The Cosmic Design
"Once you have traveled, the journey never ends, but repeats itself countless times in the quietest corners of the mind. The mind cannot separate itself from the journey." Pat Conroy
Photography Louise Damgaard
How many times, during our days, do we realize the truth of this sentence? Maybe we are carrying out a daily, repetitive activity that is not particularly exciting - not to mention: not particularly satisfying; or we find ourselves in those periods of life where everything seems to hinder us and not go well. In those situations, it often happens that the mind stops for a moment and recalls our memories of places or circumstances in which we were happy: they can be memories of trips we have taken, of things we have seen, of people we have come across. They are sensations of colors, sounds, shapes, and faces that seem to come out of nowhere but which we have actually seen and which still communicate joy, variety, and emotion. They also often lead us to sketch a small drawing on a piece of paper. They can also be images never contemplated with our physical senses, but which somehow remained within us from a dream or pure fantasy. After all: who among us has never imagined being in a place that we have never seen in person? So it happened that, in a silent corner of my mind, on a day like many others in January 2024, an emotion of warmth, color, and adventure was awakened thanks to the fortuitous encounter with a mandala, whose design was taking form on the market street of my city, and which in an instant transported me to memories of happy experiences. In fact, it could have resembled the mandalas that I had seen composed, in 1988, by the calm hands of Buddhist monks on the pavement of La Rambla in Barcelona; in a corner of the Piazza Grande in Bologna sung by Lucio Dalla; at Ile de France in 2016; hanging in one of the art galleries in Rome in 1997… To explain what it is to those who have never seen it, it can be said that a mandala is not just a drawing, but a real graphic composition, very colorful and precise to the millimeter. The term is Sanskrit and derives from manda (which means essence) and the suffix la, which means container. Literally, by combining the two words, it becomes "container of the essence."
Beyond the Sanskrit term, which identifies its origin in the Veda culture between the 8th and 12th centuries AD (and which later, according to Chiara Talé's writing "The Mandalas and the Visionary Journey of Jung," would be assimilated by Brahmanism and, through it, by the multiform philosophical-religious systems of Buddhism and Hinduism), the mandala is certainly a polysemous word which, therefore, has the property of expressing multiple meanings concerning not only the word, but also the image and the sound. With this, we mean, above all, to indicate a round-shaped object (or even a disk, like the stylized shapes of the Moon and the Sun in ancient universal culture), which is represented through a concentric geometric design, in which none of its spaces inside it is left empty of decoration and color. Much more banally, in Western countries, we know it above all as a creative tool in books with pre-printed drawings inside them, which leave empty spaces for the user to color. Something which, presented in this way, perhaps has more to do with a children's game than with a geometry considered sacred by the cultures of Tibet, India, China, and Japan. But beyond the playful function (however, very important!) that it may have, this design has been handed down over the centuries thanks to its sacred and spiritual function, capable of reconnecting the human being with the universe. To better understand the sacred dimension of the mandala, we can, for example, describe the vision of it by Buddhist populations: for them, it represents an imaginary temple that contains within itself the birth and contemplation of the Whole, of the Cosmos, of all that is. Whoever finds himself composing this figure (but also whoever observes it carefully and lets himself be transported by it), internalizes this image to the core, and by doing this can reach a mental state in which he is free from the constraints of materialism. By reaching that point of being, it then becomes easier to direct one's actions towards good.
Photo by Mirko Bozzato on Pixabay
There are several techniques through which a mandala can be created: on canvas through painting, on a rigid or paper base, by drawing and coloring with pastels or chalk; but these are all forms that succeeded the ancient ones, which have more to do with creativity and less with spiritual meaning. In the Buddhist tradition, in fact, monks created sand mandalas of different colors. It is clear how a work created with sand has, by its nature, a particularly ephemeral character: this indicates how, in the universe, everything has the character of impermanence, of continuous change. In fact, the Tibetan Monks, after weeks or months of precise work, destroy a mandala once they have finished. They thus represent the transience of earthly life. The importance of the concept of "here and now" is recalled here: a notion of time that highlights the importance of the present moment, of living focused on the present. The analogy with travel is clear: the journey of life, which is made up of many smaller journeys within it, is based on the beauty of living the present moment. By living in this way, the experiences that constitute our journey are imprinted in our mind (and in our unconscious). And which can recall shapes, colors, scents, or sounds to our senses such as to bring us back into harmony with everything that exists, in moments of difficulty or internal imbalance. For these reasons, mandalas are considered in contemporary society (including Western) a powerful tool that helps us put aside worries, directing our attitude to focus on the present: they instill a feeling of peace and serenity, leading us to rediscover a state of well-being mental thanks to the manual and artistic activity they involve; through the construction of these complex graphic compositions and the necessary attention to detail that must be paid, the ideas are left free to flow. But how is a mandala created? The rigid ancient oriental rules of the 12th century say that it must be built starting from a central design, which is then developed outwards and concentrically. Therefore, each time it would be like starting from a center that expands outwards, but in an increasingly wider manner until it fills the entire perimeter circle that contains it. This direction would seem to favor openness towards the world and, at the same time, self-knowledge. The symbolism, the parallelism, between "representation of the Cosmos" and "representation of the individual Self" is clear here: the human being is inserted into the Whole and is connected to it; one's Self becomes the microcosm forming part of the macrocosm and, beyond identification, everything becomes Unity. And here's what happens: the mandala is a representation of our inner world, which according to the Tibetan technique that uses sand, takes shape grain after grain. In the mandala, the important thing is that there are no empty, uncolored spaces left; but what are the colors always used, since tradition? Scholars have highlighted the presence of red (which represents energy, life force but also anger and aggression); yellow (which represents warmth, joy, conviviality but also wisdom); black (which represents the moment of reflection but also negative energies of internal blockage or protest); blue (tranquility and introspection); green (fertility of life because it is linked to nature, calm and natural rhythm); orange (youth, growth, change and creativity); pink (the childish aspect that is in each of us, femininity and acceptance); purple (the color of mystery and spirit); and finally white (which represents mental clarity, freedom and peace). The placement of color follows rules and patterns that are lost in the mists of time, also because it is very linked to the local practical opportunities of the time: the diversity of color shades or their replacement depended on local cultural factors or, even more often, by practical needs in their availability. At the time, given the lack of accessible communication routes in such a vast territory as Asia, it became very difficult to find the pigments to create the colors; given this difficulty, local raw materials were therefore used and further shades or even different colors were created. In any case, the overall meaning of a mandala certainly did not change as the colors changed: it was and still is an object of meditation that promotes one's spiritual development, meditation and prayer; its symbols represented one's spiritual journey, the cycles of birth-life-death, and the connection of all beings, then and now. The action of the creative moment in the construction of a mandala or in coloring it was and is considered directed by the unconscious, which leaves the self free to express itself and relocate itself in the microcosm (helping us strengthen our integrity) and in the macrocosm (reconnecting us with Nature and the Universe). Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (1875-1961), was particularly aware of all this and had noticed how - during periods of psychic tension - figures similar to mandalas can appear spontaneously in dreams, as a sort of “map” that helps the person rediscover their own internal order. According to Jung (who was the first to give a psychological reading of the mandala, and to establish parallels with the architecture of some elements of Christian churches such as rose windows), the mandala expresses the ability to reorder and reconcile all the elements opposed to each other which, being excluded from the conscious mind, become unconscious and therefore unknown to the individual. But which, as we know today, have a universal way of manifesting themselves independently of our conscious will. From his studies, it can be seen that a mandala is not just a drawing: it is the ancestral graphic representation of the energetic models in which our self is immersed. This universal meaning, according to Jung, can also explain the reason why we find the same figure even in cultural traditions so different from the Eastern ones, such as the Christian-Catholic, Celtic, and South American ones. The mandala is the "design of the Universe" and therefore concerns all of us. Taken from the war diaries of Carl Gustav Jung (he was a collaborator of the anti-Nazi secret services during the Second World War): "Every morning I sketched in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my intimate condition of that period. With the help of these drawings, I could observe my psychic transformations day by day. Only little by little did I discover what the mandala really is: formation, transformation of the eternal mind, eternal recreation and this is the self, the personality in its entirety."
