The disciples said to Jesus, Tell us how our end will be. Jesus said, Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death. (18)
Tell us how our end will be.
Those who believe firmly in their mortality are obsessed by two things: 1) When will they die? and 2) When will the world end? This reveals that however metaphysically some of them may talk, they know only this world as reality and the animation of a body as life. Material consciousness prevails in most religion–it is difficult indeed to find those who “walk in the spirit” (Galatians 5:16, 25). Considering that at the very moment of Jesus’ departure from them the Apostles still had no understanding of the nature of the Kingdom (Acts 1:6), it is small wonder that earlier they asked about their “end.” This is why on the eve of his passion, Jesus said: “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me?” (John 14:9).
Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? The word in the Greek text is “origin” not “beginning.” This is a significant distinction, for the origin of all is God himself. We must transcend time and enter into the eternal. Unless we do that, we can know nothing about anything.
Where the beginning is, there will the end be. Time and space are fundamental illusions, therefore the origin, the beginning and the end are simultaneous–but only in God. Outside God we will see it very differently–and wrongly. So to know the truth of these matters we must become totally identified with reality, united to God in the permanent consciousness of unity.
Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death. Those who return to the Origin and become established in that Consciousness will know the end, because the return is itself the end. Such a one shall never undergo death. As Emily Bronte wrote:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou–thou art Being and Breath,
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
Read the next section in The Gospel of Thomas for Yogis: Original Being