A mandala garden and imagination/divinity

T.S. Eliot (for some of us we might know him as the "Toilest") plays on the idea of a mandala on page 14. He demonstrates how the wonderer and the guests move in a "formal pattern, along the empty alley, into the box cirlcle, to look down into the drained pool." I believe that by using the idea of a mandala T.S. Eliot is trying to project a sense of trying to grasp an unbelievable "essence", in this case a lotos rose conjured up from mystical sunlight. A wonderful thing about this idea is that the flower could be said to be a divine essence or in less magical terms, imagination. Either way you look at it both terms are able to exist outside of time. There is no telling how much time really passes when we are in the realm of imagination. Of course we could use clocks, but who is to say that our sense of time is correct or at least couldn't be bent to fit into a concept of unreality. An example of this thought can be found in our dreams that last for what feels like hours, and yet when we wake up only ten minutes has passed by. If we could step outside of time I believe that we would be in that dream like state of endlessness. And it seems to me that Eliot believs that this space that exists in this illusive form is what we call the "present"; where past and future (essentially time itself) is all wrapped up into a single moment. 

Back to the idea of the mandala, (got a little side-tracked there) one could imagine this garden shaped into this intricate maze that is essentially a mandala or boarishly noted to be a "box circle". The idea of a mandala is most commonly associated with Buddhist practice. So here is a link to a site that provides quality information about the mandala and its place in Buddhism => http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/things/mandalas.htm Please check this site out!