The Alpha and the Omega

Annelies wrote about  Logion 18 in her Dutch blog, in a post titled Het onmogelijke heeft nooit plaatsgevonden (Tr.: "The Impossible Never Happened" - She does have common sense!). The  post provides there an important connection with the Course, as well as some great music (Bach).

Logion 18 reads as follows in the Pursah rendering (from Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality:

The followers said to J, "Tell us how our end will be." He said, "Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is the one who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death."

The Course passage she connects this to is the following:

A timelessness in which is time made real; a part of God that can attack itself; a separate brother as an enemy; a mind within a body all are forms of circularity whose ending starts at its beginning, ending at its cause. The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did. Except that now you think that what you did is being done to you. The guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself, and on a guilty world that dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead of you. It brings its vengeance, not your own. It keeps you narrowly confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful things the body does within its dream. You have no power to make the body stop its evil deeds because you did not make it, and cannot control its actions nor its purpose nor its fate. (ACIM:T27.VIII.7)

Eternity - the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks - has neither a beginning nor an end. Only time seems to have a beginning and and end and all things certainly have beginnings and an end within the scope of the space-time framework. The "beginning" in terms of the thought system which Jesus teaches in ACIM is the thought of separation from God, aka. the ego. As a spiritual discipline, to get back to that thought, to learn to see where we made that choice, is absolutely necessary in order to make the other choice. Or, to put it differently, a mistake can only be corrected if you understand what the mistake was. Until then, you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off, for you'll be fixing everything except that one mistake. The above passage portrays just exactly how that thought starts in the mind, and sets us up with the set of expectations that is part of our experience in this world. Undoing that thought is possible only by means of a return to the original decision moment, as implied also by Logion 18.

And so life is a bit like a labyrinth, and we are busy finding our way back to the beginning, for if you know how we got into this mess, then you have found the way out as well.