The World: A Dance Of Eternity

The last card of the Major Arcana, the XXI, has a figure that is not a man, not a woman. This person is a dancer. The Dancer. The neutral gender removes the being from the everyday world and brings it to the Transcendental World.

It holds two wands, representing the positive and the negative energetic poles. When it dances, the wands goes up and down, in a compensatory mode, representing the dynamic constant interaction of all opposites.

It is inside a natural arch, that creates a sacred space, separating it from everything that is not meaningful and essential, separating it from everything that it doesn't belong to “her”. Without having around her unnecessary energy, she has space to move within her own personal, sacred space, she is free to express her self freely e without efforts. In Jungian terms, she represents the Self, centre of our psyche.

Her sexual parts remain occults. This reminds us that even if we feel that sometimes we are very close to a big and total “truth", the creative impulse in the heart of every life cannot be totally revealed. Not because she thinks that she is better than others, and not everyone would understand… but simply because the revelation is about a mystic universal secret.

In archetypal language, this tendency to hide our private parts seems to be an instinctive feeling, caused by social restrictions. This archetypal fact reminds us that being naked is something absolutely normal and natural, but our Self always finds the need to be protected and held.

The Self is the centre of our psychological balance. When we lose contact with our internal dancer, we lose this balance. When we lose contact with Nature - our internal nature - we feel inside a feeling of inferiority. For Jung, when we are in touch with with our Natural Self, we don't feel superior either inferior, we only feel finally like: ourselves.

The protection that she has from the Wreath creates a safe space for this new Self that might be emerging, in order to don't let the outside world corrupt who she became. The nice thing here is to note that this protection is illustrated in the card as something from nature - the plants on it affirms this.

This natural element indicates that Protection seems to be a natural and spontaneous need during this stage of our psychological development. The World then comes in a moment where we are completely formed and an entity that cannot be corrupted by the external world and influences anymore. From this wreath, a new being emerges, a new personality starts to be part of the world that suddenly, is different for us.

The World, the card XXI is about the moment in our lives that the main energy is focused simply on the fact of BEING. Being who you truly are. Not thinking anymore how the past still hurts you or how the future can make you happy or disappointed, here, she dances only on the present rhythm, she understands that the only thing we truly have is the NOW.

The four elements in the corner represents what Jung calls “Amplitude of Consciousness”, and it's about that moment in our psychological development when we are able to remove the “Self” of the main focus, and we are mature enough to start to look for collective problems, issues and questions instead of focusing our energy mainly in our Ego-Questions.

The Dancer comes to tell you that she doesn't have to worry about making sense anymore. She doesn't have to spend time thinking about what she said, what she should do. She doesn't think about the past anymore in order to understand what she can ask or do today. She dances the moves she wants to dance, even if people tell her that her moves don't make sense. That her music is weird and loud. That she is dancing too much when personal/family/work problems should have her whole attention.

The dancer learnt that loving you more than loving everything around you can be offensive. That taking care of you instead of taking care of everyone else first, is not always well seen. You understand that it's not only ok to take care of you first when you start to hear the same music that tells you that you have the right to simply be who you really are. And you, you are The World.

The physicists tell s that the World and ourselves are nothing but a dance of particles. In a microscopical level, all the dynamic of opposites loses meaning. In a quantum level, there is no you, me. Black, white. Inside, Outside. The Dancer, IS the World.

And understanding the power that we have when we finally awake to the fact that we are the world, brings the possibility to change not only within yourself but also the world around you.

The Individuation process for Jung is also a collective change. The way someone perceives themselves can interfere in the community around them. When you comprehend this, you reincarnate different in the middle of people around you.

Your ego dies to become the Whole. You die inside to live, in the World. That's the lesson of The World, to remind us that our main purpose in being alive if to find a life with true meaning. I finish with a quote that I read last week for a Seminar that is very much like the whole concept of this card:

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world.”

— Erwin Schrödinger

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