The Alpha and the Omega
The difficulty most people run into when talking about spirituality, is that they imagine somewhere or something which most definitively is not THIS reality. One really have to reconcile the spiritual language with the real world everyday experience.
If the spiritual view cannot account for concrete experience, then it isn’t worth much. If the timeless and spaceless aren’t recognized right here in the middle of clocks and bodies, then it becomes fantasy instead of understanding.
One really have to treat spirituality as a science of the metaphysical. If the things one talks about cannot be observed in this reality of ours, then it is mere fantasy. During human history, there have been a lot of people with great imagination and little regard for the reality they exist in.
As an example, I will use the name given Jesus in Revelation: "The Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End". If there is a beginning, there is an end. Remove the temporal distance between beginning and end, and the beginning and the end is the same thing.
A human is born. On that day, it is decided that the human will die. The beginning and the end is linked in such a way that they are one and the same.
The birth of the universe is no different. If one removes the temporal distance between the universes birth, and its death - it can hardly be said to exist at all. It is both beginning and end, at once.
If one assumes that the "Alpha and Omega" refers to the consciousness that gave birth to this universe, then "Christ" is indeed the Alpha and the Omega.
But the Church wont tell you that, because it does not grasp the timeless and spaceless reality which is the ground of our being fully. It imagines "Heaven" to be elsewhere. It is most certainly not here. Hell also, is placed in some "other" location. Most certainly not here.
It does not recognise this eternal moment as timeless, and this infinite universe as spaceless. But it is. Our mind creates space and time where there is none. This can be easily observed, when looking at a dream. In a dream, one can imagine vast spaces. Millennia can pass, in a dream. But waking up, where is all this space? Where are all these years? Nowhere to be found. In the mind alone.
If time and space arise within mind, then the one experiencing them is not located in either. And once you’re outside both, “self” becomes something very different from a person in a world.
Christ lives in you, the Christians say. But very few know that it is their very own self, their consciousness, they are talking about in such lofty terms.