mandalaofsoul

plunged everything into darkness; a magnanimous resolution, a courageous decision radiated abeam of light. By and by I learnt to understand that love meant seeing and that hate wasblindness, was night…’ (Strauss, 65-66)We see in this statement that when fear possesses us, we contract the light. We can take fromthis that when we meet the outer reflection with fear, there is no complementary internal light fromwhich to make sense of our lives. In the Mandala Process, we reconnect with the complementaryresponse of our inner light that was in force during will development. We meet fear with heart, withcourage.Second BirthLife events begin to impact and process through drawing. Once we have our foundation, we can turn tobuilding new experience and meeting ourselves through the reflected external light of the world.On entering the second seven-year period the ability to reproduce as such what they sense intheir own life forces disappears. The first organic change as well as the change of teeth makes itclear to us that the processes that have been building up and refining the child’s organism so far,are now becoming free for other tasks. (Strauss, 84)We yield to the now unconscious imperative to go out from the “garden” and explore life in all itswonder and choice. Given that the archetypal will is healthy, we approach the consciousness-buildingnecessity of choice.The mysteries unravel and we begin to decipher the hieroglyphs. Children’s drawing makesvisible the path of incarnation….So the bridge cannot be found either in the physical orpsychological realm, but in a realm that belongs to neither of them; namely in the unconsciouslife processes that both day and night take their course on a sleeping level, in the actual realm ofphysiology…The reason why the bridge is so difficult to know about is because the stronger thelife processes are the more unconsciously they function.…The soul-spiritual nature of smallchildren is primarily engaged in the process of bodily incarnation. They build the bridges of lifebetween body and soul. In their diagrammatic pictures, that which is engaged in building thebody rises to the surface of visibility. They are, as it were, the sand washed up out of the ocean oforgan-formation, out of the subjectless and objectless ‘No-Man’s-Land’ of life processes. Weadults, who have finished growing and have replaced this activity with other activities, have toreorientate ourselves thoroughly, in order to have any understanding whatsoever of that whichonly intrigues us as yet. (Strauss, 84-86)We reconnect with this force by building another bridge from the unconscious to the physical. In this,the triangle makes its appearance as the “bridle,” the angulation (discussed more later) through which50