The Five Wisdom Energies by Irini Rockwell

Author:Irini Rockwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

When one person has finished, switch roles. Then talk with each other about this process or bring your answers back to the group.

After the exercise you might feel that the negative aspects of the relationship have not been dealt with. Trust the exercise and ride the sense of positive outlook that has been created. When you focus on the positive, you see your sanity clearly, and neurosis falls away. If issues remain, you could do another session of appreciative inquiry around them later.

11

Living in the Mandala

Four hundred of us were living together that spring in a quaint old hotel, all studying Buddhism and practicing meditation. This was overwhelming for the hotel switchboard operator, more accustomed to handling guests who did not know one another. Come the cocktail hour, she was inundated as never before with calls from one room to the next. And she made mistakes, connecting this room to this rather than this room to that. She soon realized that it didn’t seem to matter whom she plugged into whom. We all seemed to have something to say to one another!

This is an illustration of mandala principle—the inherent interconnectedness of the five energies. In essence a mandala is an energetic field encompassing the totality, the big picture. A mandala is a map: the flatlands of spacious energy, the peaks of intellect, the lush valleys of abundance, and so forth. The map is also moving, like a weather map on TV. Connecting to the mandala provides a sense of universality, a larger vision and greater perspective. It could be the mandala of our family or the weather or our body or our workplace. In Tibetan Buddhist art, mandalas depict whole cosmologies resplendent with iconographic detail. The four cardinal directions are sometimes represented by deities in the vajra, ratna, padma, and karma families, while in the middle of the mandala is a deity representing the spaciousness of buddha-family energy.

Whereas the solid, concrete world creates boundaries, the energetic world creates connections. The perspective of mandala is less egocentric than our ordinary perspective because we are not the constant reference point. Visualizing ourselves as the center of our own mandala requires recognizing that we are multifaceted and many-dimensional. The mandala puts our perspective in a larger context. It liberates us from our little way of perceiving things. Seeing the big picture takes a big mind.

INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND TOTALITY

The totality of mandala perspective has to do with our inner psychological world as well as the outer phenomenal world. The landscape of thoughts and emotions is our inner mandala; the external world is the outer mandala. There is a constant play between the two. In any given moment they are informing each other.

Our sense perceptions form a bridge between the inner and outer mandalas. They are our antennae, feeding data from the outer environment to our inner world of thoughts and emotions. How we see the world depends on our internal reality. (More on sense perceptions in chapter 14.) For instance, when I first moved to Nova Scotia, wow, how I hated the weather.

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