Alpha and Omega
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty(1).
Such quotes are often problematic for us since they aren’t geared toward being interpreted by our logical brains. Truth/God/infinity are absolute concepts that encompass more than our minds can comprehend logically. When a concept permeates the whole of reality, the very concepts within that reality—beginning and end, for example—suddenly lose their meaning. Opposites are no longer in opposition since they comprise a larger united whole.
My contention is that each of us has the spark of God/Truth/infinity within us. As a Christian, I often refer to this as the Holy Spirit. Likewise, as a Buddhist, I refer to this same concept as the inner buddha nature. The spark of infinity and the divine is always just a breath away, waiting patiently for us to knock so that it can open, seek so that it can help us find. The humor of this view is that we are, in essence, fragments of God rediscovering God. Since we start with God and enter into the cycle of suffering only to eventually rediscover God, there’s really no difference between beginning and end. There is no birth and no death. There is only God as a non-beginning and a non-end.
Adding to this, through omnipresence within our own presence, God (i.e the beginning and the end) is there even during the cycle of suffering. Every moment is simultaneously beginning and end and also non-beginning and non-end. Transformation is inevitable, but even transformation is really an illusion since we are really everything interdependently related simultaneously. We are infinite fragments who believe that we are finite in nature.
Footnotes
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