Download  Five Wings book as PDF 

 

---

Latest creative work in the evolution of the Five Wings of the Heart vision:

Introduction: Global Emergency and Human Emergence

The Five-Wings-of-the-Heart is a mandala teaching, a vision of spiritual life expressed through vivid visual forms. This vision is about saying YES to life in five widening circles, and about nurturing that life under very difficult circumstances.

The Five Wings path mirrors the deep journey of human spiritual development from asking for blessings, to opening to blessings, to becoming a living blessing.

I share it with you as one possible path toward living mindfully, compassionately and creatively in a world facing a set of enormous and overlapping challenges. These include the climate crisis, perpetual war, relentless inequalities, runaway industrial poisoning of the Earth, and global species extinction.

The Five Wings mandala series, influenced by both systems theory and ancient wisdom, is an open-ended invitation to, and exploration of, living an eco-spirituality of kindness and clarity, no matter how violent and confused the world around us has become, or may yet become.

In the course of my life I have become convinced that to live for peace, reconciliation with nature, and creative love, in a world as profoundly addicted to war and greed as our is, is the true “Great Work”, as Father Thomas Berry named it, the noblest calling of every person born in our time. The Five Wings practices express the desire to “live the answer” and “be the world you want to see.”

In my view, two elements make our era different from all previous eras in American and European history and call for the emergence of new, life-affirming, spiritual practices.

First, through electronic communication, we know much, much more about the damage being done, and the pain being inflicted, and thus we have, many of us, a more keenly felt pain for the world, and an unavoidable sense of responsibility to transform the world in which we live.

And second, there is a growing mountain of evidence, from all the Earth sciences and from the study of complex systems, that everything here on Earth, including us, is deeply interwoven with everything else.

(Careful study suggests that native peoples have always known this. Ecology and systems theory are modern rediscoveries of it.)

This theme of deep connectedness is also at the heart, both uplifting and challenging, of most spiritual traditions across the world. But in our individualistic, short-sighted, take-all-you-can-get culture so many people do not want to recognize that interwovenness, no matter how many regretful and traumatized soldiers kill themselves, or how many species of plants and animals disappear from view as we humans push them over the brink of extinction.

It is not at all clear how we humans will survive if we do not develop a more interwoven and cooperative vision of the world and ourselves. The late ecologist and systems theorist Donella Meadows counsels us, however, that the unfolding of such a vision will probably meet with great resistance precisely because it is such a deeply personal, life-changing, process.

More than half a century ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., contemplating U.S. preparations for a nuclear war that (we now know) would have killed all of us, warned us in the strongest possible language, that if we did not learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]we would surely perish together as fools.

Today, it is clear that learning to live together as sisters and brothers desperately needs to be reaffirmed in relation to all people on Earth and extended to reach the entire web of life, on which our lives depend.

Please find your way to live and to help that deep green awakening of connectedness and compassion. 

And may the Five-Wings-of-the-Heart mandalas help you on your way.

---

---

The general intention of mandala-making around the world is to explain and express the interwoven life of the universe. all creatures, and the human self. Mandalas are not about any one thing, but rather about the pattern that connects everything to everything in a totally interwoven cosmos.

The image below is the first in the Five-Wings-of-the-Heart Mandala Series (featured in the chapters following this Introduction).

 

People as gardeners of the Tree of Life and one another
The Five Wings vision takes the ancient idea that we are here to bring out the best in ourselves and in one another, and applies it in a systematic, visual, five-fold way. The mandalas envision people as living and growing through bringing a constellation of related virtues (attention, gratitude, compassion, courage, and several more) into the following five fundamental human relationships:

 
1. my relationship to my own deepest strengths and inner resources
 
2. my relationship to you, and your unfolding as a person
 
3. my/our relationship to the life energy that unfolds between us in all our shared activities
 
4. my/our relationship to the web of life-and-people that surrounds and sustains us, and needs our love and care
 
5. my/our relationship to the mysterious life of the cosmos, including all our ancestors from the beginning of time, and all our descendants, all the future generations we influence, plant, animal and human.

 

These five relationships can be visualized with a wide variety of metaphors: Five Branches on the Tree of Life, Five Fingers on the Hand of Being Human, Five Folds in a Ribbon of Blessing (shown at right), and many more. In addition to the Five Wings mandala diagrams, I include some examples of alternate geometries in this book, and you are welcome to develop your own way of visualizing the five interwoven and mutually enhancing processes in human experience and development explored here.

By naming, embracing, cultivating and celebrating these five interwoven relationships, we open ourselves to participate in the mending / blossoming of the world, in widening circles, and in the unfolding of our own personhood. As a contemporary ecological spiritual path, the Five Wings can be as deeply religious, spiritual, non-theistically reverential, or nature-celebration-oriented as one’s heart directs.

 

Morning Prayer Mandala
Expressed in Alternate Five-fold Ribbon Geometry

---

Meditation, prayer and affirmation are some of the central ways in which we mobilize our inner resources in the face of life’s great challenges.  I began to work on the Five-Wings-of-the-Heart vision around the year 2000, after approximately thirty-five years of study, prayer, anti-nuclear protests, and nonviolence trainings.  During that time, unfortunately, the threat of nuclear war did not diminish at all, and the global loss of species known as the Sixth Great Extinction accelerated.  To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the mind like the thought of being blown to smithereens in the morning.

Thinking about two famous sayings attributed to Gandhi: My life is my message, and Be the change you want to see, inspired me to start thinking about several related, creative questions:  “What sort of a person would I need to become, in order to create more of the world I myself want to live in?  And how would I get there?”

How then shall we live  ~~ For many years I had been working to make the world a much better, fairer, kinder, wiser place, while sort of imagining that I myself would not necessarily have to become a better, fairer, kinder, wiser person.  The recent research on mirror neurons in the human brain suggests that I was mistaken in my absent-mindedly self-serving assumption; the research strongly suggests that, in order to really move other people, we need to embody the behaviors and feelings we want to encourage and evoke in others.

That “What sort of person” question can be restated in the plural, which suddenly gives it a very transformational feeling:  “What sort of people would WE need to become, in order to create more of the world WE ourselves want to live in?  And how would WE get there?”  This is a heart-centered, community-oriented, reworking of the longstanding political question, “How then shall we live?” explored by many writers over the centuries, including very recently, Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil.

The Five-Wings-of-the-Heart meditation and prayer mandalas, and their related documents, are my responses, a few of the infinitely many possible compassionate responses, to these deeply personal questions. Not the only way, but perhaps one possible path for people inclined to think with diagrams. Taking a cue from how nature does things suggests that there should be many paths toward compassionate resilience, for the many different kinds of people here on Planet Earth.  If we use the wheel and spokes as a model, one might say that there are many (even infinite) angles from which one can approach the hub of the wheel (compassion for all life).  There are also many angles from which one could move away from the hub into confusion and numbness.  My hope is that each person will find a way, their own authentic way, to deepen their reverence for life and allow it to guide them.