
...So, I've had this meditation for years, and found it very helpful when I feel uninspired, afraid or even angry.
Then, two years ago we bought a house. A serious fixer, in addition to the interior needing lots of work, the back yard was essentially an uneven slope of weeds with one big tree in the corner.

I was surprised once we moved in how motivated I was to develop the garden, I had always considered myself a brown thumb, able to kill any house plants I neared. But now I was burning with desire, and spent every waking moment either working on it or meditating on it.


The process has been one of the most important "wizard classes" I've had, I feel I have learned a host of new skills (I could use that new vocabulary about now) in both creation and collaboration.
One of the many learning's I had from this process was a new understanding of my sunburst. Without trying, I would find it floating in front of my minds eye.
As I watched it and pondered, I noticed its character became clearer to me, the texture was no longer just undifferentiated glowing light, now I could see that it was made up of something related to flames that are somehow also sparks.
Constantly in motion, its like a jewel with limitless facets that endlessly turn in on themselves. (The motion reminded me of computer animations of theoretical 4th dimensional objects, such as hypercubes.)
I noticed that it came up most strongly for me at the point where I was shifting from "conceptualizing" my garden plans and moved into the physical "action" of landscaping.

One day, a moment of inspiration hit me that set off a series of profound inner experiences. I had the strong sense that this image, was a representation of what I now call the "reality engine".
I have long believed that we create our reality in a sort of subconscious state, and then somehow translate that into three dimensions, I am now convinced that this image is symbol of the process we use to do that.
What's more, I now think that this is not a completely subjective, abstract vision based on my meditation, but instead a universal symbol of reality generation.
You see, I started to realize its uncanny resemblance to the ancient symbol of the mandala.
For awhile, every time I would see a mandala, I would say to myself "that's it!"
But it didn't stop there, soon, I began to see how often in nature we experience a burst of life in a similar visual pattern, suddenly they all seemed to be symbolic representations of the reality engine; a flower opening and our sun of course are two obvious corollaries.
The image even came up in my artwork.

Although I knew nothing of the official ideas of what a mandala is, a simple "Googling",
found this, which sounds very close to the understanding I came to by myself.
I would love to hear if any of you have had any similar experiences.