Self Inquiry: The Mandala Approach

Central to Richard’s work is the intent that each individual develops the capacity to become his/her own teacher. In order to learn to live from our innate fullness and greatest natural authority, it is necessary to understand the nature of the psychological realities we default into again and again. We can frame our self-inquiry this way: Where do we go when we are not in the Now?

If you consider this question carefully, you will see that there are only four possible places your mind can carry you at the instant you leave the here and now of yourself. Your thinking will take you either into the past, the future, ideas about yourself, or ideas about others. (‘Others’ can include anything that can become an object of consciousness such as money, job, or our own bodies.) These four directions by which the mind leaves the Now, exist because of two fundamental continuums that form the basis of our human experience: time and subject-object consciousness. By drawing the time continuum and the subject-object continuum as two perpendicular lines which intersect in the center, the Now moment, we create the model that Richard calls the Mandala of Being™. (See diagram below)

The Mandala of Being™ reflects two very different levels of human functioning. Some of us live almost exclusively turned away from the Now. Psychologically we are wholly identified with the Past, the Future, the Subject (Me) and the Object (You) positions of the Mandala. This identification leads – depending upon which of the positions our minds are predominantly in – to emotions of guilt, regret, nostalgia, blame, fear, false hope, anger, hurt, grandiosity, and depressiveness. Others of us are awakening to our true selves and have begun to orient ourselves towards the Now. This simple shift, though few sustain it with any regularity, nevertheless has enormous consequences for it connects us to our innate capacity for spontaneity, forgiveness, compassion, joy, and trust.

The Mandala approach provides a simple, but powerful method of self-inquiry. By realizing that there are only four places our minds can carry us, we can learn to recognize when we have moved into the Me, You, Past, or Future positions. Then using simple questions we can identify the specific stories we tell ourselves at each of these positions. Once we learn to recognize our stories, we can then take the step of feeling the emotional and energetic consequences of these stories. We learn how our beliefs and stories poison our Now. Then we have a choice to stay in the toxicity of these stories, or to return our attention to the present and regain connection to clarity and well-being. Through self inquiry and refined body consciousness we are learning to differentiate at a feeling level between mentally created suffering and our essential state. The Mandala, by continuously reorienting us toward the Now, provides a model for practicing self inquiry that restores us to our authentic and spontaneous selves.

Richard works with the premise that in the Now our true nature is already and always whole. But, moment by moment, when we feel threatened, or just because of a lifetime of self-avoidance habits, we contract away from this wholeness into past, future, me or you stories. Doing this repeatedly, we become drugged by the emotional reality these stories create and this state of intoxication becomes our default identity, the constantly recreated attitudes, moods and sensations by which we know that we exist. If we can learn to become more aware in the midst of these contracted states, that very awareness gradually frees us from their limiting influence.

For an in-depth discussion of The Mandala Approach to self inquiry, see Richard’s latest book, The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness.

Back to The Teaching