I'm doing all this work right now on this mindfulness class, while we are moving through a moment with the pandemic that is undeniably one of those moments that changes everything. The whole thing has brought me back to an insight I had several years ago, which still resonates deeply.

I was on a winter 10-day retreat with Shinzen at a beautiful catholic retreat center in Palos Verdes that has a walking labyrinth. For 10 days, every day after breakfast and after dinner I walked the labyrinth. At first out of curiosity, but then out of compulsion.

Maze Vs Labyrinth.

It’s common to confuse the labyrinth and the maze, but they are quite different. The maze is game or a puzzle - intentionally created as an intellectual exercise in problem solving. It has twists and turns that dead end, and paths that branch off in a million directions. The labyrinth is different. The labyrinth, if followed, is a single continuous path towards the center. It twists and turns, but you don’t have to think about which way to go - you just have to follow the path forward. The Labyrinth in my favorite childhood film The Labyrinth - was actually a maze.

Labyrinth as a universal archetype

The labyrinth is a good example of what Jung referred to as an Archetypal pattern - a universal symbol that represents a higher truth that is beyond any specific belief system, and much too difficult to put into clumsy words. Jung pointed to the globally prevalent imagery of the Mandala (of which the labyrinth is an sub-category) as evidence of a universal archetypal experience that transcends culture and geography - a primordial and universal part of the human experience.

The labyrinth I walked was the 5-Circuit Chartes Labyrinth - which is arguably the most popular modern walking labyrinth found at meditation centers and churches. This Medieval style labyrinth was a common installation in western european cathedrals - the Labyrinth in the Chartes cathedral dates from 1200 and represents the pilgrims winding journey toward God.

The older, classical labyrinth is found around the world and go back as far as 2000 BCE, though possibly even earlier. In Crete, a variation of this labyrinth was built by Daedalus to imprison the Minotaur - the beast-child that lives in the center. At the same time, in what is now called Arizona, the O’odham people had created a nearly identical classical labyrinth. Their labyrinth is the symbol of mischievous god I’itoi - who brought humans up through the underworld. While they are walking the maze, humans make choices to pursue their dreams and goals. When they arrive at the center they have a moment to pause and reflect before being greeted by the Sun God and moving into the next world.

There was also the Roman style labyrinth, a square version that was often found in the tiling on the floors of temples and homes, and the swastika labyrinths of India, Nepal, and SE Asia. India is also home to the Chakra-vyuha labyrinth with a spiral at it’s heart that represents the magical troop movements of a famous warrior magician.

The Baltic Labyrinth, or “Baltic Wheel” is found throughout Germany and Scandinavia, and has a unique design with a double spiral at the center which feeds seperate entrance and exit paths. This makes it perfect for a continuous procession - and is thus the origin shape of many traditional dances. There are also accounts by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder and others of a giant ancient labyrinth in North Africa in Egypt - whose complexity and confusion within a sprawling ancient temple and tomb system might be better described as a maze.

from the unceded lands of the O’odham people - now called Arizona

Insight from the labyrinth

Walking the labyrinth with any level of contemplative focus puts you into a slightly altered state of consciousness - it does this because it is intentionally disorienting, and because the way we have constructed reality is more flimsy and fragile than we've convinced ourselves it is.

5 days into my retreat, when I walked the labyrinth I did it with the intention of noting what we call arisings and passings - though I reframed it as "beginnings" and "endings". My thought was that with each step I would notice which was more strong in my awareness - the beginning of the labyrinth or the end.

The first few twists and turns were simple - beginning, beginning, beginning. But after the first few turns, it got more complicated and the pull of the end and the push of the beginning overlapped in a moire pattern that buzzed with vibrancy and energy - an anxiety about the not knowing where I was in time.

There was a pull to move faster, to clarify what was happening, to get out of the discomfort of the liminal space into something that was more solid, which is when something shifted in my perception.

The experience of anxiety around time broke into flow - just a flowing curious dance of movement between the beginning and the end. Neither was good nor bad, it just was flowing and changing - and the "me" that was experiencing the suffering of that anxiety around time dissolved into an experience of the flow of the moment without a preference - just a wonder at what it was to be in time in a single moment

And then when I finally arrived at what I thought was the end goal of the labyrinth's center, it merely unfolded into the next beginning as I walked back out again.

“We are not this moment, or the next moment, or the moment after that. We are bigger and stronger and more resilient than any one specific moment. Combined as a collective - we are a flow of thoughts, inspirations, and then of actions that create the world.”

All those steps and all those moments I thought I was working on my relationship of time between "beginning" and "ending" only to realize upon emerging that there was never an ending or a beginning, just a series of experiences that flow and overlap and move and change - always. When you realize the labyrinth was designed to represent the pilgrimage towards god (or the gods and monsters of classical labyrinths), the ambiguity between self and god, self and monster, this world and the otherworld, the waking and the dreaming, the beginning and end, takes on a new level of wisdom.

This is all to say - you are not this moment.

We are not this moment, or the next moment, or the moment after that. We are bigger and stronger and more resilient than any one specific moment. Combined as a collective - we are a flow of thoughts, inspirations, and then of actions that create the world.

But in the great paradox of what it means to be human - at the same time we are also only this moment.

And we are powered by the limits of our compassion, and our ability to stretch our limits of that compassion beyond our personal fear or doubt. It is on us to stay in compassionate action in each moment - because it is each of these individual moments that builds the whole world.

In every moment, but especially this one, we are called on to make each step count as we are held more deeply by the uncertainty of what comes next.

Or - to sum it all up in the words of my teacher the great George Haas -

I love you, keep going.

PS: If you would like to walk a labyrinth yourself, I invite you consult the World-wide Labyrinth Locator for a public walking labyrinth near you.

Into the labyrinth.

Labyrinths