VIDEO
AUDIO
Mandalas are Psyche’s way of drawing a compass for you when life feels off-kilter. Jung noticed that these circular patterns—whether they appear in Navajo sand paintings, Tibetan yantras, or last night’s dream—pull everything back toward a stable center he called the Self. The rim defines where your ego ends; the cross-lines and repeating fours help you locate sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition in relation to your core. By “walking” the circle, even in imagination, the ego learns to orbit rather than hijack the organizing center, and the usual tug-of-war between instinct and spirit eases. Jung’s own Liverpool dream, with its sunlit circular island in a dark industrial square, showed him how a mandala can emerge autonomously whenever Psyche needs to order chaos and point the way back to wholeness. Curious why a circle keeps popping up in dreams and sacred art?—tune in and find out how it can quietly realign your life.
Circle as Archetype of Wholeness
The term mandala names any consciously fashioned or spontaneously emergent circle that intimates wholeness. Its Sanskrit root, manda-la, “circle,” directs attention to geometric containment rather than ornament. The form precedes content. Circle signifies totality because no point outranks any other, yet each point contributes to a single horizon.
The Quaternity: Equalizing Opposites
Inside the circumference, traditional mandalas typically feature a quaternity: four gates, four colors, four directional deities, or a square rotated within the circle. The quartic pattern symbolizes the cardinal tension of opposites—east and west, north and south, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine—held in simultaneous presence. Psychologically, the fourfold structure restrains inflation by distributing value equally among all four elements.
Jung’s Concept of the Self
For Jung, the mandala discloses the Self, the axial principle that orders the psyche beyond egoic preference. When consciousness fractures under conflict, a circular image may emerge in a dream or active imagination; it is a compensatory attempt by the Self to recenter the psychic economy. The ego then encounters a spatial metaphor for its proper relation—eccentric yet included.
Universality of the Mandala Motif
Cross-cultural recurrence confirms the archetypal status of the form. Tibetan sand paintings, Navajo healing wheels, Gothic rose windows, and alchemical diagrams emerge independently yet share the same geometric patterns. Such convergence suggests an inborn schema that mediates between personal experience and collective patterns, legitimating Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious.
Alchemy and the Squaring of the Circle
Alchemical texts speak of quadratura circuli, “squaring the circle.” The alchemist sought to lodge a rotundum within a rectilinear vessel—an image of reconciling fluid unconsciousness with stable consciousness. The opus mirrored psychic individuation: volatile instincts (mercury) distilled into fixed gold (lapis). In both laboratory and psyche, the circle-square dialectic framed the transformative fire.
Holding the Tension of Opposites
Mandalas dramatize the immediate problem of opposites. Within the secure rim, lion and ox, angel and eagle, sun and moon may confront one another without annihilation. The picture enacts a psychological experiment: opposites contemplated without repression gradually constellate a tertium, the “transcendent function,” which carries the system to a novel equilibrium.
Neurobiological Correlates
Neuropsychological conjecture posits that the generative impulse is located in subcortical organizers. Stimulation of the occipital cortex can elicit the perception of luminous circles and squares. These raw neural patterns become symbolic when psyche invests them with archetypal meaning. Thus, an early neural scaffold and a late cultural elaboration converge in a single image.
Therapeutic Function in Crisis
Clinically, mandalas appear at nodal crises—onset of schizophrenia, protracted neurosis, divorce, wartime trauma. The patient draws, paints, or visualizes a circle; the act localizes disarray, providing a stable “inner citadel” from which reintegration may proceed. The analyst’s task is not aesthetic critique but amplification of symbolic content until ego grasps the Self’s intention.
Childhood Mandalas and Development
Children instinctively doodle circles quartered by cross or radius. Their drawings preview the individuation drama decades before reflective thought. When the family environment collapses, the child’s mandala doubles as protective talisman, a micro-cosmos immune to external discord.
Ritual Entry and Transformation
In ritual traditions, the mandala is not merely viewed but entered. Tantric adepts visualize themselves passing through the flaming gates, visiting each quadrant, and finally merging with the central deity, a lived rehearsal of psychological reintegration. Christian pilgrims trace labyrinths on cathedral floors for the same purpose, though the iconography differs.
Modern Practice and Ethical Demand
Modern engagement demands more than passive admiration. When one paints a mandala or walks a labyrinth, one accepts the ethical demand to bring unconscious content into lived reality—relationships, institutions, ecological choices. The circle then ceases to be a decoration; it becomes the rotating mirror in which each practitioner sees civilization’s chaos gradually articulate into a cosmos.
Cosmos Remembered: A Final Reflection
When chaos presses, the mandala quietly reasserts cosmos. Its circular law reminds consciousness that fragmentation is provisional, that beneath uproar, a center endures, radiant and impersonal. By contemplating and embodying that center, the human animal realigns with the oldest geometry of psyche and world.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
I had a dream about standing in a cultivated garden looking at the ocean. Something large starting swimming towards me and out of the water came a mermaid. She was giant, at least 18 feet tall, muscular like a bodybuilder, naked. She almost but not quite shed her tail to stand on an arch structure just on the edge of the water. She stared at me smiling genuinely but with a slightly dark and scary smile, overall I didn’t feel like she was there to harm me so I kept looking at her.
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
Do you have a topic you want us to cover?
WE NEED YOUR HELP! Become a patron to keep TJL running.
We’d like to take a crack interpreting your dream.
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
Just wanted you to know that there is a MARI ( Mandela assessment research instrument) that is sometimes used by psychotherapists and art therapists.