The Mandala of Being

Richard Moss is a former doctor who has established himself as an expert and teacher in the science of conscious living, a field that loosely encompasses psychology, spirituality, and awareness. Moss is the author of six books on the subject, the most recent of which is The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness (New World Library, 2007). Of the countless books that extol the benefits of living in the present moment, The Mandala of Being stands out as one that explains how and why this works as a guiding principle for one's life.

Moss begins by detailing how, in our formative years; our relationships with ourselves sometimes go awry. Parents, even the best equipped with the best of intentions for their children, often come to the task with limiting psychological ideas which in turn limit their children's ability to be authentic, to be fully themselves. Children then develop an idealized self, a self that they imagine they should be, and it is the comparison to this idealized self that is the root of a lifetime of not feeling good enough or whole enough.

And who are we, anyway? Moss continues by inviting readers to become aware of the entity that is the self, and in so doing to realize that there must be yet a larger Self that contains this awareness. Moss points out the myriad ways we distract ourselves from the Self, how we lose ourselves in creations of our own minds. He shows us that we are not any one of these self-created identities - we are not our jobs, our societal obligations, or our religious affiliations. We are larger than that, Moss insists, and in order to have a relationship with our true selves, we must bring our awareness fully into the Now.

"As long as we are inhabiting an identity, we do not consciously have the capacity to engage each moment afresh. We are capable only of interpreting each moment in terms of whether it supports or threatens our identities ... Thus we tend to live our lives in a state of nearly perpetual reaction and self-protection."

Moss advises inner listening as a first step towards shifting one's awareness to the present moment. As with traditional meditation practice, this inner listening begins with breath awareness and extends towards total physical awareness. By focusing our awareness on present moment feelings, we are able to quiet our unhelpful stories about the past and the future, about ourselves and about others.

Past - Future, Me - You. These are the axes of Moss's Mandala, a simple x-y graphical representation of conscious thought, the center of which is the Now. Ideally, we would keep our conscious attention at the center of the mandala. Typically however, our thinking is anywhere but in the center. We move along the y-axis, downwards towards thoughts about the past or upwards into the future, or along the x-axis towards the Subject (left) side or the Object (right) side.

Movement away from the Now in each of the four directions represents various stories that prevent us from accessing who we really are: grandiose or depressive Me stories, angry or jealous You stories, regretful or fearful stories about the past and the future.

In The Mandala of Being, Richard Moss outlines in great detail the disservice we do ourselves by inhabiting the perimeter of his Mandala, and the benefits of moving into the center, into the Now. Moss takes a scientific approach to all of this, and even includes a workbook-like chapter entitled, "Experiencing The Mandala of Being." The Mandala of Being is an excellent choice for readers who would explore inner transformation but could do without the mystical trappings that often surround such work.