Many / One

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Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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Mandala
Jose and Miriam Arguelles
Deals comprehensively with the mandala, as a universal principle, a vision, a way of growth, a ritual technique, and an essential life process.

1 "If man can mandalize himself, there will be a resulting deployment of now unused energies within his bio-organic structutre. It is these energies which will be most instrumental in creating a radiant – radiating from multiple centers – planetary sphere."

2 "In a world that is split, divided by the 'Civil War of Man', healing is needed to make whole. Mandala is a whole-ing technique; it is the alchemy of opposites reuniting, a blueprint that can be placed upon anything, or any man or being."

3 "In the Beginning was the Center: the center of the mind of God, the eternal Creator, the Dream of Brahman, the galaxies that swirl beyond the lenses of our great telescopes. In all of these the center is one, and in the center lies eternity."

4 "Since archetypes are what give form to the collective unconscious, awareness of the archetypes in everyday living is a means by which the elements of existence may acquire a more conscious structure. Situations exist for the purpose of our being able to center and create ourselves anew through them."

5 "All cycles of experience are interlinked and are the expression of one immutable law."

6 "Sorrow is only a transition between ignorance and illumination. Underlying even the basest acts and forms is the redeeming flow of an eternally self-transformative energy."

7 "The Vegetative [Living] Universe opens like a flower from the earth's center in which is Eternity." William Blake

8 "Though the principle of the center is One, the patterns, the swirls and eddies of form and process which are generated by and through the center are infinite; and though infinite in number, the centers are essentially one, for each is the same irreducible point, the primary syllable, the word, the Logos, through which all is uttered."

9 "The Mandala was developed as a reminder of the direct perception of reality."

10 "The center is the beginning of the Mandala as it is the beginning and origin of all form and of all processes, including the extensions of form into time."

11 "The center principle manifests itself through man in the same ways as it does through a flower or a star; in it we may discover our cosmic commonality – our cosmic community."

12 "The circle is the original sign, the prime symbol of the nothing and the all; the symbol of heaven and the solar eye, the all-encompassing form beyond and through which man finds and loses himself."

13 "The mandala is, above all, a map of the cosmos. It is the whole universe in its essential plan, in its process of emanation and of reabsorption…..the universe not only in its inert spatial expanse, but as temporal revolution and both as a vital process which develops from an essential principle and rotates round a central axis." G. Tucci

14 "Very gradually a global perspective is forming. Man's conscious activities must be seen in light of a larger ecological fabric and in relation to the biosphere, atmosphere, and other levels or layers which form the evolving matrix of the planet earth."

15 "If man has alienated himself from the source, the center within, then it is the purpose of a Mandala ritual for our time to be used as a primal tool for investigating and opening that center, once again granting the individual an identification with the cosmic forces and their source."

16 "Through contemplating his very form and the nature of his existence, man has often found a correspondence or series of correspondences to the workings of the cosmos as a whole – the macrocosm….If man conceives of himself as a microcosm, his way of life and community also take on the character of a cosmic order. Inherent in this idea is an intuition of the basic harmony of the universe and of man's desire to realize himself accordingly."

17 "The Mandala has appeared throughout man's history as a universal and essential symbol of integration, harmony, and transformation. It gives form to the most primordial intuition of the nature of reality, an intuition that inheres in each of us, giving us life."

18 "Laurette Sejourne speaks of the Law of the Center which 'prevents the splitting asunder of opposing forces.' Cycles, whether pertaining to life and death, space and time, visible and invisible forces, are held together in concentric patterns. Understanding the Law of the Center as a basic principle of nature, men have been able to construct vast systems, and to perceive various levels of order throughout the universe."

19 "Man is a transition, an agent of transformation as well as the material to be transformed. This transformative operation can occur only through the focusing power of some new symbol or image of the whole process in which man now finds himself involved. In its universality, the Mandala provides at least the base structure for such a symbol."

20 "The world and its inhabitants are integral facets of one Mandala."

21 "In the present struggle of the planet the mandala presents itself as the seed-symbol of a more harmonized world order….The vision of renewed wholeness and brotherhood slowly spreads and filters through the consciousness of the [human] race."

22 "The holistic perception of alchemy relates directly to the Mandala. Many alchemical charts take on a Mandala form in revealing the integral interrelationships between the elements and qualities of nature. Alchemy also defines the proceses of consciousness as an on-going state of integral awareness."

23 "This eternal NOW and the realization of one's center are coeval, simultaneous events."

24 "As a cosmogenic model, the Mandala is a synchronous, self-renewing whole."

25 "Could men see clearly – as the seers have always seen – experience would be apprehended as an organic whole, continually proceeding from and returning to the one source – the center of being."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite