Mandala: The Path to the Centre?

That mandala above reminds me of being in HAL;-)

Hmm ... an anti-mandala maybe?

When I was down in Byron Bay recently, I bought a book that caught my attention called 'Introducing JUNG: A Graphic Guide'.
In fact, I bought a few books that day in the same bookstore as I wrote about in this post -
What Are We Going to Do About the Ibis?

So far, I have read Matt Haig's 'Notes on a Nervous Planet' and David Cohen's 'The Hunter', both excellent and life changing books for me in hindsight, and while I'm only halfway through 'Introducing JUNG: A Graphic Guide', it is proving to be a game changer, too.
There will be a lot more posts to come about my reading of this book, but I wanted to focus on Jung's idea of the mandala in this post.

Some of the mandalas in my computer
room that I noticed just now

Jung's first mandala supposedly 

Me in the centre

When I reluctantly started this blog, I chose the above picture for my blog avatar.
It's a picture I took of a roof of a shed at Kangaroo Point while on a walk in Brisbane, the city of my birth.
I never realized at the time that I took that photo that the roof was so reflective, and I had caught an image of myself in the centre.
It was a happy accident and I liked it as it reminded me of a living mandala. 

I used it as an avatar because I thought it represented myself better than any photo I could find to express who I really was ... a spirit caught in a changing and aging earthly body.
Some bloggers at the time were using a current (and usually doctored or the best one of probably over one hundred photos that they had taken to show themselves as best they could) selfie or a childhood photo (as if that doesn't say I've got a lot of baggage I'm working on and really don't like the current "me") of themselves as their avatar.   
To me this mandala like photo really represented my true "unchanging" self and the only constant in life is change, right?-)
Me, in the Centre
But what I really liked about my avatar mandala was it was also like an easy to get out of labyrinth with four ways out.
It was also like a lens, just like the one in my phone's camera that I used to "capture" myself.

But I've come to see that Jung's image of himself as being the centre point of a mandala doesn't quite work for me, as I like to see "myself" more like the "mandala" on Gordon White's 'The Chaos Protocols' book, a centre point that is able to expand outwards to see the big picture, as well as to contract inwards to a central point of focus.

Who's the centre point in that mandala?-)

I like how Jung had a dream in 1927 about being in Liverpool "the pool of life" amidst rain, SMOKE and fog and on a small island he came upon a small magnolia tree in blossom.

And then Richard Wilhelm sent him the manuscript for the above book.

"Magnolia is an ancient genus.

Appearing before bees did, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles.[ Beatles?!]

To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the carpels of Magnolia flowers are extremely tough.

Fossilised specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae date to 95 million years ago."

"Eat the liver of the divine child"?! LIVERPOOL?!

Hmm ... appearing before bees [Bee Gees?!] did, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles [Beatles?!].

Gee, Jung really did have some prophetic dreams it seems;-)

Open the pod bay door HAL.

Some mandalas just give me the creeps eye must say:-)
(H)AL Borealis?