The Mandala and the Self

Starting around 1916, in the same period as the Red Book and the Sermones, Jung began spontaneously drawing circular images every morning — a habit he did not yet have a name for until his reading of Richard Wilhelm's translations gave him the Sanskrit word. He came to treat the mandala as the psyche's own spontaneous picture of the Self: a center, and everything organized around it.

⭐ A DIFFERENT SHAPE FOR THE SAME PROJECT, STATED HONESTLY AS A DIFFERENCE. The Tree of Life is also a total diagram of a total psyche-or-cosmos — but it is a ladder, hierarchical, ten rungs in a fixed order from Keter down to Malkhut, not a circle organized around a single center. Both are diagrams a whole self is measured against; one is climbed, and one is entered from every side at once. The wing states the resemblance and the disagreement in the same sentence rather than choosing.