There is something about a mandala that defies description, a quality of timeless beauty, a sweet and graceful structure beyond the reach of our conscious imaginings. We sense a connection with the mandala, an eternal belonging that speaks to the oldest parts of us—it is a voice that whispers of the dawn of time and the very foundations of the universe. It assures us, despite all appearances, that we have existed for more eons than we realize. The mandala is the key to the link between our conscious awareness and the universe itself. It shows us the way back to the origins of humanity, to the birth of matter and energy. In an eloquent poem without words, it reveals to us that we are inextricably linked to the universe, as a leaf to a vast and ancient tree.
      Our lives seem to be governed by an overriding, yet mostly subconscious, sense of separation from some indefinable entity. We move through our existence shouldering a subtle sense of loss, of loneliness, that we are constantly struggling to dispel. It is our connection to the universe that we have lost sight of, and as a result, tragically, we believe that we are alone. It is mostly an underlying sensation, but all of us feel a pervasive loneliness at a deep, subconscious level, and it frightens us. Our thoughts and actions are driven by this fear of solitude and vulnerability, even though we may not realize it. It is an insidious feeling that often disguises itself as love, patriotism or piety, but under any guise its basis can only be called fear. Many of the activities we engage in are desperate efforts to fend off this inner sense of solitude. And so we seek romance to fend off solitude. We attend sports events or go to church to fend off solitude. We wave our country’s flag to fend off solitude. Because as long as we belong to a group, as long as we share interests with others, as long as we have someone to sit across from us at the dinner table, we will feel that we are not alone. That is not to say that all of the myriad human activities are desperate, misguided attempts to belong, but sadly it is too often the case. It’s as if there is a crucial piece missing inside each of us that we work feverishly to replace, some severed connection whose open wound stings us to the core. But what is missing is not mindless activity, where we hustle busily about in order to forget about our troubles. What is missing is not mindless competition, with touchdowns and home runs as sorry remedies for our feelings of inadequacy. Neither can the hole in our psyche be repaired with the righteous dogmas of the church or the ethnocentric, xenophobic pride of patriotism. What we have lost is the vision of the connectedness of the entire universe, the awareness that we are ourselves intricately woven into its cosmic web.
      We’ve created this false sense of isolation by defining ourselves as separate from the universe around us. But this separation is imagined, the distinction artificial. We believe that we live in the universe like an animal in an enclosed habitat. But we do not seem to be aware of the subtle distinction between existing in the universe as a discreet entity apart from it, and living within the universe, inextricably woven into its flow, its energy, its eons of history and development. The universe has arrived at our consciousness as a natural progression of nearly fourteen billion years of evolution, making us an integral part of this unimaginably vast universal flow. Just as clouds of gas floating through space will, under the right conditions, condense into stars, so will the more complex molecules and enzymes self-organize into a pattern of life and, eventually, consciousness. Granted, the conditions for this type of development are not easily achieved, but the universe is an immense space, with plenty of room for all manner of conditions to be found in one place or another. So we exist within this universe, not as a sacred, isolated group, but rather as a natural and inevitable outgrowth of universal evolution. The holy sanctity that we so arrogantly and exclusively assign to our own species should, in reality, be spread freely and joyously across the grand, expansive cosmos.
     Humanity as a group is one system nestled within the nearly infinite layers of universal systems. We are not only humans, we are also quarks and atoms and molecules and proteins and cells and animals and mind and consciousness, all run through with the vital energy that defines all of existence. Each level of universal structure has its own emergent properties, characteristics that become recognizable only upon reaching a certain level of complexity. The system we call humanity has as one of its emergent properties the wondrous marvel that is consciousness. While we cannot completely define consciousness, it clearly describes a certain level of awareness, of perception, of analysis and extrapolation of concepts. These, in turn, require a certain level of complexity. But every structural level in the universe has its own emergent properties, and as such no level of complexity is inherently better than any other—the universe is a kaleidoscope of nested systems, a symphony of symmetry that encompasses everything that exists. It should be evident, then, that we are not simply living in isolation on our lonely planet, surrounded by a dark and distant cosmos; rather we are vitally linked to this intricate web of existence that is the universe.
      The beautiful mandala is a blueprint for this cosmic relationship. It shows us that the seed that lies at the heart of our consciousness is tightly woven into the fabric of reality. The lines of the mandala symbolize more than simply material existence—they also represent the flow of concepts and emotions, of energy and force. For a long time the popular image of the atom had been of a nucleus surrounded by a group of electrons spinning rapidly around it. With the discovery of quantum physics, however, scientists realized that the atom is not a tiny, strictly-defined system of revolutions. Rather, the electrons are more like approximations, waves of probability, so that the atom is now roughly conceived as a fuzzy little ball whose boundaries are vague and ultimately unknowable. In a similar manner, our own existence does not end neatly at the tips of our fingers or the hair at the top of our head. Even looking merely at the physical aspects of our lives, we interact with the items we gather around us and we attribute to these things huge symbolic significance. The brand of clothes we wear, the model of car, are really more important to us than simple shelter and transportation. We absorb these into our ego, the internal definition of our individual self. In this way our material possessions imbue us with intangible, psychological qualities that we desire. Also, it should be clear that our actions and our beliefs radiate outward from us in waves of influence on the people we come in contact with, and in turn these waves move on to the people that they come into contact with, and so on. We take in perceptions and ideas that are processed in our mind and can alter our behavior, thus having a very material effect on our future physical interactions with our environment. The mental and physical influences that our individual systems exert on the universe at large are like countless invisible tendrils of force that extend from us in directions of which we are often only vaguely aware. We are affected by elements we barely perceive, and the effects that we generate in turn disperse from us in directions unseen. So, like the atom, the boundaries that define us grow blurred and indistinct, until the outline of our skin can no longer be considered the point at which we end and the outside world begins. At all levels, from the physical to the conceptual, we are an integral element of the universe. We are most certainly not separate from it, we are not isolated, we are not alone. And in the mandala this obvious yet widely overlooked relationship is at once made clear.
      The pattern of the mandala places us at the absolute center of our own awareness. Standing in the central bindu we can look around and see the universe stretching out away from us, but never, ever, leaving us alone. The strands of matter and energy, of relationships and emotions, of planets and stars, hold us tightly as we hurtle head-first along the currents of space and time. But they will never let us go, for it is we ourselves who are the very arms of the universe, we are its hands and its eyes—we are the consciousness that looks out into space and sees itself in the structure of reality. We are the universe, and the universe is us.

April 29, 2005