At a distance of about 50 million light-years, the Virgo cluster is next door, cosmically speaking, to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and its gravity is strong enough to have retarded slightly the expansion of the universe in our neighborhood.
As a result, sometime, perhaps billions of years from now, astronomers say, depending on the evolution of the dark energy pushing space-time apart, it is possible that our galaxy will succumb to Virgo's pull and go crashing through the fat galaxies sitting like spiders at its center. Then the Milky Way's contents, including whatever remains of our Sun and its innocent retinue, would be left splashed and smeared like pale graffiti across some alien sky.
I think that's just lovely. Poetic. And, of course, subject to meditation on impermanence on the grandest of scales. The Milky Way galaxy "smashed and smeared". It's not violence, it's nature, it's art, it's a painting.
In meditation, billions of years from now is irrelevant. In the depths of meditation, probing subtle, albeit not the subtlest, and intangible essences of being stimulates the formation of mental structures that might as well be cosmic in nature. Mandalas, grains of existence, molecules, material, matter, colorful and sparkly, beginning in the mind and then spreading out through all physical manifestation that we recognize as familiar. Once the outside world becomes the same as the inside mandala, illusory and mental, let it dissolve, grains of color coming apart – Seurat's dots, color by color, removed from the canvas, smashed and smeared like pale graffiti across some alien sky.
We have our lives now, we must live them. But our molecules spread across space in the future Virgo cluster is our nature. Living our lives true to our nature is key.
March 15, 1997 - San Francisco
