Walking the Mandala - A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds

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