FromtheIntroduction

A mandala is a circular design that grows out of the urge to know oneself and one's place in the cosmos. Some scholars derive the word mandala from the Sanskrit syllables manda, or essence, and la, or container. Mandalas express completeness and invite us to experience ourselves as a whole being, an individual. The womblike structure of a mandala creates a feeling of safety and protection. At the same time, mandalas distill the complex rhythms of the universe—and human consciousness—into patterns that are manageable and comprehensible to human beings. So it is that mandalas reinforce our individuality and also help us relate to the ineffable mysteries that give rise to our existence.

Peoples both ancient and modern in all parts of the world have created mandalas. The mandalas of India, China, and Tibet are images of sacred reality. In these cultures, specific mandala forms are often associated with particular deities and are created to invoke their presence. For example, Tibetan Buddhist monks, using colored sand, create the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) mandala at the beginning of a special empowerment ritual, to invite the Kalachakra deity to be present during the ceremony. Symbolic of an ideal universe, this mandala becomes a kind of dwelling place or container for the deity's qualities of enlightenment.

In Eastern traditions, mandalas are used to communicate spiritual realizations and as a way to transmit or teach realization to others. For example, visionaries of India painted mandalas in the form of concentric circles to convey their understanding that the cosmos is in simultaneous creation and dissolution. In a similar way, mandalas may serve as a focus for meditation on different forms of energy associated with deities. The meditator moves his or her gaze along a prescribed pathway in the mandala in order to discover, access, and integrate particular states of consciousness associated with the symbols in the mandala. Through this interaction, the mandala helps devotees cultivate within themselves qualities such as compassion or wisdom associated with the deity symbolized in the mandala.

Mandalas in the Eastern traditions are created with reference to an unseen reality. The true mandala is thought to be an inner mandala brought about within the artist through the creation of the painted mandala, or in the meditator through prayerful study of the mandala's patterns. This way of thinking is demonstrated in the ease with which Tibetan Buddhist monks destroy a sand mandala they have labored over for days. The sand is swept away in order to release the beneficial energies contained by the mandala into everyday life.

Sacred circles are also part of Western cultures. Ancient stone carvings of circular designs found in Denmark suggest reverent observance of the sun and the passage of time. Sacred circles in the Christian tradition include the jeweltoned rose windows prominently placed in Gothic cathedrals (see page 4). They are mandalas that focus and direct the viewer's attention to a sacred symbol framed in dazzling light. In the Islamic world, complex geometric forms worked in stone or colorful ceramic tile are found near the entrances of Muslim holy places in the Middle East and parts of Asia. The dancing lines weave from center to circumference and remind the viewer that the matrix of all creation is the One, Allah.

In the Americas, sacred circles are well known to native peoples. Circles filled with a single spiraling line symbolize the face of god for Huichol tribes in Mexico. Navaho peoples of the southwestern United States create circular "drypaintings" for ceremonial or healing purposes; these are a type of sand painting made of pollen, corn meal, and crushed flowers. Native peoples of the Great Plains construct medicine wheels using the four directions to convey tribal wisdom about life, relationships, and harmony with nature.

This wide dissemination of mandalas among cultures that had little or no contact with one another suggests that all human beings share experiences, concerns, and curiosity as they attempt to know themselves and find a comfortable sense of belonging in the vastness of the universe. Mandalas symbolize the hoped-for harmonious convergence of human and transpersonal realms. Those who achieve illumination may use mandalas to document their experience and communicate it to others.

A recurring theme in mandalas is an awareness of the passage of time and the realization that human life is in constant flux and flow. Mandalas are used to find meaning in the ongoing stream of human experience. For example, the ancient Romans believed that the goddess Fortuna presided over a celestial wheel that governed the seasons and the fates of human beings. This Wheel of Fortune helped explain the ups and downs of human life: good and bad luck were determined as the goddess Fortuna turned her wheel.

The notion of life as a cycle of ever-changing experiences is also found in some Eastern mandalas. In the Buddhist tradition, existence is viewed as a repeating cycle of twelve stages encompassing birth, death, and rebirth. The mandala known as the Wheel of Life illustrates these stages. Legend attributes the creation of this circular diagram to the Buddha himself. The mandala was given as a gift to the king of a foreign land who knew nothing of the Buddha's teachings. The king's fascination with the gift led him to carefully ponder this mandala. One day, as he studied it, the king had a flash of insight. Thereby he received the Buddha's true gift: a way out of the eternally repeating cycles of life with the attainment of enlightenment.

Mandalas created by modern Westerners serve much the same purpose as traditional mandalas: they express our experiences and bring about understanding of ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. Mandalas were of special interest to Carl Jung, the well-known Swiss psychoanalyst. He saw them as evidence of a dynamic urge toward fulfilling one's identity as an individual, a process that he called individuation. According to Jung, this development is guided by the Self, the deep inner source of a pattern of wholeness that propels human beings to fulfill their potential. Jung found that the Self generates a spontaneous desire to create mandalas.

As he worked with his patients in analysis, Jung observed that in the course of this inner work, the various parts of the psyche tend to undergo an ever-shifting balance. Clashes between opposites in the psyche, such as the ego and the unconscious, generate energy that helps to transform conflict into harmony. This growth process may be experienced as stressful and challenging to cherished ideas and beliefs. An urge to create mandalas arises as one of the psyche's natural self-regulating mechanisms for bringing about a sense of balance, order, and well-being. (Indeed, those who create and color mandalas often report feeling more relaxed afterward.)

Jung's patients brought him mandalas they had drawn or painted. Such mandalas often displayed patterns based on four: four objects, four colors, or four-armed crosses known as swastikas (in Sanskrit, svastika, an ancient solar symbol representing the cosmic wheel spinning on an axis). The appearance of these mandalas indicated to Jung that his patient was experiencing individuation and that a balancing of the personality was in process, in which previously unconscious parts of the personality emerged symbolically in dreams and artwork. When understood and accepted by the ego (the part of yourself you call "I"), these once-hidden aspects of self increase self-awareness and make identity more complex and stable.

Individuation is ultimately humbling because, if all goes well, the ego must accept nothing less than dethronement as the most important part of the psyche. We come to know that the true center of the psyche is not "I," the center of consciousness, but the Self, which is the center of the whole psyche, though it resides in the unconscious. Just as the earth circles around the sun, the ego is subject to the superior centering power of the Self. Through individuation we learn to value and accept the guidance of the Self given in dreams and spontaneous artwork, especially mandalas.

Jung was familiar with the fourfold patterns in the spontaneous mandalas that he associated with the process of individuation. Mandalas that did not fit this pattern were puzzling to him. In his case study of a "Miss X," Jung includes illustrations of her mandalas based on six, eight, twelve, and sixteen, though he chooses not to comment on them because, he said, he did not understand them properly. Jung further says that this case study "is not intended to demonstrate how an entire lifetime expresses itself in symbolic form. The individuation process has many stages and is subject to many vicissitudes" (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 348). It remained for another researcher to see the implications in designs other than the fourfold mandala.

That researcher was Joan Kellogg, an American art therapist. In association with the psychiatrist Francisco DiLeo, she conceptualized the growth and development of the psyche as an ongoing cycle through twelve stages. Each stage encompasses certain developmental tasks and is characterized by a particular state of consciousness. The twelve stages are experienced many times in the course of a lifetime. Kellogg discovered that these twelve stages are associated with prototypical mandala forms.

In Kellogg's model, called the Archetypal Stages of the Great Round of Mandala (or "the Great Round" for short), the twelve stages encompass a complete cycle of inner growth that begins in formless unconsciousness and unfolds into greater and greater self-awareness and accomplishment. The cycle then transitions to the ending when things naturally fall apart, energy returns to the unconscious, and a new cycle begins. The twelve stages of the Great Round are called the Void, Bliss, Labyrinth, Beginning, Target, Dragon Fight, Squaring the Circle, Functioning Ego, Crystallization, Gates of Death, Fragmentation, and Transcendent Ecstasy. (Kellogg later found it necessary to add a Stage 0, Clear Light.)

Most stages are initially experienced in normal growth and development. We repeat cycles of the Great Round again and again as we live our lives. With each "visit" to a stage we have an opportunity to consolidate our mastery of the challenges and states of consciousness associated with that stage. We may also clarify our understanding of past experiences there, and resolve unfinished business associated with the stage, thereby releasing bound energy to focus on subsequent stages of the Great Round. (For more on the Great Round, see my book Creating Mandalas.)

With experience and maturity we can more easily access the state of consciousness inherent in each stage. We may eventually develop the capability to be aware of all stages simultaneously, and thereby forgo identification with only a few stages. This ability to see the big picture brings an experience of transcendence and a sense of connection to the deeper psyche. The capacity to consciously experience a psychological center that incorporates a connection to the deeper psyche is the most important task of individuation.