Carl Jung on the Square Mandala
The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga
Mrs. Sawyer: But he called a square a mandala. [Footnote 15: Hauer stated: “In his description of the muladharara chakra, Hauer referred to the “square or mandala of the earth” (HS, 71). ]
Dr. Jung: Yes, he calls that a mandala, and naturally anything within is a mandala too, and this is exactly what you see in the Lamaistic pictures:
The mandala, the lotus, is inside, as well as the temple, and the cloister with the square walls, the whole surrounded by the magic circle; then above are the gods, and mountains below.
The term mandala with us has taken on an importance which it does not possess in India, where it is merely one of the Yantras, an instrument of worship in the Lamaistic cult and in tantric yoga.
And mind you, the tantric school is little known in India—you could ask millions of Hindus, and they would not have the faintest idea of what it was.
It would be as if you asked the honorable citizens of Zurich what they had to tell you of scholasticism; they would know about as much as the Hindu knows about tantric yoga. And if you asked a Hindu what a mandala was, he would say that a round table, or anything circular, was a mandala.
But to us it is a specific term.
Even within the frame of the tantric school the mandala has not the importance that it has with us. Our idea of it would come nearest to Lamaism, the Tibetan religion, but this is hardly known, and its textbooks have been translated only very recently, hardly ten years ago.
One of the fundamental sources is the Shrichakrasambhara, a tantric text translated by Sir John Woodroffe. ~Carl Jung, Seminar on Kundalini Yoga, Page 12.
Anima Mundi Mandala
“Now, all these myth-pictures represent a drama of the human psyche on the further side of consciousness, showing man as both the one to be redeemed and the redeemer.
The first formulation is Christian, the second alchemical. In the first case man attributes the need of redemption to himself and leaves the work of redemption, the actual opus, to the autonomous divine figure; in the latter case man takes upon himself the duty of carrying out the redeeming opus, and attributes the state of suffering and consequent need of redemption to the anima mundi imprisoned in matter. In both cases redemption is a work.
In Christianity it is the life and death of the God-man which, by a unique sacrifice, bring about the reconciliation of man, who craves redemption and is sunk in materiality, with God. The mystical effect of the God-man’s self-sacrifice extends, broadly speaking, to all men, though it is efficacious only for those who submit through faith or are chosen by divine grace; but in the Pauline acceptance it acts as an apocatastasis and extends also to non-human creation in general, which, in its imperfect state, awaits redemption like the merely natural man.” Psychology and Alchemy (Part 3, Chapter 3.3).
Carl Jung’s first Mandala
More than twenty years earlier (in 1918), in the course of my investigations of the collective unconscious, I discovered the presence of an apparently universal symbol of a similar type the mandala symbol.
To make sure of my case, I spent more than a decade amassing additional data, before announcing my discovery for the first time.
The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages.
It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.
In contrast to Boehme’s mandala, the modern ones strive for unity; they represent a compensation of the psychic cleavage, or an anticipation that the cleavage will be surmounted.
Since this process takes place in the collective unconscious, it manifests itself everywhere.
The worldwide stories of the UFOs are evidence of that; they are the symptom of a universally present psychic disposition. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 334-335.
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