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gaian carols
October 2009 
The Mandala
Posted on May 16th, 2009
by 
Gien
Gien
From Wikipaedia:
Mandalas are commonly used by tantric Buddhists as an aid to meditation. More specifically, a Buddhist mandala is envisaged as a "sacred space," a Pure Buddha Realm and also as an abode of fully realised beings or deities.
While on the one hand, it is regarded as a place separated and protected from the ever-changing and impure outer world of and is thus seen as a Buddhafield or a place of Nirvana and peace, the view of Vajrayana Buddhism sees the greatest protection from samsara being the power to see samsaric confusion as the "shadow" of purity (which then points towards it).
By visualizing purelands, one learns to understand experience itself as pure, and the abode of enlightenment. The protection we need, in this view, is from our own minds, as much as from external sources of confusion.
In Practice,
at first, as one meditates and performs the Mandala offering, offering the entire universe to the Buddhas, it is symbolic. However, with practice the symbolism begins to diffuse through a process of osmosis into one's mundane life.
One begins to shift into the "frameless" paradigm, in which there is no conceptual framework at all. One begins to experience one's reality as the LITERAL mandala. Both inner and outer appearances are merely aspects of the mandala.
While to the new student, the mandala makes its first appearance as symbolic and an artificial tool for mediation, it begins to transform and in time, it is seen that the mundane life was full of artifice and the mandala view pure. In retrospect, we will see that the mandala helps us to remove the obscurations of the mundane life that we never even suspected.
Indeed, when the mandala principle spreads out from our meditation cushion into our nonmeditative experience of reality and appearances are felt and experienced as miraculous and all living beings as deities, only then can we practice genuine compassion.
Mandalas are commonly used by tantric Buddhists as an aid to meditation. More specifically, a Buddhist mandala is envisaged as a "sacred space," a Pure Buddha Realm and also as an abode of fully realised beings or deities.
While on the one hand, it is regarded as a place separated and protected from the ever-changing and impure outer world of and is thus seen as a Buddhafield or a place of Nirvana and peace, the view of Vajrayana Buddhism sees the greatest protection from samsara being the power to see samsaric confusion as the "shadow" of purity (which then points towards it).
By visualizing purelands, one learns to understand experience itself as pure, and the abode of enlightenment. The protection we need, in this view, is from our own minds, as much as from external sources of confusion.
In Practice,
at first, as one meditates and performs the Mandala offering, offering the entire universe to the Buddhas, it is symbolic. However, with practice the symbolism begins to diffuse through a process of osmosis into one's mundane life.
One begins to shift into the "frameless" paradigm, in which there is no conceptual framework at all. One begins to experience one's reality as the LITERAL mandala. Both inner and outer appearances are merely aspects of the mandala.
While to the new student, the mandala makes its first appearance as symbolic and an artificial tool for mediation, it begins to transform and in time, it is seen that the mundane life was full of artifice and the mandala view pure. In retrospect, we will see that the mandala helps us to remove the obscurations of the mundane life that we never even suspected.
Indeed, when the mandala principle spreads out from our meditation cushion into our nonmeditative experience of reality and appearances are felt and experienced as miraculous and all living beings as deities, only then can we practice genuine compassion.
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painting mamdalas is a good task to sort out things thanks for sending
sounds a bit like
meta morph asis
(which to me)
is the
trans
of formation…
assisting us in the movment from form to formless…
Thank you for posting this, Gien. When you mentioned mandalas to me yesterday and I asked if you had written about it; I began to get so much information about them!
That we each have a mandala that is within us but is also a world - or matrix, or dimensions or labyrinthine space - that we travel in. That for the mandala to be complete, requires the awareness or movement [?] or all beings on earth, sentient and insentient.
After you mentioned that to me, three others have mentioned 'mandala'! So I am traveling the mandala now. Thank you for starting this blessing!
Pondering yr words johanna!
from form to formless…
the mandala is also often seen these days as an orb…in photographs…
our mandalas are created with the energy of our chakras, that fold into each other when we move out of the matter form…
these orbs, or mandalas of life, contain our individuated consciousness, and take the shapes and forms of our life signatures, In our sangha, we have photos of our teacher with his gigantic manadala above his head, with his own face showing in its center…
I have photos of floating orb mandalas with om signs in their centers…rainbow colored ones, many going from form…to formless accroding to their samscaras…
many indigenous peoples refer to “god” or “consciousness;' their “creator” as a “ball of light” … again, an orb/ or mandala…
the zero not zero…the no mind space…this, is represented by the zero..another mandala… of complete emptiness
we live in a dot matrix…a world of mandalas…
taking us all from form to formless…
What about playing scrabble as a game of Love.
Don't we come up with a kinda mandala
of Love
in the end ?
words.
=
images.
Are you game ?
Let's share our scrabbled poems !
Zulu quest killed sheer unrest.
Ox, fire up poodle love !
Ah! boxing dove !
Aum nama Buddha
OM Nama lOvemOb
Orb Of Ohm
OOOh
tO “be” this zerO