Pondering Mandalas, Hallucinations, and Identity

How do you know that you exist? What gives you the feeling of being or having a self? In his book “Hallucinations,” (2012, New York: Alfred A Knopf) Oliver Sacks writes about the feeling of self as a source of will or agency. This is the original meaning of the term “body image.” He describes disturbances in the body image which occur when parts of the body are amputated: the phantom limb sensation where people continue to experience the presence of the amputated limb. He tells the story of a gifted piano professor whose right arm was amputated. The man’s sense of his phantom right hand was so acute that he could “perceive” and recommend the best fingering for his students as they learned to play complicated pieces of classical music! We tend to think that our body image is a static reality, but this is not so. In fact, “as normal sensation is blocked, body image disturbances can occur very quickly,” (Sacks, p. 281). We have all experienced this after a trip to the dentist. Because of the anesthesia numbing part of our mouth, we have the impression that our face is deformed or our tongue too big for our mouth. This bizarre change to our body image goes away only when the anesthesia wears off and normal sensations convince us of the true size of our mouth and face. It seems that a felt sense of our body depends on our brain constantly receiving and processing sensory information from all parts of our body. I have written about my intuition that children’s mandala drawing around age 3 supports a child’s development/refinement of a sense of self: the calibration of the movements of the body, and the realization that these abilities can be directed by the personal will toward desired goals. (Creating Mandalas, Rev., 2010, Boston: Shambhala) I believe that creating mandalas consolidates body image for preschoolers. It is part of their natural development to use creating mandalas for this purpose. Jung observed that his patients created mandalas during times of psychological disorientation. I have been told of psychiatric patients who spontaneously created mandalas as their psychosis cleared. It seems likely that in cases such as these the sense of self—even to the level of the body image—is disturbed, and that creating mandalas is indeed a part of recovering or renewing the body image. So the mandalas that we create for insight, healing, and self-expression also engage us in the moment to moment flow of sensory information that tells us what, where, and who we are.