Walking the Mandala - A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds
Book Chapter ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
Global disruptions can inspire new ways of teaching and thinking through the big questions of little things. Recognising our disrupted times, we explore the mandala as an integrative symbol – a visuo-spatial abstraction of a worldview – that invites and represents responses to big questions in ontology, cosmology, epistemology, axiology and eschatology. We re-imagine the mandala as an expansion and a contraction of intersecting ‘opposites’ (e.g. sacred-profane, mythos-logos, order-chaos) that can push-and-pull thinking through the wicked problems of disrupted times. We embrace Walking the Mandala as a mytho-poetical and logico-mathematical act for learning and unlearning. It is at once an embodied and affective act of creative turns and qualitative diffractions, and a cognitive act of critical and analytical cartography that orientates and measures. It is a circumambulation – a circling of possibilities that connects oneself to others. Finally, we introduce a novel three-dimensional mandala – the Zygo – as a material artefact and architecture for critical, creative and consilient thinking through disruptions in big-little worlds.
Journal
N/A
Publication Name
Arts-Based Thought Experiments for a Posthuman Earth: A Touchstones Companion
Volume
N/A
ISBN/ISSN
2542-9140
Edition
N/A
Issue
N/A
Pages Count
18
Location
N/A
Publisher
Brill
Publisher Url
N/A
Publisher Location
Leiden, Netherlands
Publish Date
N/A
Url
N/A
Date
N/A
EISSN
N/A
DOI
N/A