Centers, Playing Card Analogy
From Cassiopedia
The picture cards of a regular playing card deck are sometimes used as a metaphor or memory aid for describing the lower centers.
All such systematizations run the risk of becoming too theoretical, where the reader may mistake the description for the real thing, leading to 'formatory thinking,' removed from the experience. Still, the below classification is relatively hands-on and helpful in placing various observations of the self on the map of centers. Because the notion of center in itself is an abstraction of something more complex, the number of centers figuring in descriptions, as well as the nature of their subdivisions varies, even within 4th Way literature. So, while most of the time there are three lower centers, the below description makes this four, dividing the moving center in two. The higher centers do not enter into this description.
The centers are instinctive = clubs, moving = spades, intellectual = diamonds and emotional = hearts. Each center is divided into mechanical, emotional and intellectual slices. These slices themselves have a positive and negative side. The slices are compared respectively to jacks, queens and kings of each suit. The playing cards have a mirror image pattern. This symbolizes the positive/negative division of each slice.
Instinctive Center
The jack of clubs is the mechanical instinctive. It is the center which maintains the body. Not all of its actions such as digestion or blood flow need to become conscious. Indeed, making these conscious can disrupt their natural functioning. Centers can take each others' energies. When one is sick, the jack of clubs takes every other center's energy for healing the body. One will not move, be drawn to anything, will not be interested in things.
The queen of clubs is responsible for liking/disliking physical things like touch, smell, texture etc. It protects one from eating spoiled food, for example. It is also excited about physical pleasures. It leads to instinctive emotions, such as becoming happy about the taste of a good wine.
The king of clubs is responsible for planning for survival and of value judgements on safety. This may also have to do with concerns for money, material security etc. This card is needed for survival but is not interested in the Work. A sixth sense (psychic sensitivity) can be a result of a well developed king of clubs.
All the 5 senses are the domain of the instinctive center.
Moving Center
The jack of spades is responsible for unconsciously executed motion like walking. Playing a musical instrument well needs a good jack of spades for the technical aspect of playing. The difference between instinctive and moving centers is that the instinctive center does not need to be taught, it will automatically activate behaviors typical of the species based on environment clues. The moving center does have to be taught and trained. Well practiced motions are executed by the jack of spades without much attention from other centers.
The queen of spades is concerned with liking or disliking motion. It likes to dance, ride a motorbike or play pinball, for example.
The king of spades has intelligence about spatial relationships. It can figure out how to pack things efficiently in boxes, for example. The jack can also do this but will do it by trial and error, the king will do it by design. The jack takes a long time to learn. This is why movements must be practised endless times, first with intellectual attention to each step before these steps become automatic, assimilated from the king by the jack.
Intellectual Center
The jack of diamonds is the formatory apparatus. It is good for storing information. It can only agree or disagree. It thinks it can think but it is categorical, yes/no and is not good with context or depth of understanding. It has no finesse. It will 'think' that something is always good or always bad without regard for the situation.
The queen of diamonds is excited by ideas. It likes to know everything but is not particularly deep. It is shopping around in a bookstore. It buys books which it may then never read. It may be good for starting with the Work but does not have the patience to stay with it.
The king of diamonds is capable of studying something in depth, of getting to the bottom of a question. This may be good for the Work, but if not completed by other centers, the efforts of the king of diamonds may result in no action but only endless speculation or high sounding phrases.
The 'second thought is the wiser.' The king of diamonds can think twice and not react immediately. The queen will grasp a concept in a conversation and start identifying with an idea and will want to say something immediately. This is identification. The king may moderate this tendency and bring context into the process.
Emotional Center
The jack of hearts is concerned with people. It has functions such as 'all babies are cute,' social chatter, all group emotions. It picks up the mood of the company and will cause one to feel happy or sad because others feel so. It will get excited at a sports match and shout because everybody else shouts.
The queen of hearts is the drama queen. It thrives on passion. It falls in love. But it is also selfish and fickle and may conceive of an equally deep hate. Fanaticism is its business. It is the only card that can commit suicide. It is often at odds with the king of clubs whose job it is to preserve the machine. The queen of hearts is good for starting the Work. It will be excited at first but will not have the persistence to go through with it, it will get distracted by something else. The queen of hearts may be very sensitive to people's energies and intents but it can overreact. It will call this or that 'destiny' and most often will be wrong.
The king of hearts is the only card with a genuine interest in the higher, it is the only card capable of self-sacrifice. The sacrifice of the queen of hearts is a thing for the self. Committing suicide is the ultimate in identification and subjective self-absorption. The king of hearts may conceive of altruistically sacrificing the self for concern for an objective external higher value, not for concern for a subjective inner state.
The king of hearts may understand and apply higher ethical principles and may be the gateway to the higher centers.
The intellectual center is the slowest. The emotional center is 30000 times faster. The moving/instinctive centers are again 30000 times faster than emotions. What one feels in a second one may spend hours analyzing or describing. Again, for the instinctive/moving functions there will be a huge amount of information processed in order to, for example, recognize a face which will then result in an emotion. Modern neurology seems to confirm the statement about the centers' relative speeds. There is, for example, talk about the 'bit-rate' of sensory functions as opposed to that of speech or verbal thinking. Also, reaction time differences between brain functions such as emotional interpretation taking place in the amygdala (queen of clubs/spades) and the frontal cortex (queen of diamonds/hearts) seems to support this notion. Again, the idea of center is not an exact reference to anatomy or function, nor is the concept strictly limited to the physical body as understood by medicine, thus such analogies should not be taken too far.
The attention of the jacks is mechanical, automatically going where circumstance pulls it. The attention of the queens is also pulled by outside objects and is automatically drawn without the self needing to work for focusing the attention. Only the kings require will, a deliberate effort in order to be active.
All cards have a useful role but generally they usurp each others' energy and work incorrectly and take over each others' functions.
See Centers, Chakra, Thinking, Formatory, Thinking, Emotional, Centers, Wrong Work of, Coach, The, Brain, Identification.