well? I'm not exactly persuaded that there are kinds among people.
So, Kingtycoon, you're saying - You don't think there are kinds of people?
"Well," I respond, "It's more sophisticated than that, there are feelings, and people have them, and those are the things that are mixed and different. You can have different feelings and then you'd be a different person." Now - I'm not married to this thesis, but I like it, I'm putting it out there. So let's say that there are feelings, and they have kinds. The Tarot, and the Alchemists suggest that there are 4 flavors of feelings.
So first up is the Cups, and this is sort of my journey with the cups. Big Story.
The cups are meant to be evocative of emotion - that's what it says on the box anyway. Now, I don't buy this, not because I think they mean something else - rather that I think it is a failure of descriptive ability to call the Cups Emotion. The Cups mean water, the Receptive power that overwhelms. They aren't just emotion or only emotion. The Rods/Phones and the Coins/Money - they're about activity and acquisition and work - it's not like you go through life doing things and earning a living and there's no emotion in it. You can't remove your emotions from the things you do, that's dumb. What the Cups signify is a kind of passive absorption, fixation on things, people, the way the sea absorbs you, the way the water soaks up everything in it. The Cups are a receptive quality of perception and awareness - they are Sensitivity.
So the cups are absorbing, and I'm absorbed. I've turned my sensitivity up to 11 and now I'm not yet ready to step on through without recounting the journey. Because this heightened sense, the engrossing awareness of your own absorption of the world? It's like any vice - hard to shake.
When I was young, and I start a lot of stories this way, having middle-aged myself into an existence with some wisdom but not a lot of action, I have to recollect past times and narrate them. When I was young I was very, very sensitive. Just like you probably, just like you when you had to become a teenager, when you couldn't do one thing right and everyone was mad at you. Just like you when you were always worried about how people would react to you - because you, like me, were all reactions, receptivity - you figured everyone else was too. You didn't know that people might be as absorbed in themselves as you were in yourself. You were sensitive - you could feel the sun's rays cutting through you, you could feel people looking at you across a room. And everything was much more vivid and real. But not quite better for it.
When I was young I was hyper-aware. I grew fast and I felt an expectation on me. That giant kid should do this and sports and that and sports or be dumb because he's a giant kid or tough or mean or brutish and slow. There's still that tacit disapproval in a person's eyes when I confess that I never did play or care about basketball. And that's the start of it - the first step on Cups Road - hyperawareness, sensitivity -The Ace of cups.
Now that all faded. I lost the sense of my own alienation when I started to feel attachment. You find that person and you fall into love. Love has not been as strong or meant as much all those later times, the first time is the one that counts still, because it was the one that knocked the sense into me, maybe into you too. The first time was the first time I ever really understood about something that's really weird in the world: Other People. Seriously, you guys are freaky. But the only way to get to the bottom of Other People is to get caught up with one, the first one. The First one is the The Two of Cups
I've not been lucky, in fact I've not even been sure of how to be capable or good at love. That's just something, something I don't do well, so I can say that I didn't form up into myself from out of love, out of the dawning awareness of the other - and of the terrible, terrible vulnerability that there is between you and a person that you love. Now, you add another leg and there you have a stool!
The Three of Cups is all about this - the idea that you draw like to you, like with like, and the acceptable other - the first stable formation, there's no worries, no guessing - there's enough people, here together, that you can - say, go on a weekend roadtrip to an unknown city, fearless of dangers and consequences and police. There's that! The formative human experience of adventure - which is a matter absorbed with the few who feel as you feel, who have joined and with whom you have joined. Segue into The Four of Cups Which is a lot of things. It's a different absorption - you've gone from self-obsession, to obsession with another - "If only someone understood me!" to "If only she could know how I feel about her." to "We are all in this moment together, we all must feel the same thing!" To... this. Rest? Relaxation? It's like a breath drawn - a wave, from being self-obsessed to being outwardly aware, to being withdrawn again. Here the withdrawal is intentional. You've chosen to become fascinated with art, with some other thing - to become absorbed by something that has the veneer, at least, of not affecting you back.
This is where you work out your alienation - because you've been so caught up with Other People. The Five of Cups Comes after that - exhaustion, exasperation. You've withdrawn, and she's withdrawn, she's finished with you and regretful - you thought you had something that could stand a bit of disengagement? Or you are faced now with the real consequence of your immersion in what seemed to be a mirror that didn't stare back. Withdraw, collapse inward and you're back to where you were - the inverse of the 2 of cups - you're at a place of breaking up. You'd been sensitive, withdrawn, fragile maybe, overwhelmed? You went after easy sensation and that was sufficient to break the ties - that is to say - all your absorption has a consequence. Forlorn distaste right here - what is lost and what is missed and what is destroyed by too much absorption in the wrong things. But here there is self-pity too - the most engaging sensation at times, you're caught up in what if and what might have been, in considerations of IF! the worst recursion.
So how do you snap out of it?
Why you get back on the horse. The first time was the only first time, but the next time is better. The Six of Cups relates to that - to another attempt, to wiser heads prevailing, to a nostalgic, hopeful recapitulation of the whole long affair of growing up. The people, they're not at the start of their life, but they'll act like they are, they're aware again, but not so acutely, not so self-consciously, they're capable now, capable even of remembering when they weren't. They give up - You give up the regrets and conceits of your experience to act again like you did when you were inexperienced, when you were pure. It's a fantasy, but a fair one. You were never pure and the world was never better, but in your self-absorption you never did see the world for what it was. Now you're starting to. There's a step back though - recursion is all over the place here. You're aware, you percieve, and your perceptions breed a new feeling - insecurity. The Seven of Cups is all about that. Not having enough of what everyone wants more of anyway. You, and me and everyone - we're wishful, wistful, aware - very aware of what we want more of, here's we're confronted with it - with our desires, but it's an idle feeling, not acted upon - not real fear - but a sensation of want unrelated to want. Confusing? Maybe - but you're confused. You need more money! You need more time, more health, more of something... Anything! You're aware of what can be had, and you're aware of what you haven't got. You might even go crazy hoping, wishing, dreaming, you might even get caught up in this fantasy so that you're crippled by the sensation.
Or you might just grow up and shout "Fuck. This." The Eight of Cups is this - when your awareness finally hits a bone within yourself, when you finally realize who you are and have the sense to place yourself in the world on your terms. This is the point in the journey where you've finally broken from any anxiety you have regarding the expectations of others - you've learned that they're like you - that they want and need and will experience it all just like you. Because there aren't kinds of people - there are People and they have kinds of feelings. Which is to say - you don't have any ill will. Heck, you've made your peace with the sensational world. It's yours, more or less to inhabit as you want. You've got what you need - you finally noticed. Why not tell everyone? Why not invite them over, why not be happy if they don't show up? Why not throw yourself a party? The Nine of Cups is throwing himself a party. You're invited- if you want to come - no big deal. It's his party, come if you want to. Here - victory is at hand - victory over sensitivity, this is the point where there is a real accounting - (not avoidance as in #4, not regret as in #5, not delusion as in #6 or even the petulance of #8) a reckoning. "This is me, in control of how I feel. In control of what I feel."
The Ten of Cups and it all goes kind of haywire right? Where feelings and sensation, where your absorption into and with the world is on your terms, where you are free, and you have the correct amount of attachment, the correct amount of hope, withdrawal, innocence, love, assurance, certainty - where you are balanced in your awarness of the world and your place in it - and it's place within you - since, after all this time - you've absorbed the world, contained it. You've become True, made true by absorbing enough true things.
So that is the journey. Those are the Cups.
