Awaken to the unique threading of your personal mandala.
In the Diamond Approach, we’re all weavers* at heart – or more precisely; we are explorers and discoverers of our unique, personal mandala woven from a vast array of experiences, processes, and understandings that are the threads that weave into our uniquely personal mandala.
(*Somewhere in one or two of the many books he authored, Idries Shah reports how mystical knowledge was woven into the design pattern of carpets, making them “magic carpets,” referring to how the knowledge they contained could transport you to the real world.)
In the beginning stages of learning inquiry as a methodology for being where we are and allowing a process of transformation, we discover and follow single “threads” that weave through our historical content, our present-day situation, the veils hindering our perception, and – well, the whole nine yards of our life and consciousness.
I may be inquiring into my closed heart… I explore the tightness around my heart… I find a dark “no, not again.” I find aggression supporting the no and a more defined barrier against intrusion… and so the thread goes… elements and issues around the red and green essences are each threads.
One of the most powerful potentials of the practice of inquiry is the revelation of our personal thread. – A. H. Almaas
Following our threads in weaving our personal mandala
As we engage and participate in a regression through our conditioning and an awakening to the real in us, we discover and explore many threads. As our capacities mature, we become aware that our threads are composed of many filaments, and our process of unfolding has many threads intersecting and intertwining.
There might be several threads. But if you recognize what they are, you will see that they actually make up one unified thread. Each thread is composed of sub-threads, and those are also composed of sub-threads. So you might see several threads, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a central one uniting all of them. There is, and that is the point. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 25
Following a thread around the personal essence. One might discover a very elaborate thread with many filaments of different colors threaded into a single thread, like silk might be woven into a thread or a seaman’s knot. With curiosity and inner vision one might recognize each of these colored filaments as different essential qualities involved in the process of revelation and understanding of the personal essence.
There may be a blend of threads running from totally opaque to pure transparency – history, conditioning, defenses, insights & understandings, and essential qualities.
Images of this thread arising in the mind might look like this or this, if we look at a cross section. The cross-section is a view in one moment of time.
Inner Vision
Some of us think we have no inner vision or struggle to “develop” it. We are visual animals. More than 50 percent of the cortex, the brain’s surface, is devoted to processing visual information. Mental imagery underlies language and concepts. Image creation in the brain is always happening, whether conscious or unconscious.
The most basic conscious brain vision is a simple picture in the brain. Think of an apple. There you go.
It helps to recognize that the brain images experience 24/7. It’s what it does. What is it imaging? External input, memories, thoughts, etc. – AND very significant – impressions from the soul.
Impressions from the soul arrive in the brain as vibrations or wave patterns that the brain automatically attempts to image within its more limited parameters – the soul is not constrained in this way. Think of the difficulty the brain has in trying to image a color beyond the visible spectrum. All of its approximations would be in vain.
Inquiry is the key to inner vision
The soul doesn’t have eyes or ears. It functions with direct knowing – experiential knowing, not reflective knowing. Developing inner vision is what inquiry does, and the mind images all the data from all input channels.
As we inquire, adding more and more data, our process of understanding widens and deepens, and we become more sensitive to the soul impression – the immediacy of the form in the experiential medium. This is inner vision, not the brain image, the picture.
The Thread of Experience
So you can look at all of your life as an unfolding thread in the experiential universe, a thread that moves within many dimensions simultaneously. And we are all related threads—sometimes interconnecting, sometimes intersecting—within the universe of experience. But none of that makes sense if we’re not aware of our experience, if we’re not present in it, if we don’t have some kind of understanding or recognition of what it is, of its meaning. Remember that this is an unfolding thread of meaning as well as of experience. – A. H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, ch. 15
As we continue our exploration of true nature through our history and current parameters of knowledge & perception, inquiry becomes increasingly multi-threaded. We have multiple inquiries and revelations in process. Each of these has many threads. Threads intersect, intertwine, ravel, and unravel, travel together for a while, then go their separate ways.
So, as you see, there is always a continuity of meaning for each of us, if we’re practicing being where we are. This continuity of meaning I call the personal thread. A lot is happening in the universe. The universe itself is flowing and moving and changing, and everybody and everything that composes it is moving and changing as well. Within that shared reality, each one of us is having our own personal experience in terms of where we are—our personal thread. Recognizing our personal experience, being with it, feeling it with immediacy and awareness and understanding—brings not only meaning but a thread of meaning, a continuity of meaning. And this thread of meaning is our own individual unfolding journey of truth. – A. H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, ch. 15
As we experience more and of the totality of this, an experiential mandala emerges, which the mind will do its thing with – attempting to image it. All imaging falls short of completeness.
You, the mandala
One definition of a mandala is a geometric figure representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism. There is a vast difference between the representational mandala, brain imaging, and the experiential mandala, the form in the soul.
As the soul reclaims and re-members true nature, its sensitivity, and impressionability become more available to the transparent ego. Psychological and emotional vulnerability tangled up with survival gives way to the openness of being.
An experiential sense of wholeness begins to return. We become aware of our uniquely woven pattern that has many facets or faces, not only in this world but in dimensions untold.
What is required of us is not just to know the thread, but also to know its relationship to the totality of the mandala. Because if we focus on one or the other, we tend to split our experience. If we focus only on the thread, only on the essential presence, without paying attention to the totality of the mandala, then we can become spiritual materialists. Some essential development will occur, but it will be split off from the rest of your soul, so a large part of your soul is not touched, not transformed. On the other hand, when people always focus on their problems and difficulties, or only on their external circumstances, they lose track of their essential presence. Either way, there’s an imbalance. So we need to be aware of understanding both the essential presence—the center of the experience of the mandala—and the totality of the mandala. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 10
Our personal presence is at the center of all threads and the totality of the mandala.
Quantum Mandala
An issue we all go through is getting trapped, at times, in a particular view, perspective, or location in our mandala. In a way, our presence moves from the center of the connective hub to some “less than total” vantage point in the mandala.
Here we see how the essential presence determines the thread of your understanding by unfolding it, which makes it the center of the mandala. The presence transforms from one quality to another, from one dimension to another, which determines the issues pervading your mandala, with their feelings and memories and their effect on your life. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, ch. 10
Again, the conditioning of the mind and the three-dimensional world impinges on what is happening.
We are like electrons – we show up where attention is focused. In the freedom of our nature, we are everywhere and nowhere – at all times and at no time. Wherever we are, we are at the center of our experience.
The center of our mandala, our presence, can be experienced like the movement of a gravity wave around the mandala. Through experience, we learn to stay with the gravity (presence) and not get lost in the local vantage point and its event horizon.
This, too, is an interpretation, an approximation of a multidimensional experience being squished into a four or three-dimensional container. It gives us something to discuss but loses potential and opportunity if we can’t sustain awareness of the soul impressions functioning as part of the enlightenment drive.
Kaleidoscope of Individual Logos
As we become more stationed in presence, as the center of the mandala, we begin to notice that the center never moves, never has moved. Movement is unnecessary, as the center is centered in all “places.”
The center is not of time and space, so it never moves.
What, then, is going on?
The logos of reality is happening. Appearance is arising and arising and arising. The seemingly changing universe is a morphing, experiential field, AND it’s morphing as our personal logos, unique thread and mandala.
One image the mind can offer up of this and one way to experience the center of presence in relationship to the logos is like a kaleidoscope. I am presence, and the logos is the kaleidoscope of appearance rotating my perceptive lens.
Imagine…
…presence in each of those transparent crystals and you at the experiential epicenter.