Creation history

11. — Regarding the name of entire typology

Long time I was also thinking about the name of the whole typology, which story of creation I am describing here. From many ideas finally, I distinguish the following names:

• The Psychological Mandala,
• The Mandala of Personalities,
• The Mandala of Psychological Types,
• The Mandala of Characters.

The psychological Mandala.

At the beginning I liked the name “The Psychological Mandala” and I used it for a quite long time. However, with time, it began to seem for me too general. It is because this typology of characters does not apply to whole psychology. Above all, it refers to personalities. Specifically, it relates to personality psychology. The word “psychology” often also has a more scientific character. This work, however, is not only scientific. This work has various references to art, faith, philosophy, ethics, etc. Simply speaking, I was more focused and interested in connecting this work with a typical life. I tried, and I am trying, to get more practical knowledge and understanding, which can be used in everyday life.

Besides, I think that it is worth paying attention to the fact that our human mind is not only scientific. Our mind is also guided by feeling, thinking, intuition, sensing, perception, experience, art, magic, faith, hope, love, extroversion, introversion, perceiving, judgment, and other factors.

So, scientific point of view is very important, but it is one point of view among many other views. And we can have a big discussion about it, whether scientific attitude should be more important than other attitudes. And probably we will be not able to resolve this dilemma now and in the future. Then, I think it is easier to say that science is a great and very helpful tool. It is because the scientific methods of studying the psyche are very useful, and they are giving us a lot of benefits. However, despite this helpfulness of science, I think, we cannot rely only on science.

Why?

I think I can give here an example of Jung’s methods of research. Jung besides science drew inspiration from art, culture, philosophy, literature, alchemy, and others.

In general, I think, each of us can notice that inspiration is coming to us from various points of view, from different fields of acting, methods of thinking, different kinds of feeling, intuition, sensing, experience, etc.

In that case for the above reasons I was thinking about other titles. These titles, among others, were as follows.

Mandala of Personality.

Mandala of Personality – this title has the advantage that it can be associated with the English word “personality”, which is very widespread in the English language. For example, the word "personality" is used in various books, articles, and papers about human characters. Among others, the word “personality” is used in part of psychology about characters. This part is called “personality psychology”. One of the personality researcher was above mentioned, Hans J. Eysenck. In general, the term “personality” is used the most in the scientific word. More often than words like temperament and character.

Mandala of Psychological Types.

Mandala of Psychological Types – this title, in turn, would be a reference to Jung’s book “Psychological Types”.

Mandala of Characters

Mandala of Characters – this title is good because of the word “character” is most widespread in the language, and everyone exactly knows what is going on?

Besides, the word “character” is very ambiguous. It refers not only to the character of human but also
- to the characters of various creatures, animals
- or characters of things and objects, both material and non-material.

And most significant here is this that the word “character” is the most symbolic. That is, the word “character” is more symbolic than the words like personality, type, and temperament. This symbolism in this work is important because I often refer to various symbols and metaphors. Then, the word “character” seems to fit as closely as possible to use it for creating the name of this work. That is, to create the name of my combined typology.

In this work, as I have already written, I use different terms, names, and meanings, which are as symbolic and ambiguous as possible. And this approach, first of all, helped me in fitting together the three typologies of personalities into one. That is the Ancient System, the Enneagram and Jung’s Psychological Types. Such a combination was easier to achieve when I used an approach that is usually opposite to the typical scientific approach. That is,
- not specify, but generalize,
- not to create new, more specific names and terms, but to use general, ambiguous and well-known names, terms and symbols. This approach makes it easier to match various relationships, common elements, create different synthesis, associations, connections, etc.

So, I finally came to the conclusion that the title the “Mandala of Characters” fits the most to the character of this work.

From the very beginning, I liked the idea of using the word “mandala” in the name of my combined typology. It was because I use many geometric schemes to help me to show and explain the ideas which I present in this work. These diagrams are kind of mandalas. Besides, the word “mandala” has a deep symbolic meaning.

Probably most known is the Buddhist mandala, which is a harmonious combination of circle and square, where the circle is a symbol of heaven, transcendence, externality, and infinity. The square whereas represents the inner sphere. This sphere is associated with human and earth. Both figures connect the central point, which is at the same time the beginning and the end of the whole system.

About the mandala we can find information among others on this web page:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(symbol)

Therefore, the Mandala of Characters in meaning and symbolism is to a large extent similar to this what reflects the typical mandala.