Mandala of Love

René Descartes’ Error

This Post 6 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.

In a previous article (here), I spoke about Plato’s advice that we know the truth by drawing our attention back into an identification with Consciousness (the ‘Plato’s Cave’ allegory). When we exercise this freedom to direct not just the placement of our attention, but the placement of our identification, the initial effect may be undramatic. This shift may at first seem to change nothing in the content of our experience, but as we look deeper we are usually delighted and amazed.

And if we continue to experiment so that we learn to sustain this shift from our egoic preoccupation with the objects of Consciousness, and start to cultivate the habit of resting as Consciousness, everything changes. To be able to recognise Consciousness as ourselves, and know its qualities as our own, even just for short moments, is the ultimate freedom.

The greater our receptivity in meditation, as we allow ourselves to expand into the imperturbable and equanimous quality of the field of Consciousness, the quieter the thinking function of the mind becomes. And the quieter the thinking function of the mind becomes, the deeper is our experience of Being. Also, as we practice this regularly, we begin to break our habitual identification with our thoughts, recognising that they are only points of view, and points of view that inherently lack objectivity. Paradoxically, it is precisely through our recognition that thoughts can only ever be points of view and therefore have an inherent tendency to lack objectivity, that the capacity for objectivity arises.

“I think, therefore I am”

The 17th Century French philosopher, René Descartes, famously stated ‘I think, therefore I am’. His words reflect a Western world that was starting to abandon the certainties of religious belief. While this intellectual process that he was part of (le Siècle des Lumières – ‘the Enlighmentment’) was in many respects necessary, it also left the Western world in a state of moral disorientation, with only the intellect for guidance – and global culture has been dominated by that dangerous moral malaise to this day. Continue reading

May 2, 2017

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Archetypes

This is Post 4 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist, and he started his professional life working in large psychiatric institutions. He was a student of the neurologist Sigmund Freud who was developing his psychoanalytic method of treatment at that time. Jung had a close friendship with Freud, but his voracious appetite for understanding lead him to his own distinctive style of psychological thinking, which is of great importance for the modern world. His Analytical Psychology was distinguished two powerful concepts: the archetypes; and the collective unconscious.

Because of his pragmatism and alignment with the emerging scientific materialism in medicine, Freud’s more reductive approach was subsequently more widely adopted during the 20th Century. Jung was altogether more ambitious. It is as if he was writing for the 21st Century – and specifically setting himself against both the scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism of the 20th Century. His perspective was, I believe, aiming to be much more comprehensive and – despite his careful efforts to avoid metaphysical speculation – more spiritual.

Jung the Scientist of the Inner World

While Jung was in some ways actually more rigorously scientific and forward looking than Freud, he was also looking back to the roots of psychology in the literature, mythology and psychological reflections of the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. His archetypes can be thought of as the eternal principles at work in human psychology, and also as the collective psychological forces at work in nations and human groups – forces that the ancients projected onto their gods. Continue reading

April 28, 2017

Objectivity – Meditation and Thinking

This is Post 5 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Meditation grounded in self-enquiry, of the sort I have been speaking about, is enormously supportive to the thinking function of the mind. Creativity requires thought, and high-level creativity requires high-level thinking. Collaborative thinking especially requires the capacity to think clearly and the capacity to express our thoughts with accuracy and integrity – but all these things spring from the illusive mental quality that we call objectivity.

Objectivity is illusive because it is a function of our relationship to Consciousness. We can choose to embrace objectivity as a value, and can train ourselves to some extent in the discipline of objective thinking, but this requires a systematic study of thought, language and logic, in the context of a study of Philosophy; and ideally a broad study of Thought itself. Only the very best high schools teach thinking (especially in France, I believe), but most do not, so this training is usually only available in the context of higher education institutions – but most of these are increasingly focused on vocational training for industry and commerce. Any training in objectivity will in any case be limited however, unless it is developed with reference to Consciousness, since Consciousness is the only objective observer.

Consciousness is Non-Computational

#Consciousness #Meditation — This image will post to social media if you choose to share this post.

To better grasp the distinctive and extraordinary thinking capabilities of human beings, it is helpful to compare human thinking with that of the logical processing of a computer, and to recognise how profoundly different it is. A computer can never develop the attitude that we call objectivity however powerful it may be – and it certainly cannot develop Consciousness. It can process logically, and even ‘learn’ by accumulating vast amounts of data according to its human programmers intentions, but it is incapable of reflecting on what it is doing. Because a computer cannot consciously observe its own thought processes in the way a human being can, it can never develop the sort of objectivity, or the sort of depth of understanding, that is so characteristic of high-level human reasoning. Continue reading

April 25, 2017

Non-Duality – Buddha, Jesus, and Plato

This is Post 4 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The unity of Consciousness and that which arises in Consciousness, is often spoken of in terms of non-duality or oneness, but what we actually experience in the self-inquiry experience, might better be characterised as a relational unity. Each of the great spiritual teachers have found different ways of pointing to this fundamental unity or oneness. When Jesus said “I and the Father are One” he was expressing this truth in the context of Jewish tradition. Similarly, the Buddha challenged us to notice that the conventionally assumed atman or soul in Hindu tradition cannot be located, and is actually ‘empty’ of self-nature. Now Quantum Physics is pointing to the same fundamentally unitary reality in which everything arises.

There is great practical psychological value for each one of us in trying to find our own experiential way into the actual perceptual reality behind these confusing and challenging ideas. For me, the core idea experientially behind these teachings, is that we are invited to acknowledge Consciousness – that which is generally overlooked in the perceptual process – and are invited to notice the ethical and relational qualities that are inherent in Consciousness, and to recognise that our assumed state of absolute separateness is a superficial phenomena – one that is denied, or at least relativised, by our more fundamental unity and connectedness on the level of Consciousness.

Plato’s Cave – an Allegorical Description of Consciousness

The unconscious and habitual tendency, which characterises ordinary egoic awareness, is such that we fail to acknowledge Consciousness. All our senses are directed almost exclusively towards objects. In regard to our sense of sight for example, we look ‘forward’ – with our attention solely on the object of our awareness – and do not acknowledge the Consciousness that is ‘seeing’. When we look forward in this way (without reference to what is looking) our perception is always limited and – paradoxically – can accurately be described as ’subjective’.

It is only when we allow ourselves to draw back and include Consciousness in our experiencing, that we become capable of perceiving reality as it is – that is, objectively. This way of experiencing, where we draw our attention back into the observing Consciousness, so as to include, or even give primacy to, the observing Consciousness in the perceptual relationship, is what the Buddhist tradition has come to refer to as Mindfulness. Continue reading

April 24, 2017

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) – Mandala Wisdom

This article was written to present a very brief explanation of my passionate conviction about the little known connection between Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC) model and the mandala model of mind and mental functioning that we find in Buddhist tradition. It is the first post in a series of articles on the closely related themes of Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘NVC’; and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ (a self-empathy/self-enquiry model) – and which can be found under ‘NVC/Focusing’ in the top menu.

I have also incorporated reflections on these themes into several of the articles in the introductory series on meditation and self-enquiry (under ‘Meditation’ above) – and in the other categories also. Summaries of those NVC/Focusing-related articles in other categories are available here.

One of my greatest inspirations has been the work of the late Marshall Rosenberg (October 6, 1934 – February 7, 2015), who wrote Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg, and the world-wide community of students who have worked with him, have created an inspiring communication skills and self-awareness model that is deeper and more challenging than anything comparable. Marshall trained as a clinical psychologist, but worked outside the medical and academic mainstream. In using the term Nonviolent Communication (NVC for short) as the name of his model, he was consciously identifying himself with the intellectual tradition and with the struggles for social justice through nonviolent direct action, of Dr Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.

Another Spontaneous Expression of the Universal Mandala-Wisdom

From my point of view, as a student of Consciousness and archetypal psychology, what makes NVC so interesting, is its obvious similarity with the mandala-wisdom that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, in Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology, in the Native North American ‘medicine wheel’ traditions, in the four ‘elements’ of Western Astrology, and in numerous other places. It is of the nature of the mandala archetype, that the same wisdom appears in many different cultural forms that have evolved entirely independently of each other. It seems that wherever, and whenever, individuals are seeking spiritual truth, we frequently see the emergence of this mandala-form wisdom, and in my view Marshall Rosenberg and the NVC tradition have made a profound and very practical contribution to that body of wisdom-knowledge.

April 22, 2017

The Cross and the Mandala

This is Post 3 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

The Mandala is an archetype – a universal symbol or pattern. Images that reflect this archetypal pattern are found in all cultures throughout history, and in the dreams and visions of humanity since the beginning of recorded history. For Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, the mandala was a symbol of the wholeness of the psyche and of the cosmos – even a symbol of God. The Cross, the symbol of Christianity, is the most prominent example of a mandala image in world history. For Jung, the life of Jesus was a profound spiritual mystery – one that preoccupied him for the whole of his life. For him, Jesus was a man who lived a mythic life; and the crucifixion of Jesus was, for Jung, both an historical event and a mythic mandala image. It was one of the most important parts of his life’s work, that humanity should better understand this great symbol. Indeed, he found the lack of understanding of that symbol, and of the person of Jesus, to be both tragic and dangerous for the future of humanity.

Carl Jung’s Mandala Archetype

Carl Jung passionately wanted to bring about a healing and a renewal of Christianity, so that it could meet the modern world with a new wisdom and integrity. His search for understanding of the mandala archetype played a key part in that quest. To understand the depth of Jung’s passion in this regard, it is important to understand that he was the son of a protestant pastor, and that he had witnessed, in the course of his childhood, his father’s loss of faith, a painful experience whose impact never left him. He was also painfully conscious by the end of his life that Christianity had failed to prevent a bloody revolution in Russia, two horrific world wars, the rise of modern fascism, the Holocaust, and the nuclear arms race of the cold war era. Continue reading

April 21, 2017

Introduction to the Mandala of Love book blog

This is Post 2 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

I am disturbed by what I see in the world. Even as I am personally seeking to orient myself to that which is eternal and satisfactory, I am keenly aware of the suffering that we are collectively creating for ourselves on this planet. While I hear others expressing wilful optimism, I cannot help but see a world in the grip of a frightening unconsciousness, and making deeply unsustainable choices that will lead to misery. Our world appears to be caught between, on one side, a postmodern world-view that rejects as ideology, the notions of social progress, objective reality, morality, truth and reason (following, it would seem, Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum – “there is no truth, only interpretations’), leading to various forms of nihilism and narcissism; and, on the other side, fierce amoral world-shaping ideologies such as neoliberalism and religious extremism.

There is however, in the 21st Century, an emerging community of people throughout the world, who are seeking a new ethical basis for humanity; who would wish to seek out and establish a post-postmodern foundation for ethics and social justice. They seek a movement forward culturally and spiritually – one which specifically avoids merely retreating back to either conventional religious belief or the limitations of a merely humanistic moral philosophy. These are the creative and reflective people that will be interested in the content available on this website, where I hope to present understandings and practices that support a grounded spirituality that is deeply ethical because it is rooted in the experiential study of Consciousness. Continue reading

April 20, 2017

The Content of the Mind is Not Important

This is Post 3 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The title of this article ‘The Content of the Mind is Not Important’ is intentionally somewhat provocative and paradoxical, especially for most meditators because, of course, most meditation practitioners have the explicit or implicit primary goal of becoming more mentally clear, or more emotionally positive, or more focused, or more effective in some way.

While I could guarantee that those results will naturally flow from this approach to meditation, I want to emphasise from the start that these results are not the primary focus of the practice. This is because the practice does not aim merely to change the contents of the mind by a sustained effort of will – but is focused instead on Consciousness itself. When, through self-enquiry, we become deeply familiar with Consciousness and start to fully recognise it, and familiarise ourselves with its nature, the wished for changes to the personal content of the mind will inevitably follow.

April 19, 2017

Preface to ‘Mandala of Love: Consciousness, Ethics and Society’

This article was written as the first article, and as the Preface to a series of articles, that were written as chapters for a book project, which I provisionally called ‘Mandala of Love: Consciousness, Ethics and Society’. The plan to write and publish a book, soon evolved into the idea of publishing on this ‘Mandala of Love’ website. Essentially, the subject of the book was the four-fold nature of mind; the four-fold nature of the Divine; the four-fold nature of a comprehensive ethical sensibility; and the four-fold nature of creativity – themes that have fascinated me since my twenties. At that time I was living and working in Triratna Buddhist Order communities, and as a result of the very broad and rich cultural and religious education that I was receiving, I fell in love with the work of the visionary English poet William Blake. Blake had his own very profound understanding of the four-fold nature of the Divine – one which in some ways mirrors that found in the Buddhist tradition and in other spiritual traditions down through history.

In my twenties, when I was a passionate full-time student of Buddhism and living and working in a Buddhist community, I was surprised, one day in my meditation, by a strong visionary experience of the energetic presence of Jesus – Blake’s Jesus. I experienced him as a purifying light descending from heaven. This ecstatic and visionary meditative state was evoked not by any devotional form of words from Buddhist tradition, but by a single recitation of William Blake’s words: “Jesus, the Imagination, the forgiver of Sins” that just burst out of me in a spirit of devotion and petitionary prayer. As a Buddhist, I also recognised this pure-white descending light as the energy of Vajrasattva [more on him here], and the cross-cultural ambiguity of this religious experience was one of several around that time that taught me about the universality of the ultimate spiritual reality. It was revealed to me that the ultimate nature of the divine is beyond any culture or religion, and that every genuine religious or spiritual cultural form may be seen as attempting to approach, and surrender to, the same transcendental reality – though clearly some religious cultures are more effective in that approach than others.

One of Blake’s better known poems is ‘Jerusalem’, which is copied below. Blake wrote it as a preface to one of his longer poetic works. Because I resonate so strongly with so many of the themes of Blake’s poetry, and perhaps because I aspire to follow in his footsteps in some modest way, I would like to use it as a preface to these reflections.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green.
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire;
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

by William Blake (1757 − 1827) – part of a preface to his epic poem: Milton (written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810)

William Blake was a dissenting voice in a world that was in the throes of early capitalism – industrialisation, colonialism, scientific materialism, the privatisation of the commons, and the horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade. He despaired of Christianity’s failure to provide a voice for spiritual truth and social justice in that world. His poems are a call to a humanitarian vision rooted in a spiritual view of man. The ‘Jerusalem’ of this particular poem is a symbolic city – the symbol of a just and sustainable society in Blake’s imaginal world. Continue reading

April 17, 2017

Self-Enquiry – Familiarising ourselves with Consciousness

This is Post 2 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Our mental functioning is multidimensional, so there are many perspectives on the mind within Psychology. Hence, there are dozens of ways of conceptualising what meditation is, and because the mind is malleable, and very much subject to our various beliefs about its nature, all the various techniques and methods may appear to work to some extent. Meditation however, can be very time consuming, and much time will be wasted in internal conflict, if we fail to conceptualise the practice in a way that reflects the ultimate nature of mind. I would like therefore, to first establish what meditation is in the ultimate sense. Other teachers present ‘introductory practices’ in full awareness that they are holding back knowledge that is necessary for a more complete understanding, and necessary for transformative insight. I will not be doing you the disservice of adopting this sort of approach.

The approach described in this blog post series is based on the idea that meditation, if it is to be profoundly transformative, cannot limit itself to an engagement with only the personal experience of mind and body. Rather, it must specifically address that wider field of intelligence in which the phenomena of the personal mind arise and ultimately rest. That field of intelligence is what the theistic religious traditions call God, but which I have been choosing to call Consciousness.

Consciousness, in this context, has some of the scope that others might associate with metaphysics and with a divine, or transcendent, reality, but here it is a purely psychological term – a label for an objective psychological experience, albeit an illusive and difficult to define one – and in the context of a psychology that is expanded far beyond the bounds of academic Psychology’s usual merely personal perspective.

While there is clearly value in striving to become more focused, more emotionally positive, and more self-aware – heroically struggling to modify mental states by an effort of will, I hope to show that there is much greater practical value and effectiveness, for the practice of meditation, in the development of a profound openness to the field of Consciousness in all its aspects, so that we utilise the qualities, and the energy, of Consciousness in our transformation. Continue reading

April 17, 2017