EPISTEMO-BIOGRAPHICAL CORRELATIONS

MANDALA OF THE TWO REALMS:WOMB AND DIAMOND MANDALAS

What am I doing here?

What has led the researcher here?

Can the lens of critical exploration be turned on the researcher himself, so that, just as the artists' psychosocial worlds are explored, those of the researcher are also examined?

The artists are creating cognitive worlds through the development of metaphysical conceptions in imaginative terms.

These creations demonstrate particular ontological,epistemological and social implications.Along similar lines, the researcher is creating a universe of cognitive possibilities through his work on the artists.

Can both cognitive universes illuminate each other?Can the efforts of the artists and that of the reseacher studying their work throw light on each other?Is such mutual illumination not the very purpose of research,in the first place?

Not necessarily.

Research is more often understood as a one way illumination with the researcher's efforts throwing light on the subject studied. It is less often perceived as capable of facilitating understanding of the research project as an aspect of the life of the researcher themselves.

Less often studied is the potential of the research project for facilitating an understanding of the life of the researcher as a primary hermeneutic project within which the academic research project is a secondary phenomenon.The academic project is a secondary phenomenon demonstrating the directions taken by particular imperatives and orientations within the larger project.

Why has the researcher chosen this project?What combination of choice and circumstance has contributed to their entry into this effort? Could the answers to these questions throw light on the manner in which they frame and investigate their subject? The manner in which the subject is framed and examined is of course crucial to whatever understanding emerges from the investigation.That being the case,could a study of the factors external to the explicit boundaries constituted by the public face of the research project but which shape the project contribute to a better understading og the immediate goals of the project?


My use of the metaphor of light in this context also evokes questions that help clarify the issues at stake. In terms of relationships between the extra-academic context of research and the academic structures in relation to or in terms of which research takes place.

In speaking of the extra academic and the academic contexts in relation to mutual or one sided "illumination" what are the implications of this metaphor evocative of casting light from a source onto another? It suggests a projection outward from a source onto an recipient of what has been cast from the source. In other words an effect moving outward from a source to a target. How accurate is this metaphor here? To what degree ism it helpful in suggesting what could actually take place oin relation to these two existential universes?

Perhaps a more helpful metaphor could be one that evokes, not so much the movement of something from a source to a target, even if such movement occurs mutually, from target to a source and from the erstwhile target to the source that had earlier impacted it, but a metaphor that suggests something more of the simultaneously temporal and atemporal, linear and nonlinear conjunctions and correlations that emerge in the relationship between the academic structures of research and their informing extra academic contexts. A dynamism evoked, perhaps, by a geometric form that suggests such a complex interplay, possibly the diagram of interlaced triangles that emerges in both Hindu and Hermetic thought.

In both traditions, it stands for the interpenetration of different modes of being. In Hermeticism, as a pentagram,it resents the interpenetration of spirit and matter. In Hinduism, as a Yantra,it evokes the interpenetration of masculine and feminine forces in the constitution of being. The central idea is that of interpenetration, where one aspect of being does not demonstrate a fundamental separation from the other without being identical with it.

In this context, the metaphor of illumination remains helpful, but with a recognition of its limitations as suggesting a linearity that might not be sufficiently accurate in its evocation of the relationships between the academic structure of research and the larger extra academic context that informs research.








Above:Images of Mandala of the Two Realms:Womb and Diamond Mandalas from http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/mandala1.shtml

More on womb and diamond mandalas

http://www.brh.co.jp/en/experience/journal/48/research_3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_of_the_Two_Realms

MANDALA THEORY AND PRACTICE AS HERMENEUTIC STRATEGY IN EXPLORING THE COSMOGEOGRAPHIES OF WENGER AND MALTWOOD:THE DIAMOND MANDALA AND DEDUCTIVE THOUGHT

MANDALA FORMS IN AFRICAN AND ASIAN ART AND THOUGHT

The second approach to navigating the space delineated by a mandala is to explore it in terms of centrifugal movement, a movement inwards from the margins to the centre. Such centrifugal motion is meant to enable the meditator on the mandala relate themselves to the integration of multiplicity to unity that the mandala depicts.

This unity is often cosmographic.It could also include,or be exclusively psychological.It could also be a social unity.The mandala could focus on the universe of which the individual is a part but to which the individual belongs as an entity who is distinct in some ways from that univese.

The mandala could depict the internal universe of the individual.This would be a representation of the universe that constitutes the mind of the invidual.

In depicting the universe to which the individual belongs,it often does so in cosmographic tems,representing the metaphysical structure of the cosmos.That possibility of representing the universe external to the individual could be adapted to the depiction of the univese from any perpective,whether metaphysical,physical,social, or psychological.

The essential point is to depict the universe to which the individual belongs.
This depiction could be done in relation to greater degees of inclusiveness,beginning from the social world of the invidual to increasingly larger configurations, till they encompass the world.

The Classical development of mandalas as epistemological tools,constructed according to particular aesthetic criteria,emerged in India,in Hinduism and later,in Buddhism,particularly in the developments of Buddhism in other Asian countries,particularly Tibet.Iconographic forms similar to the mandala in construction and sometimes in interpretation and purpose have been develped in other cultures,but it seems that the literature currently available suggests that it was in Hinduism and Buddhism that they achieved their most precise and elaborate charaterisation as cogntive tools.

Within these religious cultures,the mandala was most often understood as a cosmographic representation which would asisst the contemplative achieve a cognitive identification with the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos.The possiblity of such identification implies a detree of conjunction between cosmic structure and the structure of human consciousness.Without such a conjunction,would apprehension of cosmic form be possible by a conscousness that was a part of that form?

The notions of microcosm and macrocosm are central to Classical mandala hermeneutics.

Whether the mandala is meant to be contemplated in terms of a centripetal or a centrifugal configuration,its interpretation consists in the intergretion of the multifarious aspects of the phenomenon being contemplated into a unity. This unity could be constiutted by the origin of the phenomenon,or by a later stage of the development of that phenomenon.

The starting point of a process often contains the potential later realised in subsequent developments of that process,but that does not make the starting point equatable with a later,more comprehensive stage of its development.The latter stage could embody previously latent or even unanticpated aspects that would represent,at times,even a new form entirely.

Along those lines,Dion Fortune's conception of cosmic development,similar to Hegel's conception of the develpment of ideas,of history, and of being,in general,posits an emergence from a centre and a reabsorption into that centre at the end of a cycle of experience.The cosmos that is reintegrated into that centre,however, is not identical with that which went out.It is identical in its fundamental metaphysical grounding but is not identical in the possiblities of being that have been actualised through the progression it has undergone. This can be related to the Hindu conception of cosmic time known as the Yugas.It would be valuable to explore the level of sophistication of the Hindu conception.A similar conception might also have been developed in Helena Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.In a similar stream of ideas and contexts,it could be relevant to see Dr.Douglas Baker's books.

This progression is made possible by the act of manifestation from the primal centre where the potentialities that are actualised through this progression are latent.

It is possible to utilise Fortune's conception of cosmic progression without necessarily identifying with its larger postulations about the cosmos.Such a caefully qualified appropriation wcould involve a focus on its epistemological implications rather than its metaphysical focus/directon.

An imaginative exploration of such conceptions of the emergence of the manifest cosmos from a primal centre can,in my view,facilitate an understanding of how the individual's psychogical and social universe is manifest from a psychological and social centre.

Our interest when reflecting on the mandala in relation to the work of Wenger and Maltwood is in terms of cosmographic conceptions and psychological processes.In terms of cosmograpohic conceptions,my interest is in the radiation of meaning from a central point within the cosmogeographic creations of the artists as well as the convergence of meaning towards a central point in those cosmogeographic forms.

In relation to the psychological processes of both artists I am exploring the manner in which their cosmogeographic creations represent the development of meaning through the interplay between the self,the landscapes they interpret and the interptetive communities in relation to which the artists interpret the landscape and the specfic interpretive techniques or technologies which they employ in carrying out and concretising their interpretations

More specifically,I am interested in the radiation of meaning from a central point-the self-into the cosmographic formation of landscape.I am also interested the configuration of meaning in relation to the self from forms external to the self,specifically,landscapes and interpretive forms.Interpretive forms include both bodies of ideation and iconography and the communities in relation to which they have emerged.

In relation to the cosmogeographic constructions of Wenger and Maltwood,therefore, I am exploring the cosmographic and psychological implications of their constructions of lanscapoe through an interpretive strategy represented by outward and inward motion.Outward motion-from the self to the landscapes.Inward motion-from the landscapes to the self.

We are examining,therefore,their development of physical space in terms of explicit cosmological correlations.We are also interested in the implicit psychological correlations that their works evoke.