On Baker Street

Mandala has Hindu origin and is used in Dharmic religions such as Buddism and Hinduism to refer to tangible objects ranging from the metaphysical or symbological cosmos to the microcosm of the world . In the West, mandala is also used to imply individual world, which includes one's inner interests and outer activities. The center of a mandala is always an object for focusing attention and used in meditation practice. According to Carl Jung, exploring mandala enables us to contact the unconscious self, figure out the disorders and reach personal wholeness.

(image source : http://www.netreach.net/~nhojem/mandala.htm)
"I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. ... I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation. ... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate" - C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

(image source : http://www.netreach.net/~nhojem/mandala.htm)

As we look into a mandala, it seems that the general symmetrical geometric shapes possessing it tends to draw the attention to its deep center - the midpoint. And the mandala is somewhat a procession of rhytmn following the clockwise or anti clockwise helical direction. We experience a sort of gradual growth or gradual disintegration hierachicaly, which means there's no misplacement, no single object does not follows others or impressively valuable than others. In mandalas, there seem to be always perfect balance, diagonal, upright, or helical .

The above mandala is my favourite mandala, it seems to absorb in it the general hamony among the extreme conflicts of the cosmos - the oposite but complementary. We can see part of the basic yin-yang at the periphery, and we can also see that there is an element of yang within yin and an element of yin within yang (the white part in black and black in white)

Posted by Magnifying Glass on Sunday, November 12, 2006 at 11:51 AM | Permalink