Our fragmented and chaotic world is no longer recognizable to us. Disease, divisiveness, destruction, and death seem to pervade the globe. In our fatigue and aloneness, we suffer from overwhelming feelings of sorrow, sadness, compassion, fear, and anger. As we seek ways to mitigate the misery, we long to make sense of it. Jung described how the mandala, an archetype of the Self, manifests at times of crisis, when there is a need for structure and centering. As creative arts therapists, we turn to creativity and imagery as a way to navigate toward wholeness and balance for all our clients, regardless of their challenges. What if we could observe our world as if it were someone in therapy, one who is in the throes of experiencing the inherent challenges of being on what James Hollis calls “two great mythic cycles. . .the Quest and the Great Round?” Perhaps by examining the mandala images that abound in contemporary media, we can find some clues.
This image-rich online presentation proposes a way to explore our world through the lens of a Jungian-inspired mandala theory, grounded in art therapy. The blueprint of the Great Round helps to explain how states of consciousness interact and influence each other and illustrates how our world is attempting to re-align and re-center itself. Storyteller Robert Johnson has been quoted as saying, “Nature would act on the human world in the same way that the collective unconscious could act on the ego when it is dangerously out of alignment. . .so life could order itself around a new center.” This global perspective found in the wisdom of the Great Round provides us with hope that healing for our ailing world is not only possible, but ultimately imminent.
This video was formerly included in the Expressive Media Arts Therapies Films Collection distributed by Expressive Media Inc.
