In the beginning, I was simply walking in the woods and saw an aster by the path. After that, during the late spring, summer, and early autumn of 1995 I drew a series of mandalas that incorporated circle images from some of my dreams. This experience took me back to some of my favorite books to read about mandalas and circles:
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and
round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there
I saw more then I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in
a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all
shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop
of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as
starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the
children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
--Black
Elk
A wheel was shown to me,
wonderful to behold...Divinity...is like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can
neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended...no one has the power
to divide this circle, to surpass it, or to limit it.
--Hildegard of
Bingen
The self, I thought, was like the monad which I am, and which is my world. The mandala represents this monad, and corresponds to the microcosmic nature of the psyche.
...When I began drawing the mandalas...I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point--namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.
...I began to
understand that the goal of psychic development is the self...I knew that in
finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me
the ultimate.
--Carl
Jung
If you share my interest in these people, or in the idea of circles as symbols of the Self and of Divinity, I'd like to hear from you.
I'm returning to these pages after an absence of a few years. I've tried to leave the original pages intact, but I find myself making minor revisions to them. When adding whole new sections I'll divide the text with a line, as I have above. If you visited these pages before, you'll notice that the design is different, and the Flash animation at the beginning is new. But all the mandalas are still here; and I've added some additional and later mandalas.
The aster link above goes to a new area I think of as a virtual labyrinth. It's a work-in-progess; so you may find some dead ends. The navigation is not straight forward--the images sometimes have multiple hot spots; and the journey is meandering.