What Are Mandalas?
Mandalas: Coming of Age
Some fifty years ago, using the Sanskrit word ‘mandala’ was met with a question-mark-stare and the occasional “weirdo” brow motion. In the current global culture, mandalas are now well known to be visual art forms modeled after a circular geometry, with a spiritual, shamanistic, healing or cognitive purpose. Mandalas are traditionally presented as static 2D designs engaging the visualization and imagination of the on-lookers. Well known examples are: Tibetan & Indian Mandalas, Navajo Sand Paintings, Rose Windows… They can also be dynamic 3D constructs inviting a full body immersion such as Medicine Wheels, Stone Circles or Labyrinths…
Mandalas nowadays are globally understood as primordial, centripetal (pointing to a center), guidingmaps & technologies describing steps or approaches to a journey from question to answer, from ignorance to understanding, from confusion & un-ease to healing & wisdom, from fragmentation to wholeness… They are seen as instruments of scale-invariant integration and unification, from personal to universal and from nano-scopic to macro-cosmic. Mandalas have come of age.
Mandalas: Vortices of Creation
However, Mandalas are much more than the engaging art forms & rituals from around the world that we are rediscovering for fun, spiritual questing, inner balance or scientific enquiry. At the Academy for Mandala Arts, we adopt and promulgate a vaster definition of “mandalas” as the essence of creation and the existential act of being. We say that a Mandala is modeling the process of cosmic creation.
Essentially understood, a Mandala is the process of moving in and out of a center – which applies to any current of energy or flow of consciousness circling or spiraling in, around and out of a bindu-center, both as an origin and a destination. A vortex (with its famous eye looking back at you) is the quintessential mandala.
A Mandala is no longer an object framed in the separate space of observation – with the triggered conclusion: I like or I dislike, I love or I kill. A mandala is the cosmic flowering: the merry go-round-the-vortex; the come-and-go cycle about a center, Point of Origin & Source as well as final Goal & Home. A Mandala is how the cosmic spring constantly powers the universe towards new blossoming. The cosmic arrow of Self boomerangs to Itself. A Mandala is the closest metaphor for BEING.
Mandala is a verb, the act of creation and the act of offering it. The Verb Mandala can be conjugated – follow after me: we are Mandala, you are Mandala… The universe is Mandala. All of nature & biology are mandalic, as the sacred geometry of optimum Golden Ratio balance, for win-win fusion. The eye and physiology of human vision are mandalic. Life itself is the mandala of all life-times: entering the 3D vortical mandala of human life and, at death, exiting it, from the same center, the same form-less nudity. So is the breath: the first in-breath of the baby and the last out-breath upon “expiring” – in between is the daily inscription of the mandala for a unique person with a name, skin color and many more (but ephemerous) descriptives. The real universal descriptive of a life-time is how harmonically spiraling its trajectory has been – how blissfully and compassionately the river stayed on course to meet the Ocean… How the release at origin took fancy flight and yet retained its memory. How exactly the point of departure emerged within the arrival point…
How much of a Mandala are you? A mandala is about Cosmic Oneness and the Return Home, on the wings of a spiral…
For further insights about mandalas, see free download of PDF book
The StarWheel Vision: Documents. Available on AyaLove.Earth