Eight of Cups

The Eight of Cups hones in on the complicated relationship between head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and emotion, or cognition and affect. The point of view with the Eights is mental. We learn a lot from the things the heart gets us into. And even the head knows that too much restraint on the feelings will keep us from the experiences that allow us to learn so much. Ultimately the head is more interested in feeling’s past tense, on getting it all sorted out afterwards, although it knows at least dimly that this may require having a deeply authentic experience in the first place. The mind wants the ability to call on past experiences when needed, from a safe and unobtrusive distance away, so there is a focus on getting the experience behind us, where it can be better understood. Affective affordances are found and set aside, but encoded for later access. Nietzsche wrote in his last notebook: “One does not get over a passion by representing it. Rather, it is over when one is able to represent it.” We have what we need from this experience for now. The RWS card is a depiction of leaving some feelings behind us and preparing to move on. While this may be an abandonment, it is not a disavowal or a repudiation. It’s neutrality instead of negation. We haven’t scorched any earth, burned any bridges, or poisoned any wells. As Anonymous wrote, “Sometimes you just have to be done. Not mad, not upset. Just done.” The previous effort was simply a preparation for a greater freedom. With a new perspective we now have freedom towards, not just freedom from. There is a side of this that has some big drawbacks. With having it all figured out, with the problem now solved, we may think that our abstract summarization was all that we needed to learn. Where the mind has been and what it has done becomes ‘been there, done that.’ Experience has now been encoded and emptied of its present emotional content. We spoke with someone for a couple of minutes a couple of years ago and now claim to ‘know’ this person. The mystic experience? Oh, I’ve had one of those, now I'm awake. The past loses its feeling, texture, and depth. Transience is the rule, of course, and we cannot take everything with us. We have to mine the whole time for a handful of moments, and this is all we can carry, unless we want to end the journey now and dwell right here. We sometimes have to take things for granted to make any progress at all. The place served us well for a time. And we leave a little a cache behind, perhaps for when we want to come back. A mind that enjoys feelings and is articulate in its understanding might appear to be overthinking, or have already overthought. It may converse knowledgeably about affect and speak well of passion, even if not presently having the experience, and in all of this it might seem abstract and detached, emptied of subjective meaning, having lost the sense of refreshment. Mental understanding of feeling and emotion works on a different time scale, one that is not in the moment. The point of having things sorted is in large part building an infrastructure for access to our feelings. Often these help or cause us to react more quickly than thought to similar situations. We may have left a place in the past, but we also now know the way back. The inner life is organized. In waxing philosophical over prior emotional states, it’s possible to call up or conjure those feelings again. We can go too far of course. With our feelings all named, counted, sorted, and weighed, we have done little to secure our routes to back to happiness. Another force pushes us onwards as well: hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill. We are genetically predisposed to not even like it if the good things stay the same. Our hopes and expectations adapt ever upwards. If we can’t have constant improvement, or at least some gradual intensification, then we will go after variety for its own sake instead. It takes a lot of gratitude for what we already have to keep this process under some control. Familiarity would rather breed contempt. It’s novelty that keeps the mind awake, just like it’s acceleration, and not steady movement, that lets us know we are moving. We have a need to renew the familiar if we want to keep it around. A resource is a source that we can keep coming back to. Refreshment is just that, a freshening up again, just as respect means ‘to look again,’ which offers a clue to a lasting enjoyment or better appreciation of steadier states. The Yijing counterpart is Gua 48, the Well. This is something, literally, that we really dug at one time. We have a resource that we can come back to whenever we are driven by thirst. We retain the ability to go deep again, to access our depths. But most of the time we have left it behind us. The structure that makes the magic is out of sight and out of mind. We know the way back, and can even tell others how to get there as well. The texts of the lines in this chapter discuss the periodic checkup and mainten- ance issues, how we ought not to take this completely for granted, how we ought to keep the water accessible, to keep refreshing our outlooks and browsers. Even in stable systems, negative entropy still needs inputs of energy. By analogy, we have tapped, perhaps with forethought, a source of feeling, refreshment, or nourishment and conceptually set things in order, for the sake of securing future access. Although this source lives largely outside of our awareness, it is nevertheless a resource. The Yijing also emphasizes the social aspects, as either the well was dug at the center of things, or things developed around the well as a center. Feelings and emotions are an older and more common ground for humans than our cultures, languages, thoughts and ideas.