The Living Mirror
A Meditation on Mandalas
“Know the world from end to end is a mirror;
in each atom a hundred suns are concealed.
If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water,
from it will flow a hundred clear oceans;
if you look intently at each speck of dust,
in it you will see a thousand beings.”
-Mahmud Shabistari
Mandalas are more than flat images. They are windows to gaze into the heart of the world. Mandalas are psychoactive catalysts that open gateways of perception. They elicit a wider, more coherent and spacious awareness.
Usually, we look but we don’t see. We perceive without engagement. We don’t fully register what we are seeing. The world appears flat and often with no sense or structure or meaning.
Perception is an art form. It is a discipline and a practice. The world appears random and meaningless because of the complexity of its patterns. Implicate patterns are so pervasive that they appear like nothing at all, so vast they seem incomprehensible. But pattern gazing is one way to experience a deeper perspective. This is essential medicine for a time of meaninglessness, incoherence and distractions.
A natural order is always present, just more subtle, more integral, more integrated than our most of our perceptions. When the underlayment come into the foreground, what was implicit becomes explicit and we get a glimpse of a deeper pattern.
When patterns are expressed coherently, they expand consciousness, as all our ancestors knew. Our ancestors drew mythopoeic blueprints. They knew patterns as a technology. They engaged in pattern-making through sound and movement and image. Our ancestors created patterns to enter into deeper states of consciousness. This is a psychotechnology of all original cultures.
Our ancestors engaged with the patterns of nature as a devotional practice. They observed the directions, the seasons, the movements of constellations across the night sky. The human bodypsyche is patterned on nature already. The patterns of creation are the ancient blueprints that are our actual inheritance. When we engage with the patterns around us we awaken their essential medicines. Pattern making is also a technology of the present and future generations. We are the cause and effect of living patterns in action.
Design designs itself, as sound design instruments and light designs leaves. The landscape shapes the bodies of its inhabitants and consciousness is the architect of dreams.* When we return to the simplest structures, the foundations upon which everything else rests, form and function are the same thing. Constructed by the same architect. They are reciprocating currents of call and response like theory and practice.
What is revealed in a mandala is an imago mundi, an image of the world, a basic pattern of nature. It’s not an identity, ideology or concept. It is an expression of the form of form itself, an originating principle of pattern and process.
Pattern gazing is a practice of deep seeing, paying exquisite attention to the senses. This is a practice for expanded awareness. It may last an instant or many, many sittings but when you participate in the art of attention-giving, you may receive more than you give.
How can we perceive more deeply? The question itself is the practice. It brings the bodymind into inquisitive focus. Realizing the limitations of what we can perceive in comparison with the enormity of consciousness, eventually we ask the mysteries themselves to teach us. We try to look again and again, bringing more exquisite attention to the patterns and processes that constitute everyday awareness.
‘To look and look again’ is the original meaning of the word respect, from the Latin 'respectere'. To respect something is to see it again, in a different way. To constantly observe without assumption or judgement. We will never see everything in its original nature. We only see a tiny fraction of what is. The rest is filled in by imagination and projection. Whatever we see, regardless of what the eyes perceive, is mostly emptiness and at least partially illusion.
To respect is to look and look again at even the smallest things. Can we give this same kind of attention to the ones we love? To look and look again. Let everything exist beyond the image we hold of it. Give every object of attention the freedom to shapeshift and transform beyond the image we hold of it.
Let every phenomenon arise and fall and become something different from one moment to the next. Let the objects you see be as fluid as attention itself is. Look into and beyond the current form of whatever you are perceiving so that the construct dissolves and becomes diaphanous.* Do not look at images, look through them at the underlying patterns and process. Look, as Jean Gebser suggests through ‘diaphanous structures of consciousness’*
Try gazing at a mandala from the center of your being. Don’t just see it through your eyes. Don’t just hold it in the mind. Look through the body. Look from the eyes of your heart. See it from your bones. See it from the depths of consciousness.
To practice the contemplation of images is to study contemplation itself. Notice how the quality of attention shifts from one moment to the next. At times it seems that where the eye goes, the mind follows. At other times, it seems that where the eye goes, the mind already is. Experience the continuum between awareness and consciousness. The space in which awareness happens expands and contracts like breath.
What we percieve depends on the quality of consciousness, the screen on which we cast our perceptions. The undulating space of awareness, the surface on which the poetic image sits. Let the undulating space become voluminous. Let it have breadth and depth. An infinite sky, a wider body, a luminous and expansive breath.
Try to look into instead of looking at the image, Let your thoughts soften. Let the eyes relax. Look and look again. How deep does your gaze extend? Can it go deeper than that? What is the purpose of this looking? To open the gateways of consciousness. To rest in the silence of the present. To enter a trance state. To resurrect wild awareness as thoughts dissolve into non-conceptual patterns.
Look inward and outward simultaneously. Stretch your perception across space and time. See if you can extend the space of awareness, the depth of field into a wider context. See if you can look across space and across time, observing processes within processes, patterns within patterns.
Gazing into a mandala, each moment, you may perceive something different. The patterns stir and shift. Even a still image is always moving. The mandala brings us into its depths and centers us again and again so that we can maintain concentration in the swirling, ever changing terrain that we exist within.
What we are looking at, we are really looking into. As you open the gates of perception, they also open to you. There is no separation between observer and observed. The gesture of looking into the world is infinitely reflected back so what you see is a mirror and simultaneously a glimpse into the depths of the cosmos. The boundary between self and world becomes porous and attention is drawn into the center, where a mystery continuously unfolds.
The binary between perceiver and perception dissolves. There is sight in all directions. There is no backwards or forwards, inwards or outwards. There is only luminous awareness. Like a transparent eye that sees itself, a mirror that melts into its own reflection, a kaleidoscope that turns inward and spins luminous patterns beyond dimensions. Subject and object dissolve into ten thousand transparencies. Through them all, we can see one integral presence which has no source or center but is always, everywhere, endless and ongoing.
Credits:
The leading quote is excerpted from 13th century poem ‘The Secret Rose Garden’ written by sufi poet Mahmud Shabistari. trans. by Florence Lederer
The idea of implicate order comes from David Bohm.
The concept of diaphanous structures of consciousness is from Jean Gebser.
“the architect of dreams" echoes the line from Carl Jung's collected works: "The complex... is the architect of dreams and of symptoms."
The phrase ‘transparent eye-ball’ is from Ralph Waldo Emmerson.
“Living Mirror”
Made with: Filamentous Algae (Pithophora spp), Honey Locust thorns (Gleditsia triacanthos), Wild Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) aerial parts, Smooth Sumac leaves (Rhus glabra), Snow-on-the-mountain leaves (Euphorbia marginata), Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense), tattered Woodbine leaves (Parthenocissus inserta), Love-lies-bleeding leaves (Amaranthus caudatus), kaleidoscopic effect
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