THE MANDALA OF BEING
Discovering the Power of Awareness
Richard Moss, MD

INTRODUCTION

This book has been a true labor of love for me. It is the culmination and distillation of what I have learned in thirty years of teaching, around the world, about being fully alive no matter what the circumstances. It is an invitation to self-mastery, less in the sense of attaining a state of enlightenment, and more in the sense of living as a genuinely self-determining individual free from the dominion of fear. Real mastery is the ability to stay fully present for whatever life brings because we trust who we are.

Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, observed that all of us are seeking in myriad ways meaning and purpose in our lives, but that what we really want is the experience of feeling totally alive and completely free. This yearning wells up from deep within, and we know it to be essential and real. Responding to it has been one of the principal impulses of human endeavor; it is the true heart of spiritual life. To touch it is to awaken from sleep to such a sense of fullness that, for the first time, we recognize a certain emptiness that has always been a part of our lives. Suddenly, without thought, we know the answers to our deepest questions, such as why we are here.

Early on in my career as a consciousness teacher, I learned that it was relatively easy to bring people to a state of what I call “radical aliveness,” where the mind is silent, the body is filled with presence, and a new enthusiasm for living is born. The secret, I realized, lay not in deliberately invoking a particular state of consciousness but in creating activities that require the body and the mind to be in the same place — in the Now.

Some of us spontaneously experience moments of this aliveness in meditation or in making love. Others have tasted it in the flow of artistic creativity or in the exhilaration of athletic pursuits. But when we leave the focus of these contexts and return to the routine and challenges of daily living, few of us know how to sustain a sense of centeredness and joy. I have written extensively about reaching these states of aliveness in my previous books, especially The Black Butterfly and The Second Miracle.

In The Mandala of Being, I offer a simple practice that meets the challenge of maintaining this aliveness in daily life without requiring the presence of a teacher, a special sacred environment, or the heightened energy of a group of people exploring consciousness together.

I long ago recognized that it was always easier to remain spacious and present while I was teaching than when I was at home and involved with the demands of daily living. So I set about trying to understand what my mind was doing differently, both for my own sake and the sake of those whom I counseled. I already knew it was not a question of holding onto the same expansive state that we attained in our work together, that it was instead about reclaiming an equivalent quality of relationship to ourselves in the midst of ordinary life.

I realized that we needed to balance the experiential activities that invite presence, such as meditation, movement, and breath work, with a specific form of self-inquiry that helps us understand how our minds leave the Now. Obviously our bodies are always in the Now. As I began to carefully observe what the mind is actually doing when it moves away from the present, I saw that there are only four places that it ever goes. This added an essential element to my work.

The word mandala comes from ancient Sanskrit and means “circle.” In Eastern spiritual traditions, a mandala is a form of sacred art that depicts the totality of the Self. Mandalas appear to be universal symbols and have been found throughout many different periods and cultures.

In their simplest forms mandalas are circles with four primary directions oriented around a strong central focus. The circle represents the intrinsic wholeness of the Self, which naturally sustains within itself the fundamental tensions of opposing forces, such as chaos and order, masculinity and femininity.

One day while addressing a group and trying to share my insight about where the mind goes when it leaves the present, I found myself walking around to indicate a large circle on the floor and then tracing a smaller circle in the center of the larger one. I wrote the word Now on a piece of paper and set it on the small central circle. On the perimeter at the top of the large circle, I placed the word Future, and at the bottom the word Past. I then placed the word Subject on the left perimeter and the word Object on the right. Subject-object is the psychological term for the inherently dualist nature of our ordinary consciousness, in which, as soon as we become aware of ourselves as the “subject,” me, we simultaneously become aware of the “object,” you. Me isn’t who we really are, but is the collection of thoughts we have about ourselves. Likewise, you is the collection of thoughts we have about others. With this simple mandala, I could show the four directions that the mind escapes to when it flees from the Now, usually because of an uncomfortable or threatening feeling.

I spontaneously named this model the Mandala of Being, and it has proven to be, both for me and those I have taught it to, a highly effective tool for deconstructing and understanding the mechanisms of our repeated patterns of emotional struggle and suffering. Using the Mandala model, we can see that our recurrent reactivity and defensiveness results from our being unaccustomed to living in the present. Moreover, the specific nature of this suffering is a consequence of which of the four directions our minds predominantly move in when we leave the Now. By recognizing that there truly are only four places to go when we step out of the Now, we can always find our way back home. Living in the Now becomes our starting point, not our goal.

The power to return our minds to the Now allows us to communicate more of our inborn authentic and spontaneous natures. The present moment becomes our ground of being, because that’s where we’ll find the juice of life and the truth of who we are and why we are here.

In working with this model, we start to understand the relationship between thinking and emotion. We learn how to recognize the particular thoughts, beliefs, and stories we tell ourselves as our minds move in each of the four directions in turn, and how each story contracts or agitates our bodily sensation in specific ways. When the mind is in the future, the body experiences worry or hope; when it is in the past, the body registers guilt, nostalgia, or regret.

An essential component of the Mandala of Being is that it will guide us to a new relationship with our bodies, where real understanding must occur before we truly know something. By elucidating how we “leave ourselves” in daily life situations, this work opens the pathway of awareness that consistently returns us to the Now. By feeling the shift in sensation as we return ourselves to the Now, our bodies begin to recognize presence. As we begin to understand the power of our own awareness to help us live in the present, we shift our emotional reality from what we typically call negative emotions to the sense of joyfulness and freedom that is our essential natures.

In learning to live more consistently in the Now, we increase the energy of our consciousness. In the sense that I am using it here, this “energy” is our capacity to be present and is what emanates from us through this actual act of being present. It takes heightened energy to give ourselves the spiritual muscle needed to embrace feelings that have for so long closed our hearts and dimmed our lights, instead of collapsing into them. This energy brings our awareness to the Now and allows us to see what is, not merely what our usual desires or fears might predispose us to see.

When our awareness is rooted in the present, we access our higher emotional potential — empathy, compassion, and forgiveness. We experience greater oneness with a vast field of awareness that far transcends our limited personal realities. We begin to touch the Source, to drink from a fountain of aliveness and intelligence in which we perceive each moment’s innate wholeness and to which our natural response is a sense of gratitude, wonderment, and implicit trust in life’s goodness.

As our minds move further from the Now, we begin to function from a lower emotional register. Lower energy represents a shrinking of consciousness, so we feel smaller and isolated. We become dogmatic, inflexible, and self-protective. Then we become the victims of fear, anger, distrust, neediness, and other potentially destructive emotions. The profound depths of our larger consciousness become less available to us, and even threatening. We lose our innate sense of delight in life. Instead of feeling connected to ourselves and embracing life with the fullness of our beings, we live more and more from a false and contracted sense of self designed to keep us safe from whatever we don’t want to feel.

In this sheltered but simultaneously limited state of mind, we become spectators — and too often even critics — who believe that we are, and that the world is, what we think. When we are unconsciously in this Self-avoiding mode, thinking about ourselves, others, and the world at large is our favorite pastime because we do not know what it is to feel our own depths in the present moment and taste life directly. Eventually, our minds become addicted to states of ever-greater distancing from the “now-ness” of our beings. This is the fundamental reason we experience so much dissatisfaction with ourselves, and why we often lack empathy for others.

The first teacher of the unawakened mind is fear. As children we are always in the Now, transparent to love but also vulnerable to every traumatic moment. To survive emotionally we learn to project the mind away from overwhelming sensations like loneliness and shame. We withdraw our awareness from the present, where all sensations are the most alive and are potentially too intense. Gradually we become conditioned to avoid the Now and, as a result, intimacy with ourselves and with life diminishes.

In my years as a teacher, I have seen that what inevitably halts our spiritual maturity and compromises our capacity to love is believing that we must protect ourselves from difficult feelings, such as abandonment and despair. But the only reason we cannot face them is that we have not developed the energy to stay present with them as they arise. However, until we stop fleeing whatever feelings we believe can annihilate us, we cannot mature fully or love without restraint. Sooner or later we must embrace these dark parts of life. We must trust the soul’s profound capacity to meet and be in relationship with whatever we experience, without having to defend ourselves or even react.

There is an enormous difference between how the self meets experience — how it judges and reacts to a feeling — and how the soul meets the same experience or feeling. The self’s relationship to any aspect of life is always strategic: it seeks to increase its pleasure, security, or power, and it reflexively defends against any feeling or situation that threatens it. In contrast, the soul does not see a feeling as an extension of itself or a threat to itself. The soul appreciates any feeling for what it is, and in this nonreactive, nonstrategic relationship we learn to make room for our feelings instead of closing down or fleeing from them. The way the soul meets each moment transforms our sense of self.

Few of us are aware of the power of this inner relationship and how it can transform the way we experience ourselves and everything else. Instead we reflexively use our minds to defend against difficult feelings or challenging situations, not realizing that when we do this we are never in the Now. As a result, consciously or subconsciously, we frequently feel as if our lives are built on quicksand. We feel as if we are in danger of being engulfed by any sensation, thought, or event that threatens the tenuous foundation of self on which we are poised.

But when we become conscious of the subtle power of awareness and increase our ability to remain present, we begin to see that the reality of our experience, and what we are further capable of experiencing, is determined ultimately by the quality of our relationship to ourselves during every moment. We need not be determined by our defensive thoughts or by our reactions to what comes to us from outside. As our ability to stay present increases, we at last discover real freedom from fear and other difficult emotions that have ruled us. We realize our essential wholeness and gain the ability to enjoy relationships that spontaneously invite love, respect, forgiveness, and empathy. We claim the power to exercise our awareness in ways that liberate our minds and our hearts.

This book is a handbook for reclaiming the wisdom of your true self. It is an initiation of conscious intimacy with yourself, with all of who you are — even the darkest aspects. We can never feel whole by trying to eliminate any part of our experience. As we begin to consistently trust this truth, we recover the aliveness we have yearned for.

In our hearts, all of us know that the human spirit is so much more than a “me” that recurrently feels threatened and dissatisfied, that endlessly seeks to find happiness while feeling that somehow, something is wrong with us. We intuit that we have the capacity to reconnect to the source of our own beings.

Soul, for me, is our capacity for self-awareness. It is the ability to ask “Who am I?” in a way that silences the thinking mind and opens us to immediacy. The soul imbues all that we are and, at the same time, can lead us beyond where we are, even to oneness with the source of our beings. For the soul, each moment is a new starting point from which it can take the next step to greater awareness.

Who we really are, always begins Now. None of us will become our true selves at some fortuitous moment in the future. Our real identities never originate from the remembered glory or traumas of our pasts. It begins anew with the attention we offer to ourselves and to life in each moment. The Now is not an ultimate state to be realized but rather a continuum to be lived. We can hide in the shallows or risk diving deeply.

At this evolutionary moment, humankind is wavering between fear and love, focusing on survival and yet beginning to touch the infinite potential of being. In brief moments we know the undeniable rightness of all things; we come home to ourselves and understand that we are already that which we have been seeking. Yet at the slightest threat, we revert to distrust and control, once again losing confidence in who we are. Simultaneously, we unconsciously externalize this inner breach of faith and perceive a threatening world. Instantly we are back with both feet in the dominion of fear.

With both feet firmly on the terrain of love, we find that life is not about survival, it is about thriving. It is about consciously embracing each moment, aware of our parts in a great wholeness. In the ecology of love, all things have their rightful place and purpose, including our most difficult feelings. In the wisdom of love, we gain the energy to encompass what we formerly fled.

What is needed now, what evolution itself is demanding, is that we experience the self-transcending power of the soul. We do not have to change the world. We need only reclaim the fullness of our beings that is ever present and always seeking to awaken in us. In so doing, we become transmitters of a profound faith in life, and the world begins to change.

What you will find in these pages can be tested in your own experience and will support your own emerging wisdom. When we live with true intelligence, we build our worlds moment by moment from a sense of our own wholeness and thereby always invite wholeness. There is nothing more important, now or ever. Wholeness is where our hearts want to go and where our souls are leading us.

Join me now, and let’s dive deeply together.

Excerpted from The Mandala of Being Copyright © 2007 by New World Library
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