Joel Bowers is a digital artist publishing daily to his www.risingrims.com Web site and frequently to social media such as instagram.com/risingAbstracts, facebook.com/joelmbowers ,jmba.wordpress.com, twitter.com/jmbisdoing, medium.com/@risingrims, steemit.com/@abstracts, patreon.com/joelbowers
“If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
I just completed a mandala course and the instructor asked us to create a “World View” mandala.
What is a mandala?, you ask. Here are a couple definitions for a quick google search:
A geometric figure representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
a symbol in a dream, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness and self-unity.
A mandala (Sanskrit: मण्डल, maṇḍala; literally “circle”) is a spiritual and ritual symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism, representing the universe.[1] In common use, “mandala” has become a generic term for any diagram, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmosmetaphysically or symbolically; a microcosm of the universe.
The basic form of most mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the general shape of a T.[2][3] Mandalas often exhibit radial balance.[4]
I like the symmetry and colors in typical mandalas that I see, but have a hard time figuring out how they represent something with deeper meaning.
I guess you have to have a higher developed consciousness or intuition to guess what these might mean.
The only way that I could figure out how to “represent my world view in a mandala” was to place some words on it. The words used here are words from the titles of last months paintings. I have begun the practice of including inspirational quotes with my paintings (see http://www.risingrims.com). Then I title them based on a key idea in the included quotation.
The attached quote is chosen sort of randomly based on a couple thousand quotes that I have downloaded from the web, mostly from one of Eckhardt Tolle’s books. But it is amazing how often I can see some similarity between the independently created painting and the attached quote.
Here are a couple others recent paintings. The same words are used on a slightly different image:
