Mandala of Life and
Living
(summary of book
manuscript by Rolf Sattler)
This book is about
life in the broadest sense, ranging from our personal life to
life of the Earth and the Universe. And it is not only
about
life; reading this book is
also living and the
transformation of living because it involves the reader totally:
humor, jokes, and laughter release tension, poetry and visual art
open up higher realms, and meditations (if they are practiced as suggested) may
create deeper awareness and lead to wisdom and compassion
beyond one’s imagination.
As the basis for the book I devised a mandala that is
presented in a conceptual and artistic version. This mandala
illustrates the relations between the
materialistic/mechanistic world view, the holistic world
view, and spirituality. In this connection, I discuss many
topics of personal, social and global dimensions that
encompass science, philosophy, art, and spirituality.
As the mandala emphasizes synthesis, it points to many
bridges, bridges between East and West, science/philosophy
and art/spirituality, materialistic, mechanistic mainstream
science and holistic science, body and mind, body and soul,
the mundane and the sacred, thinking and being, the many and
the One. It wants to create awareness that, although we often
cannot see the bridges, they are already there. We just have
to recognize them, and then we can walk over them, then we
can join “the other half” that has been so sorely separated
and for whose union we have been longing so much.
In this book I try to convey that living can always be like
a mandala that encompasses the sun and its
radiance, the source and its efflux, the unmanifest and
the manifest, mystery upon mystery...
The spiritually inclined reader might ask: So why bother
about science and philosophy? My answer is simple. Because
science has become an integral part of our society and our
lives, almost everything has been touched and permeated by
science and technology. Unless we completely retreat from
society, we cannot avoid science. And philosophy is at the
basis of science. One cannot engage in science without making
some philosophical assumptions. Our society and our lives
have been conditioned and permeated by philosophical ideas
and worldviews of which we are often unaware. Unless we
become aware of this conditioning, we cannot change it.
However, beyond philosophy and science we still have a
profound yearning, consciously or subconsciously, for art and
what some call spirituality and others simply know as
profound happiness, joy, bliss, enlightenment. It is for this
reason that the relation between science and philosophy on
the one hand and art and spirituality on the other may be one
of the most pressing issues in our society and our lives. Ken
Wilber, in his book on “The Marriage of Sense and Soul:
Integrating Science and Religion” (1998, p. 3) wrote that
“there is arguably no more pressing topic than the relation
of science and religion [spirituality] in the modern world.”
My book is about this relation. It also includes humor,
philosophy, and art that are important in our society. And it
is based on a mandala that relates everything to its source,
the unnamable mystery of all existence.
See also my book Wilber's AQAL Map and
Beyond