According to Jung, the mandala describes and symbolizes the psychic totality. The transcendent function has the living symbol as its driving force and the dream as its vehicle.
For Jung, the mandala is involved in two types of representations:
- The mandala that repeats and imitates, sometimes with religious care.
- The production mandala of the unconscious.
It is above all the unconscious that interests Jung and he writes in his correspondence (T. IV, p. 26.): “The unconscious reacts instinctively, and instinct never imitates; it reproduces itself without conscious example; it follows its “biological pattern of behaviour.”
The unconscious has its creative project and resists the efforts of consciousness to impose its one-sidedness on what is considered the good model by the aesthetics of the time. For the unconscious there are no modes.
The meaning of the center of the mandalas
Jung does not neglect the historical and symbolic side of the mandalas.
The representational mandalas are very old. The term originally means circle, especially magic circle. In the form of drawings they are found in the East, especially in Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan tradition traces the origin of the mandala to the Buddha Shakyamuni, who created the Kalachakra mandala himself shortly after his awakening.
Tibetan mandalas are sometimes very complicated. Jung attributes a calming effect on the soul to their creation. Their contemplation relieves tension and gives life a sense of order and purpose. Mandalas are also instruments of evolution. “They are yantras or ritual instruments designed for contemplation and for the ultimate transformation of the yogi’s personal consciousness into the universal divine consciousness.” (Psychology and Religion, p.138)
“Squiggly” mandalas that have ritual or religious significance are also found in medieval works. Christian mandalas from this period often depict a Rex Gloriae, King of Glory, with the four evangelists. In all these types of mandalas, the emphasis is on the center: “…always the harmonization of lines occurs around an ideal center or represents it in a direct (symbolic) way. For example, the rich ornamentation that accompanies the representation of the cross. ” (Correspondence, T. IV, p.224.)
Mandalas in dream
Despite their esthetic or spiritual value, it is not these types of mandalas that make Jung think.
His interest is in the mandalas that appear in the dreams and drawings of modern people with no knowledge of traditions or religious art and no artistic talent. When his patients drew mandalas after dreams to materialize their reactions, he did not attach importance to their more or less successful execution. The function of the mandala for him is to be a proxy: “The unconscious produces a natural symbol, which I have technically called the mandala, which has the functional significance of a reconciliation of opposites, that is, of a mediation. (Psychology and Religion, p.179.)
In this text we find all the elements of what Jung understands by mandalas when it comes to dream-like expressions.
Mandala is a term chosen by Jung to denote the result of an elaboration carried out thanks to the collaboration between an unconscious, which, as we have said, is pure nature, and the conscious, which seems to be searching for a lost form to fulfill its quest for totality.
The mandala as a balance to fear
The mandala-like configuration often occurs in situations of confusion, disorientation, and bewilderment: “The archetype that this situation constellates through compensation represents a scheme of order that somehow comes to rest on the psychic chaos, a bit like the crosshairs of a telescope, like a circle divided into four equal parts that helps each content to find its place and contributes, thanks to the circle that delimits and protects, to maintain in their cohesion the elements of a whole that is in danger of getting lost in an indefinite indeterminacy.” (A Modern Myth, p. 269.)
To protect against this danger, the mandalas of Mahâyana Buddhism are images of the temporal cosmic order, which can be seen as a representation of the psychological order.
Our time is characterized by anxiety, disorientation and perplexity. This state is likely to de-potentiate the ego, and it is normal that this type of structures appears
The mandala as a balance to fear
The mandala-like configuration often occurs in situations of confusion, disorientation, and bewilderment: “The archetype that this situation constellates through compensation represents a scheme of order that somehow comes to rest on the psychic chaos, a bit like the crosshairs of a telescope, like a circle divided into four equal parts that helps each content to find its place and contributes, thanks to the circle that delimits and protects, to maintain in their cohesion the elements of a whole that is in danger of getting lost in an indefinite indeterminacy.” (A Modern Myth, p. 269.)
To protect against this danger, the mandalas of Mahâyana Buddhism are images of the temporal cosmic order, which can be seen as a representation of the psychological order.
Our time is characterized by anxiety, disorientation and perplexity. This state is capable of depotentiating the ego, and it is normal that this kind of structures appear in the dreams of Westerners as a compensatory phenomenon.
The mandala reappears, without external tradition, as a modern symbol that orders and encompasses the psychological totality, and it appears more and more as a “psychological symbol of the totality”. Jung confirms this in a sentence from a work from the end of his life, A Modern Myth, which summarizes the meaning and function of the mandala: “Since the mandala describes and symbolizes the psychic totality, protects and defends it against the outside, and seeks to reconcile the inner opposites, it represents a true symbol of individuation; and as such it was already known to us in medieval alchemy.” (p. 55.)
Symbol
The unconscious produces symbols, Jung says, but what is the meaning and the limit of the symbolic realm?
A precise answer is found in the definition in Definition 55 of Psychological Types. (pp. 468 to 476.) This is an essential text if one wants an idea of what Jung calls a living symbol, the only kind of symbol that is really of interest in the context of the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness. Other information is scattered throughout the work, often with less clarity.
Sign, Symbol and Allegory
Jung begins by distinguishing between sign, symbol, and allegory.
For the sign, he gives the example of the winged wheel of a Swiss railroad employee. This wheel does not symbolize the railroad, it is only the sign of belonging to this organization. Moreover, it is a known fact that leaves no room for other meanings.
For Jung, to see a symbolic expression in an analogy or an abbreviated designation of a known fact is semiology. When we transform this known fact into a metaphor, it is an allegory.
In order for it to be considered a symbol, it presupposes, as he writes, that: “The chosen expression designates or formulates as perfectly as possible certain facts which are relatively unknown, but whose existence is proved or seems necessary.” (p.469)
At the level of the symbol, then, a window must remain open to the imagination, a potential for significant plurality. It is the significance of this opening that will make the difference between the “living” and the “dead” symbol.
Symbol of living and symbol death
As long as a symbol is alive, it is the best possible expression of a fact. To remain so, it must be both “meaningful” and “the highest expression of what is felt but not yet recognized.” “
Any scientific theory, any psychological phenomenon can be a living symbol, provided that they express “something more” that is beyond knowledge at the time.
We propose to call the living symbol an open symbol.
Jung adds: “It depends primarily on the attitude of the observing consciousness whether something is a symbol or not; the mind, for example, sees in given facts not only what they are, but also the expression of an unknown. Thus it is quite possible to determine a fact which does not appear symbolic to its originator, although it is so to another consciousness, and vice versa. (p.470)
For this reason Jung calls the attitude which interprets a given phenomenon as a symbol symbolic.
When the meaning becomes perfectly clear and we have found the formulation that best explains what is sought, expected, or felt, we are dealing with a dead symbol, which we will call a closed symbol that no longer has historical value. Jung is willing to still consider it a symbol, and it is often encountered in dreams, but on the condition that it be restored to the context in which it lived before it “brought forth a better expression of itself.”
To summarize Jung’s thought: For a symbol to remain alive, the critical mind must not overcome it, or it will be reduced to the role of a conventional sign.
The vitality of the symbol
The living symbol is rooted both in what is most differentiated on the level of consciousness and in representations so primitive and collective that their universality cannot be doubted. This is what makes it so powerful. This applies to individual symbols as well as those of social groups, but only those that aim at the realization of the unknown are true symbols.
The fact that there is controversy over what a symbolic expression does or does not mean is testimony to its vitality.
Since symbols are of an infinitely complex nature, and this complexity is distinguished by the conscious ego, it is normal that they borrow data from all psychic functions. The symbol, Jung writes, is not: “…neither rational nor irrational. On the one hand, it is accessible to reason; on the other hand, it eludes it because, in addition to rational data, it consists of irrational data derived from pure inner and outer perception. By its divinatory side, by its hidden sense, the symbol makes the thought vibrate as well as the feeling; its unique plasticity covers it with sensually perceptible forms, which excite the sensation as well as the intuition. The living symbol cannot appear in a dull and undeveloped mind, because the latter is satisfied with the already existing symbol as offered to it by the traditional one. (p.473)
The symbol and the transcendent function
Very opposite tendencies, ranging from the most differentiated mental functions to the most primitive instincts, manifest themselves through symbols, especially in dreams. It is therefore normal, Jung says, that: “…a state of very violent disagreement with oneself, as thesis and antithesis negate each other and the ego is forced to recognize its unconditional participation in each. But when the one predominates, the symbol will be mainly its product; it is then not so much a symbol as a symptom of a suppressed antithesis.” (p.473)
The symbol as a symptom, even if consciousness does not recognize it, is then nothing but a claim to the right of existence of all parts of the psyche.
The equality of thesis and antithesis is not more liberating. A stationary state is established because opposing forces of equal intensity confront each other, causing a stagnation of the will.
This is a situation that life, consciously or unconsciously, does not tolerate. From the tension of the antagonists a new unifying function emerges, whose motor is the living symbol and whose preferred vehicle is the dream: the “transcendent function”.
The technique of Mandala is a central technique of my programs.
