I drew this mandala in response to a dream that I had which I interpreted as coming from my animus (the masculine aspect of Self). Thinking about this dream, I knew that it was not just about about my fear and mistrust of masculine energy. It gave me a way that I might develop a more balanced perspective on maleness so that I do not feel that I need protect myself from it. At the same time, I've been reading a couple of books that illustrated the extraordinary clarity of thought, ethical and spiritual conviction and courage that can be part of being and thinking male.
The male-female opposition is just one manifestation of our paradigmatic separation of spirit and matter. For in separating these in our thinking, and according to our dominant paradigms, dismissing the reality of spirit altogether, we have blinded ourselves to the fundamental basis of all being, all experience and all apparent oppositions: the knowing that everything is spirit, and that spirit contains everything.
Yet beneath our concepts of separateness and our earthly experience of opposites - of light and dark, conscious and unconscious mind, male and female, spirit and matter - is a ubiquitous Luminous Radiance, the primary essence. We cannot see it or understand it, but something in us knows that it from that radiance that we and all that we know and can imagine spring. It is the darkness in which all light exists and all known light has its source.
I took my title for this mandala, "Luminous Radiance of the Divine Night", from a wonderful little book on the thought of Henry Corbin, called Green Man, Nature Angel.
The two half coloured faces, male and female, represent them as oppositions between the light side of consciousness and the dark side wherein lies the anima or animus. I have represented them as manifestations of the much deeper Self, the fundamental Spirit Self which in neither male nor female, this or that, and Knows itself One with the All. The pale blue outlines I have used to depict the spiritual realty seem seem to suggest emptiness, but actually represent inexpressible fullness, symbolised by the blackness of unknowability.
Yet out of this unknowable fullness that can sometimes be partially experienced comes everything, represented by the outpouring of energy, colour, vibration. At the top of the mandala is a suggestion of ocean, representing the mysteries of reality represented in Nature, symbolized by the sea. A few barely discernible birds represent the continual messages and guidance that comes to us in hunches, dreams, intuition etc, but that, like the birds, are hardly noticed.
Comments