Everything on our beautiful planet Earth, including the Earth itself, will one day vanish. The timing of that event is unknown. What we do know is that our sun will eventually exhaust its fuel, expanding to consume the inner planets before collapsing, in roughly 5 billion years. But our time here on planet Earth may end much sooner. It is possible that a planet-destroying asteroid, an event we cannot control, is already on its way, giving us just hundreds, thousands, or millions of years before it’s all gone.
We don’t know the answer to the question: when will this all end here? But that very fact helps us realise something extraordinary about life, about your life, and about the very nature of existence. Because your life, and indeed all of life, is like the intricate play of the sand mandalas in Buddhist monasteries. Some spend days, weeks, even months working on them, only to erase all their efforts when it is finished. The teaching at the heart of this practice is the impermanence of life.
Our own individual lives are the same as the Buddhists’ sand mandala play. We create and live our lives and all of the experiences, moment by moment, through our choices and through how we respond to life’s sometimes uncontrollable circumstances. And moment by moment those experiences are erased, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, until all is erased in the end by our passing. Our only task is to make that life as colourful and beautiful as we can before it’s all gone, and importantly, to help others do the same with their lives. Because the real richness and colour to be experienced is in giving and receiving. That’s the natural cycle of life. Life gives you everything it has, so in return, you give all your experiences back to life.
Your own mandala of life is made ever richer and fuller through your support of others, and through your support of all other life forms on this planet. By helping all life to thrive here on Earth, the grand mandala of our Earthly human story is made ever more magnificent.
But the real gift to uncover is the bigger picture: our universe is the incubator of all life, birthing within itself an endless array of new galaxies and planets, all of which will eventually meet their ending, over billions of years, over and over, like an endless sand mandala play.
The universe births life and life ends, but every ending becomes the gift of life to another possibility, something new to become and be experienced. The dust and gases of destroyed planets and galaxies become the fertile material for the next, over and over, without end, and without any sense of loss.
Boundless possibilities are formed, lived, and experienced, only to be erased, over and over, in an eternal mandala play in conscious awareness.
In an eternal mandala play… in Love.
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