What is the "mandala process"?

So in Tibetan, the word for mandala means something like "center and fringe" or "gestalt". It is a way viewing our existence and a learning process. It helps us to see the relative nature of things such that if this exists, that exists; kind of like enantiodromia. The idea being that straightness implies gayness, liberalness implies conservativeness, and each end of a duality implies the other.

Conventionally, the self-existent mandala for each individual is based on ignorance and struggle at its center. Due to this, it is also implied the possibility of a mandala based on freedom and openness.

The basic mandala can be said to have three parts which are the center (containing either ignorance or freedom), the fringe (made up of either the 5 traditional neuroses or 5 traditional 'types' of wisdom all of which have elemental correlates), and the basic ground which gives rise to all possibilities. The whole thing becomes a learning process when we learn to relate with the basic ground, and thus see how the basic energy of our existence flows in the manner of 'orderly chaos' from the center to the fringe. In other words, our state of being changes the world around us due to the interdependent nature of phenomena in a way that the Tibetans have mapped with astounding precision.

So in essence it's a really intricate Tantric mental map, that I'm GROSSLY over-simplifying. The elegance of it, IMO, is how it explains the relative and interdependent nature of all phenomena while showing us how to transcend the notion of duality including the notion samsara and nirvana are fundamentally different.

The idea of space is pretty central to the whole thing in that when space is seen negatively, your fringe becomes a solid boundary. Thus, when people invade on your territory you use neuroses to re-establish your boundary as opposed to having an open, spacious, fluid fringe from which wisdom can arise.

For example, Chogyam Trungpa in his book Orderly Chaos from which I'm basing this description states:

The southern quarter of the samsaric mandala is connected with pride. [...] Ordinarily, when you say you are a proud person, there is an element of confidence involved. But the pride we are talking about is without dignity or confidence; it is simply self-assertive. It is arrogant in the sense that you are not willing to let yourself be regarded as needing to be rescued or saved. Not only that--you want to be acknowledged. You want people to acknowledge your richness or your potentiality for richness so that you can march into other people's territory. If necessary, you are willing to roll into their territory, expand into it.

So when you see a Tibetan mandala with a diety in the middle, you are basically seeing a symbolic representation of the world they have created.