The Ancient Solution to a Modern Dilemma
Image: Mandala from Jung’s The Red Book (Liber Novus)
We live in an age of extreme division. Our cultural and societal conditioning fragment our body, mind, and spirit — and this inner fragmentation echoes in how we separate from each other and from the natural world. Our outer conflicts mirror our inner ones.
When we cling to being “right” and making others “wrong,” we deepen the divide. We often forget that while our truth matters, it’s not the only truth.
The Tibetans — like the ancient Greeks — understood this. They knew the mind could be freed from rigid, binary thinking through a practice called the tetralemma. The Greek word dilemma means “two premises” — neither of which feel acceptable. The tetralemma adds two more, opening the mind to possibilities beyond rigid either/or thinking. In meditation, practitioners would place opposing truths — masculine/feminine, right/wrong, want/don’t want — at the four points of a mandala:
They would enter each position, feel its essence, and then return to the mandala’s centre — the place where all truths can coexist and where the mind can remain free and unbound.
Carl Jung, deeply drawn to this same underlying wholeness, filled his Red Book with mandalas. He called the integration of opposites the 'transcendent function' — a portal to our most authentic Self.
“COACH” is an acronym for a state of centred, open, aware, connected and holding (of everything in one’s experience)
When we practice this loosening of identification from rigid perspectives, our sense of what really matters shifts. We can listen more deeply. We respond instead of react. We open ourselves to creative solutions to conflicts and impasses.
As we remember ourselves as something deeper than surface forms, we can begin again to live from the intelligence of our more intrinsic Self, experiencing life as a realm of infinite possibilities in which we are free to create what we want.
We don’t need to paint mandalas to experience this freedom — but we do need to practice.
I’ll be guiding a live tetralemma process in my free Tranceformations group which takes place on Thursday each week.
