taotiger - Mandala Cosmography

...this mandala is similar in composition and intention to Buddhist mandalas, attempting to depict the whole of the human condition, as process and potential, demystifying psychic recesses, equalising all "natural" and "transcendental" qualities.

Further, the mandala is somewhat rhythmically processional, irregular clockwise helical rotation indicating growth and anticlockwise regression or disintegration… also, a-hierarchical and a-causal - that is, no aspect unfailingly follows from another, or is more valuable than another; and mutual uprising of phenomena is presupposed, in that no part causes any other part. After all, is it the sun (energy, activity), refraction through suspended prisms (substance), or the observer (vision, consciousness, will as attention, etc.) causing this rainbow (form)?- Or maybe as immanent deity/absolute manifest (Tao, Buddha-mind, Brahman, etc.), at once every element is present, and yet any particular facet may be temporarily dormant, or hyper-functioning, relatively relevant, and seem more important than others. In fact, as a drawing primarily mapping collective individual or social human happening (not to mention self-portraiture or multidimensional subjectiverses), each image or label does describe, in seed form, the basis of what may be indeed a life-styling perspective.

Second, physicality is co-extensive with all other qualities - what we conveniently refer to as matter (including brain), occurs within the illusory and symbolic space designated as 'form,' which includes the formal, or objective, aspect of all categories and phenomena comprising this 'mystic pizza' diagram. While it may sometimes appear we are bounded by our body, vast interstellar vacuum, or boundless extension of substance, there are equally convincing, or unconvincing, arguments claiming the essential 'ground of being' is love, or idea, or dream-stuff, or nothing, etc. These views are all correct, depending on our focus, but when asserted as the only absolute, are subject to eventual decay and succession by other, more or less form-based 'truths.'

Existence may seem to occur as the 'universe' to some, sometimes, but to others, at other times, the universe may seem to exist purely as the subjective event (willed or otherwise); now as the remembering of crest becoming airborne droplets flying from a once-breaking wave, now as air forming breath entering through the nose of this hunched reader noticing "air forming breath entering through the nose of this hunched reader noticing... ," now as vague inclination to end the sentence.

Oh yeah, and if things weren't weird enough already, supposing infinite conventional extension, every possibility is manifest, repeatedly, somewhere, right now, and allowing for an unending continuum of these traditional 'right nows,' has been and will be manifest here, repeatedly - a little-pondered corollary of space-time infinity... but don't do your head in thinking about it, matter isn't the only infinite, really there's nothing that's not - and that's what's in the mandala. The "empty" centre, into which could be drawn the whole, is recognition of this qualitatively infinite continuum, of ultimately unique nature, the active experience of whatever:

Neither those rooted depths sustaining,
Nor your central solid trunks,
Nor gnarly branchings meeting like this -
No, I am thus leaves in autumn.

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