Page 117 - Contribution To Phenomenology

110 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

"the fullness of the person."^ Indeed, inwardness is to subjecthood and
to the mystery of being at the center as a radiant center is to fullness
and to the mystery of the center of being. Experiences of inwardness
and of a radiant center are archetypal experiences of light as spirit—or
psyche. Symbolically instantiated in the drawing of a mandala, they
become an archetypal human act aimed at self-understanding.*^ Drawing
the circular form is symbohc of wholeness.
Again, phenomenology itself as well as Husserl's languaging of the
relationship between Ego and Object sheds considerable light on why a
mandala is a basically circular form that cross-culturally symbolizes the
cosmos as well as the self. To put oneself in the center of the mandala
\& to be at the very hub of the universe, centered rather than spinning
along on the outer edge; to put oneself in the center is to be "at the
still point of the turning world,"^ at the unmoving eye of the storm,
calm, quiet, unjostled, unperturbed by all that is whirling about one in
three-dimensional space. Thus to be both inside and at the center of the
mystic circle of the mandala is to have the potential of understanding at
a cosmic level everything that is going on about one. No longer being
whirled along at the spinning edge, one has the possibility of apperceiving
the whole and with it, an illumination of the spirit—the animating
essence—of the cosmos itself. Putting oneself at the center is thus akin
to the phenomenological epoche—to bracketing the everyday fact-world
the better to see clearly into its nature, to accomphshing those cogita-

^ Ideas II, 292, 293.
*^ The act is dimly prefigured each time we close our eyes to sleep. As an
actual journey inward, it is presaged in a psychological sense by the world we find
awakened in the darkness of our fantasies and dreams. Like the eye itself, the eye
that is the mandala leads to the I, to the self, to the subject; so also it leads to the
fullness of myself as person, to my potential for wholeness, to the mandala that is
my body. (See Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, specifically chapter
5: "The Mandala in the Human Body.") Note also that Jung's "self-reflections,"
carried out over seven years and forming the basis of his analytic psychology,
document the symbolic connections between creative act and inwardness. Through
"active imagination," Jung actively generated and entered into a fantasy world
through which he charted the unconscious and its archetypal forms. See, for
example, his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, In this illustrated work,
Jung discusses mandalas and their significance.
^ The line is fi-om T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets ("Burnt Norton," IV) (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1943).