Nirvana is the Limit of Self-reflection, pt 21: The World

The World, or as it is known in religious contexts, the secular world, is never what it seems to be. Think about the lives of all the people who have lived before us, and the limitations they might have faced. The catastrophes they might have witnessed. Human collectives are always driven by subjectivity, and these collectives always see themselves as the center of the world. I would argue that this is a completely perceptual issue. Humans are simian-shaped beings with two hands and two eyes. More to the point, the Latin word for hand is the root of the English word manipulate. As humans, we cannot imagine the world without imagining how we would work it with our hands. We cannot deal with the world without looking at it from multiple perspectives. And then there is even the perspective assigned to The World as the 21st major arcanum: that it more or less represents external information to the querent's literal own physical world. But what about the non-literal metaphysical world? What about the twilight world that some people insist exists? What can we say about that world and what should we say about it? Is that world completely subjective, or does it have some objectivity? I would argue that even if that world is completely subjective, enchantments like The Tarot attempt to bridge the different subjectivities of what one person might see in the future versus another person's view. And the way in which The Tarot does this is to make objects about these deeper facts of existence. The world, which is so wide, and such an ambiguous word, becomes simply The World, the card.

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