When people think of spiritual practices, they tend to think of the “nice” stuff-light and love and all that. They practice visualization to evoke various sacred energies and then manifest them in their own lives. Tibetan Buddhists visualize mandalas in great detail. As far as I understand it, mandalas are used in Vajrayana practice as focus points for meditation and visualization. My time studying at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Kagyu lineage-holder Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, informed my understanding of mandalas. Steve Silberman: I’ve been a practicing Zen Buddhist since I was nineteen. What are your thoughts on the sacred figure? The Rubin: Mandalas have many layers of meaning and can be interpreted in different ways across cultures. In order to understand the significance of mandalas to the Grateful Dead and Deadhead fan community, we turned to the expert himself: The documentary, now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, features several mandalas from the Rubin’s collection. Earlier this year, Silberman joined filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev at the Rubin for a sneak preview of the new Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip. Silberman is not only well-versed in Buddhism, but he’s also one of the most knowledgeable Deadheads, the legendary Grateful Dead fan community. His award-winning history of autism, NeuroTribes, made sense of a previously unknown pattern in medical history that helps explain the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses that began in the 1990s. But is the power of a mandala constrained to the religious context of Himalayan Buddhism?Īuthor Steve Silberman can’t help but spot patterns in other realms of experience. If you’ve ever been to the Rubin or studied Himalayan artworks, you know that mandala paintings are often created as tools for meditation and the pursuit of a higher spiritual state. Art can lead to spiritual transformation.
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