The Mandala

            Chaos in our lives can be transformed to a degree into order by the psychic process of drawing a mandala, a universal psychic symbol for order. Chaos and cosmos exist together even at the quantum level. The quantum foam of science is comparable to the chaos of alchemy. Translating an alchemical work, Jung (1980) describes chaos as an “assortment of crude disordered matter.... [which nevertheless contains the] divine seeds of life” (pp. 144-145). This chaos-order relationship is also embedded in the Chinese symbol of yin-yang as shown in Figure 12 with a Jungian interpretation.

                 Figure 12. The Yin/Yang Model.                                                       

            The perfect circle, a symbol for linearity and order, uses B (the Greek letter pi) for its circumference as:

            But, B cannot be calculated exactly; it must always be rounded off and is therefore nonlinear. Pi is a chaotic number in the sense that it is undeterminable. For this reason, the circle is a good example of how chaos and order work together in perfect harmony (Peitgen, Jurgens, & Saupe, 1992).

            Jung (1990) saw the circle as a mandala, “the psychological expression of the totality of the self” (p. 304). According to Jaffé (1964), the circle is also a symbol of the psyche, while the symbol for the body is a square. Like the circle, the psyche can exhibit both stable and unstable modes, and it includes both conscious and unconscious aspects, as suggested by the yin-yang model in Figure 12.