Mandala Art Designs With Quotes

Arthur C. Clarke thinks that it may be just a coincidence, "but", he writes, "the Mandelbrot set does indeed seem to contain an enormous number of mandalas or religious symbols, which are found in ecclesiastical designs-such as stained glass windows, and particularly in Islamic art. We find many forms like the Paisley pattern echoing the Mandelbrot set centuries before it was discovered!

Zooming into the boundary of the M-set, we find smaller and smaller island molecules, surrounded by increasingly intricate circular patterns, evocative of Oriental art, particularly in the meditative designs of Buddhism known as mandalas.

The key to awakening, then, is to recognize the appearances in the world as the radiance of the essence ground, and our true nature as the vast awakened universe itself. The work with the mandala and the five Buddha families returns us to the original luminosity of the ground. We then return home to what is called the Great Mother, the ground of being. The good news is that for all of us who took the second path of confusion, liberation is achievable. All we need to do is stop investing in the dualistic struggle and recognize the true ground of being. The path to liberation is never far from us. We are actually never apart from it. We are simply not recognizing the non-duality as our true condition. Longchenpa, the great Tibetan teacher of the 14th century, described the mandala as a luminous house, a dome of light emanating from the purely latent ground. The mandala is a means by which we return to our essential wholeness. The mandala practice is designed to help us see our patterns. It is the map for returning to the ground of being through transforming the five poisons into wisdom. It is a method of placing the psyche in a template of luminous wholeness. There is a deep longing for wholeness in all of us. And from that longing, cultures and religions have created mandala-like forms and ceremonies, architecture, temples, churches, stained glass windows, jewelry, art, gardens, and arrangements of ceremonial food. Although the human body is its own dynamic mandala, with the heart center, the limbs as the four directions, and so on, we often experience the world and ourselves in a fragmented way. This fragmentation is particularly true in modern times when the collective mandalic centering rituals and dances that healed individuals and communities have, for the most part, been lost. Meditating on the mandala is a tool or template for reintegration and provides a re-centering experience that unites the fragmented psyche and transmutes the five poisons into wisdom.