Mandala
"Mandala" (Sanskrit) means "circle," also "magic circle." Its
symbolism includes - to mention only the most important forms - all
concentrically arranged figures, round or square patterns with a centre, and
radial or spherical arrangements.
More
than twenty years earlier (in 1918), in the course of my investigations of the
collective
unconscious, I discovered the presence of an apparently universal symbol of
a similar type – the mandala symbol.
To make sure of my case, I spent more than a decade amassing additional
data, before announcing my discovery for the first time.
Mandala
symbolism … has been interpreted by Jung as grounded in what he identified as
the
four basic psychological functions by virtue of which we apprehend and
evaluate all experience, namely,
sensation and
intuition, which are the apprehending functions, and
thinking
and feeling, which are those of
judgment and
evaluation. A life governed by prudent forethought may be
undone by an upsurge of feeling, just as one swayed by feeling may, for a lack
of prudent forethought, be carried, one day, to disaster.
(“Never go out with strangers!”). The cruciform diagram to
the left makes it evident that in this view of Jung’s “four
functions” we are dealing with the claims and forces of two pairs of
opposites; for as feeling and thinking are opposed, so too are sensation and
intuition. TMD 193
The mandala is an
archetypal image whose
occurrence is attested throughout the ages.
It signifies the
wholeness of
the self.
This circular image represents the
wholeness of the
psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms,
the divinity incarnate in man.
They are to be found in almost everywhere throughout history. The early
middle ages are especially rich in
Christian mandalas showing
Christ in the
centre with the
four evangelists, or their symbols, at the cardinal points.
The Egyptians represented Horus with his
four sons in the same way.
Mandalas are found in paintings of the Pueblo and Navaho Indians as well,
but the most beautiful ones are, of course, those of the East, especially those
belonging to Tibetan Buddhism.
I have also found mandala drawings among the mentally ill, and indeed among persons who certainly did not have the least idea of any of the connections we have discussed.
For the most part, the mandala form is that of a flower, cross, or wheel, with a distinct tendency towards quadripartite structure.
Out
of this irritation and disharmony within myself there proceeded, the following
day, a changed mandala: part of the periphery had burst open and the symmetry
was destroyed….
… Only gradually did I
discover what the mandala really is: “Formation, Transformation, Eternal
Mind’s eternal recreation.” And that is
the self, the
wholeness of the
personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate
self-deceptions.
When I
began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that everything, all the paths I had
been following, all the 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
center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is
the path to the
center, to
individuation.
… Uniform development exists,
at most, only at the beginning; later, everything points toward
the center.
This insight gave me stability, and gradually my
inner peace returned. I knew
that in finding the mandala as an expression of
the self I had attained what was
for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.
Among my patients I have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas but who danced them instead. In India this type is called mandala nrithya or mandala dance, and the dance figures express the same meanings as the drawings. My patients can say very little about the meaning of the symbols but are fascinated by them and find them in some way or other expressive and effective with respect to their psychic condition.
The Golden Flower is a mandala symbol which I have often met with in the material brought me by my patients.
Insofar as analytical treatment makes the “shadow” conscious, it causes a cleavage and a tension of opposites which in their turn seek compensation in unity. The adjustment is achieved through symbols. The conflict between the opposites can strain our psyche to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us seriously. MDR 335
The tertium non datur of logic proves its worth: no solution can be seen. If all goes well, the solution, seemingly of its own accord, appears out of nature. Then and then only is it convincing. It is felt as “grace.” Since the solution proceeds out of the confrontation and clash of opposites, it is usually an unfathomable mixture of conscious and unconscious factors, and therefore a symbol, a coin split into two halves which fit together precisely.(7) It represents the result of the joint labors of consciousness and the unconscious, and attains the likeness of the God-image in the form of the mandala, which is probably the simplest model of a concept of wholeness, and one which spontaneously arises in the mind as a representation of the struggle and reconciliation of opposites. 335
The clash, which is at first of a purely personal nature, is soon followed by the insight that the subjective conflict is only a single instance of the universal conflict of opposites. Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche. MDR 335
For that reason the God-image is always a projection of the inner experience of a powerful vis-à-vis. MDR 335
...... In this way the imagination liberates itself from the concretism of the object and attempts to sketch the image of the invisible as something which stands behind the phenomenon. MDR 336 I am thinking here of the mandala, the circle, and the simplets (mental) division of the circle, the quadrant, or as the case may be, the cross. MDR 336
In particular, mandala symbolism shows a marked tendencey to concentrate all the archetypes on a common centre, comparable to the relationship of all layman unfamiliar with this symbolism is easily misled into thinking that the mandala is an artificial product of the conscious mind. Naturally mandalas can be imitated, but this does not prove that all mandalas are imitations. They are produced spontaneously, without external influence, even by children and adults who have never come into contact with any such ideas. One might perhaps regard the mandala as a reflection of the ego-centric nature of consciousness, though this view would be justified only if it could be proved that the unconscious is a secondary phenomenon. But the unconscious is undoubtedly older and more original than consciousness, and for this reason one could just as well call the egocentrism of consciousness a reflection or imitation of the "self"-centrism of the unconscious. MC 463
The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world, and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a unus mundus. The alchemical equivalent is the lapis and its synonyms, in particular the Microcosm. MC 463
All
of the descriptions, from the City of the Sun in the story of Alexander to
Thomas the Apostle’s sepulcher in the legend of Prester John, present a picture
of what is without question a mandala, a
symbol of the Self.
Significantly, in the legend of Alexander, the limitations of the young
world conqueror are pointed out to him each time he encounters the symbol.
TGL 108
In mandala symbolism generally, the sign or figure at the center of the quadrated circle is crucial, in every sense of the word. Like the hub of a turning wheel, it is at the point where opposites come together: East and West, North and South, right and left, up and down; also, motion and rest, time and eternity; as in the words of T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton”:
Unless everything deceives us, they signify nothing less than a psychic centre of the personality not to be identified with the ego. P&A 98
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
Such experiences have a helpful or, it
may be, annihilating effect upon man.
He cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them man, daimon, or God. Science employs the term “the unconscious,” thus admitting that it knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the psyche. MDR 336
Therefore the validity of such
terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed.
The true mandala is always an inner image, which is gradually built up through (active) imagination, at such times when psychic equilibrium is disturbed or when a thought cannot be found and must be sought for, because it is not contained in holy doctrine. P&A 96
Experience shows that individual mandalas are symbols of order, and that they occur in patients principally during times of psychic disorientation or re-orientation. As magic circles they bind and subdue the lawless powers belonging to the world of darkness, and depict or create an order that transforms the chaos into a cosmos. AION 32
… mandala structures have the
meaning and function of a centre of the unconscious personality. Aion 204
The term Mandala with us has
taken on an importance which it does not possess in
The circle of knights around Arthur mirrors the symbol of
the Self as it was manifested in the first half of the Christian age, an
image in which the light, spiritual, masculine aspect of
Logos predominated
one-sidedly and whose vital expansion served the civilizing purpose of
overcoming pagan and animal primitivity.