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 "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."

2 "Feeling the impulse toward wholeness, man applies it to all that he does. It motivates his thoughts, permeates his activities, and resides in all that he constructs. In his dwellings, as in those of most of the 'primitive', pre-industrial world, there is a place, an altar, a fire, a stone that is the center, not only of the house or dwelling, but also of the entire cosmos…. We are dealing with what is essentially a SACRED principle, or a sacred state of consciousness in which all beings and all things are realized equally as emanations of One Divine Whole."

3 "Sacred living is rooted in the source of wholeness and spreads outward as the flower from the stem."

4 "To be integrated, to be made whole, means to be able to maintain contact with one's center."

5 "Each of us is an individualized being with a particular focalization and center of pure self-awareness; each of us is a creature of energy and light emanating our own creative field."

6 "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

7 "It is the vision of wholeness that heals and is self-healing."

8 "From whichever point a Mandala is entered, a path opens that leads to the eternal center."

9 "The center is the nameless, the most supreme, the oldest, yet is ever-present and continually pours forth its energy – it is self-renewing."

10 "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."

11 "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."

12 "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."

13 "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."

14 "Universally inherent in man's consciousness, the Mandala has continually appeared in his constructions, rituals and art forms."

15 "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."

16 "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."

17 "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."

18 "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."

19 "In one sense, all sacred religious structures partake of the Mandala principle: the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; the temples of India, Buddhist stupas; Islamic mosques; the pagodas of China and Japan; and the tipis and kivas of North America; in the churches and cathedrals of Christianity."

20 "Sacred consciousness, of which the Mandala is a structural model, conforms to the Hermetic statement, 'God is an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'"

21 "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."

22 "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."

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

24 "Polarities are but the two extremes perceptible to us of one and the same motion."

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

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite