Update 1.16 — What is autumn?

In the Mandala of Characters there are the names of four seasons. These names appeared in the Mandala because of the Ancient System, where four seasons are used.

The Ancient System is the foundation of the Mandala of Characters. On this ancient foundation, I have appropriately placed two more personality systems. It means the Enneagram and C. G. Jung’s—“Psychological Types”.

All in all, the Mandala of Characters is an association:
— Ancient System,
— Enneagram,
— and Jung’s typology.

Coming back to the four seasons, we can actually ask a simple question, why are they on the Mandala of Characters?

The four seasons have a symbolic meaning, and they are associated with the Elements distinguished by Aristotle. It means, particular seasons are linked to the following elements:

• Winter—autumn
• Fire—summer
• Water—winter
• Air—spring

In the following diagram, we can see how are arranged the seasons and the Elements on the Ancient System.

During developing the Mandala of Characters, at some point, I thought that I could remove the names of the seasons. I thought that the symbolism of the four seasons is not as obvious as the symbolism of the Elements. That is the symbolism of the Earth, Fire, Water, and Air.

In the meantime, I also thought that it would be worthwhile to put into the Mandala of Characters the Jung’s ideas which contain the following scheme, called “Compass of the Psyche”. I came across, and I was inspired by this scheme while creating the first version of Mandala (1.00).

This diagram is turned upside down in comparison to the Mandala of Characters. It means, on the Mandala, Intuition—N, is at the top, and Sensing—S is at the bottom.

So, I put phrases from the above scheme on the diagram of the Ancient System. The ancient system, as I mentioned above, is the foundation of the Mandala of Characters.

According to this scheme, we can see that Carl Gustav Jung divided his psychological types into four groups. These are:

• S—Sensing — tells us that — something exists.
• T—Thinking — tells us — what it is?
• F—Feeling — tells us — whether it is agreeable or not?
• N—iNtuition — tells us — whence it comes and where it goes?

Intuition is marked with the letter “N”. It may seem illogical because the other three groups are marked with the first letters from the names. That is, T—Thinking, S—Sensing, F—Feeling. Intuition takes its mane from the second letter, that is, N—iNtuition. It is because the letter “I” has been used to mark the “Introversion”.

Sensing, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition Jung called psychological functions. I wrote about it in the chapter:
2.2. — Carl Gustav Jung—psychological types.

This time, my attention to a greater extent than the psychological functions drew their descriptions. We can see these descriptions on the above scheme. It means we can see that:

• S-Sensing — tells us that — something exists.
• T-Thinking — tells us — what it is?
• F-Feeling — tells us — whether it is agreeable or not?
• N-iNtuition — tells us — whence it comes and where it goes?

The above descriptions of the psychological functions from the scheme “Compass of the Psyche” I decided to compare with the original quotation that we can find in Jung’s book “Psychological Types”. Here is a fragment about the above descriptions:

The descriptions that are on the scheme “Compass of the Psyche” differ a bit from those in the above quotation. So, for comparison, I will simplify the descriptions from Jung’s book “Psychological Types”.

• Sensation — establishes that — something exists.
• Thinking — tells us — what it means.
• Feeling — tells us — what its value is.
• Intuition — surmises — whence it comes and whither it goes.

At the moment, I do not know which descriptions will be more useful in further considerations. In that case, I made the second version of the above scheme. That is the scheme containing:

• Ancient System,
• and the above descriptions of psychological functions, which are the summary of the quote from Jung’s book “Psychological Types”.

When I was thinking about these descriptions of psychological functions, at some point came to my mind one association. That is, above descriptions of psychological functions I associated with names of four seasons.

I started from the season—autumn. Autumn is at the bottom of the Mandala of Characters. There is the following set of concepts:

EARTH
position, SENSING, benefit
sorrow autumn

I started the association of seasons with Jung’s short descriptions of psychological functions from autumn. I choose autumn because of my personal reason. I belong to Air type. So, for me Earth and autumn are oppositional. It means Air is my Conscious State. Then, Earth is my Unconscious State. In that case, I was thinking, what is autumn for me? And what autumn means for type Air in general?

Trying to answer this question, I started with symbolic meanings.

Autumn, for example, occurs in such phrases:

• “autumn of life” (Polish phrase), or “autumn years” (English phrase)
  old age, elderly, the end of life, decline of life, period near the end of one’s life, etc.
• “golden (Polish) autumn”
  the time when we can admire the beauty of autumn, mainly thanks to the colorful leaves and mature fruits.

Besides, autumn is often associated with the time of fruit harvesting. Farmers during autumn have a lot of work while harvesting crops from fields.

Autumn, therefore, which among others, means:
— old and mature age
— or the time of collecting fruits,

can be perceived as the closure of a period or a cycle in which something existed (or continuously exists).

The word “existence” has fascinated me very much. It fascinated me because autumn can show what meaning has the existence of someone or something? In other words, autumn shows a sense of the existence. For example, the main sense of a fruit tree is to bear fruits. If we have, for instance, apple tree, its sense of the existence is to bear apples.

In the case of people, the matter of their existence is more complicated. It is because every human being has to find a sense of his existence. Besides, different types of characters are driven by the sense of existence in a greater or lesser degree.

To the greatest degree, by the sense of existence are guided types from the area of the Mandala of Characters, where are the Earth and autumn. So, in the place where is the Earth and autumn, the sense of existence is the most visible and evident. Therefore, people from this area of the Mandala, in their Conscious State, prefer to follow mainly this what has the sense for them.

We can ask here, how specifically looks like the sense for people from the area of the Mandala, where are the Earth and autumn?

Generally, for us people, the sense is a very interesting thing, because what makes sense for one may not make sense for another. Also, particular people may think that their sense is better than the sense of others. Figuratively speaking, someone from the Earth type, may say — my sense makes sense, and your sense does not make sense. The sense of my activity, goals, achievements, course of action…, or sense of my entire life, has more sense than the sense of others’ lives.

So, in the case of people from the area of Mandala, where are Earth and autumn—as I mentioned a moment ago—their sense is more visible and evident. In the symbolic sense, this is due to the Earth and autumn. The Earth is concrete, tangible, clearly defined, etc. Due to the autumn, it is often clearly known what fruits bear something. For example, when in autumn, we see apples hanging on an apple tree, we can clearly see that the apple tree bears apples. In contrast, during the spring, when we see the same tree, we can see on it only the buds of flowers or flowers. Then, we do not know what fruits will bear this tree. We may not even have any idea what is the tree? So, we need to have some knowledge about the trees. For example, we need to be able to recognize the species of trees. Recognize their shapes, look of barks, buds, flowers, branches, trunks, etc. Or we simply have to remember what fruits had a particular tree before.

Then, in autumn, when we see fruits on the tree, we know what its sense is, and why exists this given tree.

And in this way, I think, we came to the statement—something exists. That is a statement that is placed on the above scheme. It is placed under the letter S, which means, psychological function—Sensing.

The statement—something exists—thus tells us about the existence and sense of something.

In short, thanks to autumn, we know that—something exists. It is so obvious, visible, and concrete that we do not even have to think about it. And we do not have to prove it.

For example, when in autumn, we see an apple tree with apples hung on it, we do not have to think and prove that it is an apple tree. We see these fruits, and we can easily conclude that we are dealing with the apple tree.

So, the tree is known by its fruits. And we can see its existence and its sense. In short, this may be summarized as follows:

• Tree—this is existence.
• And the fruits—this is its sense.

All in all, it comes out that autumn is a fascinating symbol that tells us about existence and sense.

Referring to the statement that I mentioned above—something exists—we can say that:

At this point, we have entered a little bit into the philosophical region, which I really like.

In philosophy, concepts such as sense or existence have a very long history. Probably they have been analyzed since the beginning of philosophy. And perhaps in the future, these concepts will be further investigated.

Therefore, in the face of centuries of reflection on existence and sense, I will not deal with these concepts now. That is, for example, I will not try to briefly summarize them, since for philosophers these concepts are a great challenge. Especially—existence—is probably one of the greatest philosophical problem.

In any case, the concepts of “existence and sense” have the great potential for many considerations, analyzes, and associations. And this can be very useful to us while considering the Mandala of Characters.

In that case, I think that the phrase—existence and sense, can be put on the Mandala of Characters next to the symbol, which is the season—autumn.

So, the set of words at the bottom of the Mandala of Characters will look like this:

EARTH
position, SENSING, benefit
sorrow
(autumn—existence & sense)

Now, instead of the word “autumn”, we have its short definition. That is — (autumn—existence & sense). This definition I put in brackets to emphasize the relationship between the season “autumn” and the phrase “existence and sense”.

The above change I also put on the diagram of the Mandala of Characters. We can see it below.

References: