#AppreciativeJoy

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 7: The Somatic Body-Mind

This article is the seventh of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; you can read the previous article in the series here; and you can read the five verses here.

In these articles, I am choosing once again to use a non-traditional terminology for talking about the process of transformation that the Dharmadhātu Mandala invites us to engage in. Those who have read the previous articles on this series may recognise Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth as the stages of a system of meditative practice that was suggested by Sangharakshita in the 1970s. This being the case, I need to point out once again, that while I find that these four general stages fit my experience very well indeed, the detail of my own approach to these stages of meditation practice is not based on any detailed exposition by Sangharakshita, but on my own explorations.

I should also make it clear that what I am presenting here does not represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ – far from it. My intention is only to share my own experience, and to share my own somewhat personal and perhaps idiosyncratic reflections. My hope is that others will find my exploration of that four-fold conceptual frame of reference to be meaningful and useful, and will be stimulated to engage in their own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu mandala.

This article was originally written as the first part of a longer article on the female Buddha Māmaki, but I have chosen to present it as a separate article, and as one which will hopefully serve as an introduction to that article. In it, I hope to provide a recapitulation of key understandings from previous articles in the series, and to further introduce the notion of the somatic, and the idea that meditation is an experience of, not mind, but body-mind – these being foundational conceptualisations for the article on Māmaki that follows. By talking of mind as body-mind, I mean, not an integration of two separate elements – mind and body – but an acknowledgement of the extent to which mind and body must be regarded as inherently integrated in the practice of meditation. So, while meditation can usefully be thought of, at least in the beginning stages, as an integration of mind and body – of ‘bringing the mind home to the body’, as Thich Nhat Hahn used to say – I am interested in a deeper integration, in the sense of a bringing into full awareness, of the five already integrated body-mind components, which Buddhist tradition calls the five skandhas. By way of introduction to the article on Māmaki, I shall, in this article, be reflecting on the vedanā skandha in particular – the skandha of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Sensing, Sensation and Embodiment.

A Comprehensive Non-Dual Archetypal Psychology

In this series of articles, I have set out to describe the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala – the mandala of the Five Wisdoms – and to present them as personifications of an interrelated constellation of Dharmic principles that together form a comprehensive non-dual psychology. These Dharmic principles can be viewed as stages in a transformation process – a transformation process that leads not just to Insight, and to the release of self-view (which we can call Spiritual Death); but to our embodiment of the transcendent Bodhisattva principle (a stage which we can call Spiritual Rebirth), through the release of the energetic residues of the egoic mind, which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas.

We can characterise the process of realisation that we call Enlightenment as having four stages – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth – and we can approach each of these four stages through five meditative contemplations, using the Five Wisdoms Mandala as our guide. Each of the four stages engages with the Five Wisdoms at a higher level than the last. They are are like four octaves – the subsequent stages resonating with the earlier ones, and each expressing a higher and more comprehensive level of transformation and wisdom than the last. While it is true to say that embodiment of Consciousness characterised by Positive Emotion requires the foundation of mental and emotional stability such as is developed in the Integration stage, there is also however, a sense in which these two different familiarisation processes can progress in parallel. I shall be talking more about this below.

The most obvious division of the four stages is into the first two and the last two. There is however, a particularly strong resonance between the Integration and Spiritual Death stages (first and third), and between the Positive Emotion and Spiritual Rebirth stages (second and fourth). This means that our practice in the Integration stage, and our deepening connection with the five receptive ‘Integration’ Buddhas (that we we are currently studying), is likely to also produce significant insights into the impersonal nature of mind (Spiritual Death). Similarly, a deep practice of the Positive Emotion stage, and our deepening connection with the five expansive ‘Positive Emotion’ Buddhas, is likely to propel us into that profoundly and naturally altruistic way of living our embodiment of Consciousness, which the Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the Bodhicitta – the emergence of the Bodhisattva archetype as the guiding principle of our being (Spiritual Rebirth).

What I am presenting here is clearly not an ego-psychology – in which an heroic and narcissistic egoic self makes vain attempts at transcendence by trying to appropriate divine powers to itself. Rather it is a Buddhist archetypal psychology, in which the humble and reverent egoic self of the Mahayana Buddhist practitioner seeks to know, familiarise themselves with, and surrender to, the benevolent forces of the Transcendental – the archetypal powers that are inherent in Consciousness and organised as a mandala of Five Wisdoms.

The Brahmavihāras – Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding

The egoic mind has tendencies which we can characterised in terms of energetic dis-integration and energetic contraction, and the practice of meditation, or resting as Consciousness, leads to the opposite tendencies – Integration being the opposite of energetic dis-integration, and Positive Emotion being the opposite of energetic contraction. One way in which this distinction that I am making, between Integration and Positive Emotion can be understood, is in terms of the brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy) which can be either self-regarding or other-regarding – either energetically receptive or energetically expansive.

June 18, 2022

Overview Part 1 – A Mandala Framework for Meditation and Self-Enquiry

The approach to meditation that I have adopted in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series of articles, is unusual because it brings together elements from philosophical, spiritual, and psychological traditions that do not usually cross-pollinate, and tend not to understand each other. My aim in this article is to provide an overview of my approach, and to show why I have found the relatively unknown brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy) to be so essential to my framework for meditation and self-enquiry.

My Psychological and Spiritual Influences

Although I was born into a nominally Christian family and a nominally Christian culture, my first real spiritual education, during my twenties, was in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community, a Western Buddhist tradition that integrates Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana elements, with a special emphasis on re-creating something of the spirit of the lost Indian Mahayana in a Western cultural context – especially the spirit of the Bodhisattva Ideal. During that time I have a number of very strong and deeply affecting visionary experiences during meditation sessions. I also, in my mid-twenties, made a deep study of Padmasambhava’s Bardo Thodol texts, the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ – symbolic teachings that I continued to reflect on over the decades since.

In my thirties I became a Quaker for 10 years, and subsequently studied Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’, Marshal Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC), with a few different non-Buddhist non-duality teachers, before returning to Buddhism in my early sixties.

I worked in General Psychiatry settings for many years, where I became an Occupational Therapist and made use of the very Buddhist ‘open system’ model of the person, developed by the Occupational Therapist, Gary Kielhofner. During those years, when my profession required me to speak the language of medical model psychiatry and the various models in use by Clinical Psychologists, but I maintained a keen sense that human experience cannot fully explained by merely humanistic or brain-based models. For me a comprehensive psychology has to include a transcendental dimension, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would return to Padmasambhava’s Buddhist non-dual psychology of the mandala.

January 2, 2020

Consciousness, Meditation and the Four Qualia

This is Post 38 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The four brahmavihāras are a description of Consciousness, and of our innately compassionate nature, and together they give us a very powerful approach to meditation. This extremely important ancient Indian framework for personal transformation is unfortunately however, very little known and poorly understood. I am very keen to do what I can to help the brahmavihāras to be better known – the world sorely needs this practice and this understanding.

In my efforts to find ways of making this approach to meditation more accessible, I have developed a somewhat simpler, and more experiential approach, which supports the original brahmavihāras framework, and which I call the Four Qualia. I have been introducing this Four Qualia framework in detail in recent posts (here, here and here), and I recommend that you read those articles first – as they will provide context for this one. I hope, students of meditation and non-duality will find that these four Qualia – these four ever-present, but subtle and difficult-to-define experiences – provide a useful foundation from which the brahmavihāras can more easily be integrated into their practice and their understanding.

The Four Qualia are a mandala framework, and can be approached in meditation as a mandala-cycle – usually starting with the Eastern Quadrant. The exploration of the Four Qualia that I have set out below however, is presented in the order that is suggested by the stupa – by the natural hierarchy of the subtle bodies and chakras – and which I have described previously (here). Those wishing to incorporate this approach into their meditative enquiry, may wish to return to this article several times.

Embodiment, the Physical Body, and Appreciative Joy

The Qualia associated with the experienced reflection of Consciousness in the Physical Body, is Embodiment. When we sit to meditate, and we bring the word Embodiment to mind, we find that we can use it as a pointer to the whole experience of embodied Consciousness in the field of the Physical Body. Continue reading

August 30, 2018

The Mandala of the Four Brahmavihāras

This is Post 37 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The overall framework for the articles in this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series has been provided by the mandala of the four brahmavihāras: Equanimity (upekshā), Appreciative Joy (muditā), Loving Kindness (mettā), and Compassion (karunā). In order to make these four ‘attitudes of Consciousness’ more accessible, and in order to help people recognise them in their experience, I have, in recent articles, been exploring to the Four Qualia – a formulation of my own, which I have found to be very useful.

The qualia are difficult-to-define, difficult-to-describe, difficult-to-account-for experiences, and there a four of them that together provide a helpful experiential framework for meditation practice: Embodiment; Being; Uncaused Happiness; and Life Energy. Deepening into our experience of resting as Consciousness using this ‘Four Qualia’ formulation as our guide, is essentially an easier, more modest, and more experiential way of approaching the sublime brahmavihāras.

In the next article in this series, I shall be presenting some more detailed reflections on each of the Four Qualia and their corresponding brahmavihāras, for those wishing to experiment with them in their meditation practice, but first, in this article, I would like to reflect on the importance of these practices, and also on why, given their great value, they appear to have been relatively neglected.

Why are the brahmavihāras not better known?

The brahmavihāras are literally the vihāras or ‘dwelling places’ of the great four-faced creator god Brahma – they are the states in which Brahma was believed to abide. Importantly the word vihāra does not denote a permanent home, but a lodging or retreat, like the accommodation for travellers to rest overnight while on a pilgrimage. So the term immediately suggests a staged form of meditation, in which the practitioner moves systematically through a series of four stages corresponding to the brahmavihāras, in order perhaps to achieve a fifth stage, the state of balance, wholeness and internal energetic coherence that Indian tradition calls samadhi. We are being invited, in the brahmavihāras meditation-cycle, to ‘rest’ for a period of time in each vihāra – to rest and find refreshment and renewal in our true nature, both in our meditation practice, and on the journey of life. Continue reading

August 22, 2018

The Mandala and the Stupa

This is Post 35 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Taking the mandala as our guide, I have been presenting the journey of self-enquiry into the nature of mind, as a four-fold one, and as a circumambulation of the mandala – a clockwise series of enquiries into Thinking (east), Sensing (south), Feeling (west), and now Intuition-Volition (north). There has been a traditional logic in this sequence, but in meditation practice there are many orders of priority that can be used, as we systematically progress our integration – or simply respond intuitively and spontaneously to the needs of our integration process.

In this post I shall be exploring, in conjunction with the symbolism and psychological dynamics of the mandala, the psychological symbolism of the stupa – the traditional symbolic monument that is seen in various forms across the Buddhist world. Much like the mandala, the stupa is a five-fold symbolic representation of an ideal state of psychological and spiritual integration. It is a very useful pointer to the nature of mind, because it brings us back to the enormous importance of the energy anatomy of the subtle bodies.

The Stupa – a Monument to the Experience of the Liberation

Whereas the mandala can perhaps be thought of as a larger symbol, which represents both Consciousness itself and also the tensions, or polarities, that exist within the egoic mind, the stupa represents the somatic embodiment, or reflection, or resonance, of Consciousness in the energetic fields of the body, in the so-called ‘subtle bodies’, and highlights the hierarchical dimension of the relationship between them. So, the stupa brings a hierarchical dimension to the way we approach the corresponding brahmavihāras, and the egoic cognitive-perceptual functions (which Buddhist tradition calls the skandhas, as mentioned previously here). While different cultures have elaborated their symbolism in different ways, ultimately the stupas of the east are monuments that celebrate the profound mystery of the energetic embodiment of Consciousness in this world – in the lives of individual human beings.

Consciousness exists everywhere. Indeed it is because of Consciousness that life exists, and because of Consciousness that we are capable of knowing and experiencing life. Paradoxically however, although we are all resting in the field of Consciousness, very few of us have ‘recognised’ Consciousness and fully embraced the non-dual reality that pervades all experiencing. But it is only by deeply acknowledging Consciousness, and learning to ‘turn towards’, or ‘rest back into’ Consciousness, that we allow Consciousness to become energetically embodied in us. Continue reading

August 2, 2018

Mandala Innerwork and NVC Self-Empathy

I have practised various forms of self-empathetic innerwork over the years. In the past, my personal method has been a distillation of, and a combination of, the innerwork approaches of Eugene Gendlin (Focusing), Ann Weiser-Cornell (Focusing), James Hillman (Jungian Innerwork), Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication), Richard Schwarz (Inner Family Systems), Jerry Donoghue (Inner Presence Coaching), Steve De Shazer (Brief Solution Focused Therapy). While I continue to draw on the specific methods of these innovators in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy practice, I have more recently found it helpful to set these learnings in the context of the non-dual mandala-wisdom that we find in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and which Carl Jung helped to make so much more available and accessible in the West. Hence my own personal name for the form of self-empathic innerwork that I now practice, is ‘Mandala Innerwork’, reflecting the fact that it is essentially a form of Buddhist self-enquiry.

The Buddha’s Self-Enquiry / Self-Empathy Dyads

As I have developed my approach to self-empathetic innerwork, and studied the various other self-enquiry dyad models that I have mentioned above, I have increasingly found myself coming back to the Buddha’s approach and to the Buddhist terminology of the Five Skandhas, the Five Realms, the Five Wisdoms, and the brahmavhāras. I have begun to outline the details of how these fit together in various articles on this website. By making these connections we can bring the richness and power of the Buddhist wisdom tradition to our Western approaches to psychotherapeutic innerwork, while also bringing a much needed psychological sophistication to Buddhist Mindfulness, meditation and self-enquiry practice.

In this article however, I will be avoiding the complexity that arises for us when we try to use the Sanskrit terminology of ancient Buddhism – by mainly using the language of the self-empathy aspect of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model.

In the language of Nonviolent Communication, we can conceptualise Mandala Innerwork as a self-empathy practice, and the person doing it as a ‘self-empathiser’ and the person holding space is the ’empathiser’. In Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing model the activity of self-enquiry came to be called ‘focusing’, and the person turning their attention inward was called the ‘focuser’, and the person holding space is the ‘companion’. In the context of Mandala Innerwork, I prefer to think of the activity simply as ‘doing self-enquiry’, but I acknowledge a debt to Eugene Gendlin by using the terminology of ‘focuser’ and ‘companion’ for the roles.

The Buddha had his monks do meditative self-enquiry dyads, the details of which got lost down the centuries. The modern Buddhists and historians of Buddhism understand the practice as some form of ‘confession’, which is an unfortunate projection of Christian cultural practice onto the much more complex and subtle culture of early Buddhist self-enquiry. It is my belief that these early Buddhist ‘Confession’ dyads would have more closely resembled the self-empathy / self-enquiry dyad practices of today, and my Mandala Innerwork model has in part been an attempt to recreate the sort of Buddhist self-enquiry that would have characterised them.

The notion of ‘Confession’ is not completely illegitimate – of course. It just needs to be freed from the assumptions that tend to attach to it. I shall be sharing more of my thoughts on this in future articles, but the main thing I would like to highlight here is that in a confession process we are addressing that which is incongruous with our deeper true nature. In other words, not merely incongruous with an external religious creed, but incongruous with our deeper ethically and aspirational sense of ourselves, which is felt to be more essential and more authentic. So, ‘confession’ is always about our inner relationship between this deep inner knowing (which I like to call Consciousness) and something more superficial which is incongruous with that.

Resting as Consciousness; Relating to Psychological Parts

Their are two close related features in my approach, and they are both rooted in the profound early Buddhist psychology of the five skandhas and the four brahmavihāras. The first, could be characterised as ‘resting as Consciousness’: a focus on familiarising ourselves with, and learning to ‘rest as’ the ’empty’ impersonal Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), that is capable of witnessing our experience objectively, and ‘relating’ to our experience with a warmly accepting quality of Presence. In my articles – especially those on meditation and self-enquiry that are to be found under the Meditation’ menu above – I have been highlighting the fact that the character of that the ’empty’ field of Consciousness, as it becomes embodied in us as Presence, is beautifully and comprehensively described by the four brahmavihāras.

The second feature of my Mandala Innerwork, or ‘Buddhist Self-Enquiry’ model, is based on our development of a deep familiarity with the other four skandhas – essentially the conceptualising (rūpa), sensing (vedanā), evaluating (samjñā), and volitional (samskaras) functions of Consciousness – and this involves learning to ‘work with psychological parts’. By working with psychological parts I mean, essentially, that we look at our experience closely, and learn to recognise that our conventionally experienced self never does actually have the character of a self at all. Rather, on close examination is it found to be an aggregation of cognitive-perceptual processes and cognitive-perceptual data that are assembled into the appearance of a self. What’s more, when we engage in this enquiry, we also become keenly aware of the fact that the egoic self is certainly not single. Rather, it is multiple – each of our separate egoic selves or ‘psychological parts’ are an adaption, in the course of our development to particular developmental stages and challenges.

I have come to regard these two features: resting as Consciousness; and working with psychological parts, as inseparable. Whether our focus is on learning to be self-empathetically present with yourselves for the purpose of self-knowledge and psychological healing; or we are spiritual seekers wishing to know the ultimate nature of mind, we cannot avoid acknowledging these two features of the process. It is one of foundational paradoxes of the process of spiritual integration and psychological healing that in order to become more unified and whole, we need to acknowledge that our egoic self is made up of many psychological parts; and need to develop a sense of the inner relationship between Consciousness and those psychological parts.

January 16, 2018

Zen and the Art of Human Life

This is Post 21 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

As previously, when reflecting on the brahmavihāras, I feel a need to emphasise that muditā, which is often translated as Sympathetic Joy, but better translated as Appreciative Joy, is not merely a mental state, but an attitude of Consciousness, and a way of being that gives expression to a quality of the universal Consciousness as we relate to the practicalities and specifics of human life. While we need to acknowledge that it is a cosmic attitude, it is also an attitude that individual people will often embody in rich personal ways even if they are not choosing to adopt the practice of resting as Consciousness. Muditā involves being in this physical world in way that is informed by, and supported by, the healing, evolutionary, and compassionate energy of our transpersonal source – so if we express this consciously it is extremely powerful source of blessing and creativity.

Muditā can perhaps be better understood by contrasting it with its egoic counterpart, which is the ordinary egoic Sensation function, which Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the vedanā skandha. Through meditative self-inquiry we come to recognise that we habitually and unconsciously bring multiple assumptions to the experience of Sensation and the experience of being in a physical body – assumptions that we come to recognise as untrue. Foremost among these incorrect assumptions, is the way we take the physical body to be absolute evidence of our ultimate separateness. This sense of separateness, and the ways in which we live with it, or seek to overcome it, is fundamental to, and characteristic of, the experience of being human. Buddhist tradition speaks of this habitual perception of separateness and the associated preoccupation with ‘looking after number one’ in terms of the klesha of māna, which is usually translated as ‘pride’, and sometimes as ‘conceit’.

The Human Realm – Separateness healed by Appreciative Joy

Of the Buddha’s Six Realms, which I have talked about briefly in a previous post (here), the realm associated with the Southern Quadrant of the mandala, is the Human Realm. This Human Realm, in which we find ourselves, occupies an archetypal position in the mandala of egoic styles, and can be regarded as the egoic counterpart, and polar opposite, of Appreciative Joy. The Human Realm is regarded, in Buddhist tradition, as a very special and fortuitous place to be reborn, but it is also the realm associated of the egoic Sensation function, and has particular problems for us, and a particular style of egoic unconsciousness, which we need to explore and become familiar with. Continue reading

September 3, 2017

Appreciative Joy – an Attitude and an Energetic State

This is Post 20 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

Each of the four brahmavihāras is a doorway into meditation and a doorway into a key aspect of spiritual truth. Muditā, which is usually translated as Sympathetic Joy, but is perhaps better translated as Appreciative Joy, is a particularly important doorway for us however. As I have been explaining in the last two of posts, the body, because of its seeming obviousness, is easily misunderstood and overlooked, when in reality it is our entry point into the mysterious somatic dimension. Without examining this bodily-felt dimension through meditative enquiry, the universal blessing which is our experience of embodied Consciousness cannot be fully received and understood.

The Body – our Doorway to Somatic Transformation

I have talked in a previous post (here) about the importance of acknowledging and becoming deeply familiar with the seven subtle bodies (and the seven chakras) – especially the first four bodies, which correspond to the quadrants of the mandala, and which we may call the four surface bodies. The subtle bodies are important because they provide us with a way of understanding that meditation, while it takes the apparently physical body as its starting point, gives us a way of engaging directly with these ‘subtle’, or non-physical, dimensions of our experience, which are nevertheless felt in the body.

Using the map that the mandala provides, these energetic or somatic dimensions can be distinguished and discerned in meditation. When we first start to meditate we experience the way the subtle bodies have a felt quality that reflects the psychological parts that we have fallen into identification with. As we learn to rest as Consciousness however – and learn to break our identification with psychological parts, if only in brief moments of Mindfulness, or in periods of meditation – the energies of the subtle bodies can start to transform. Even if we only practice resting as Consciousness for short moments of time whenever we remember to do so, this can be very significant, because we come to recognise our choice – and our power to transform ourselves in this way. Continue reading

September 1, 2017

Muditā – Appreciative Joy – A Sense of Wonder

This is Post 19 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

In the previous five posts I have been talking about the inner landscape of the blue Eastern Quadrant of the mandala – the Thinking function; the Mental Body; the Hara chakra (second chakra); the brahmavihāra of Equanimity; the qualia of Being; the attitude of objectivity; the ethical characteristics of honesty and integrity; and the mirror as a symbol of Consciousness and of non-dual wisdom. We also started to explore the polarity between, or the choice between: the peaceful, objectively observing, and embodied, style of consciousness, which is associated with Equanimity and Being; and the fragile, judgemental, mentally-constructed, and obsessively self-referencing form of identity, which psychology might speak of in terms of narcissism.

Cosmic Appreciation and Gratitude

Circumambulating clockwise round the mandala, we come next to the Southern Quadrant of the mandala and to the brahmavihāra of muditā. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition the Southern Quadrant is yellow – the colour of gold and of the earth. Muditā is often translated as Sympathetic Joy, and occasionally translated as Empathetic Joy, but Appreciative Joy is, in my view, a better translation. While I have sometimes been happy to translate muditā as Sympathetic Joy, as I was first taught, many years ago, I now prefer to use Appreciative Joy.

Traditionally muditā is understood to refer to our innate sympathetic response to the happiness and achievements of others. It is certainly this, and it is naturally present in all those types of social interactions and responses to events in the world that are in any way genuine expressions of appreciation and gratitude. It is important however, to recognise that muditā, in its archetypal and suprapersonal essence as mahamuditā, or Great Appreciative Joy, is a cosmic principle – an attitude of Consciousness itself. Continue reading

August 22, 2017

The Brahmavihāras – the Soul’s Moral Compass

This is Post 13 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

When we look within, we find that Consciousness, the ultimate nature of the human mind, appears to be structured like a mandala – like a compass rose. And at each of the directions of this inner compass are ethical principles that are inherent in the nature of Consciousness. In the last few posts, I have been starting to explore one cultural form of this archetypal mandala structure – an ancient pre-Buddhist formulation called the four brahmavihāras – the four ‘abodes of Brahma’, sometimes called the four immeasurables.

Meditation as a Mandala-Cycle

Traditionally in the Indian and Himalayan countries our circumambulation of, or progression around, the mandala, follows the path of the sun in the northern hemisphere, so we enter the mandala in the east, which is associated with sunrise; then move round clockwise to the south, which is associated with mid-day; then move round clockwise again to the west, which is associated with sunset; then move round clockwise again to the north, which is associated with midnight; and then return to the east point and the sunrise once again. I shall be adopting this traditional order as I go deeper into the four brahmavihāras in the future articles is this series over the coming weeks. When we have a full understanding of all four brahmavihāras there is great value in practicing all four in sequence, as a mandala-cycle. Continue reading

June 21, 2017