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This articles explores the three different ‘lenses’ through which we perceive this world.

The lens we are most familiar with is the everyday one employed by the mind: it shows us a world full of threat, fear, competition, struggle, sadness, loss, death – interspersed with moments of love and joy. This is the transient world where everything comes and goes but nothing is permanent. It is the world we all know. We may experience a connection with the Divine in this world – through nature, love, or inspirational beauty – yet this too is transient. For me, this is the ‘story world’ because we are always telling stories about our experiences in this everyday world. In time, these stories of past experiences are captured and interpreted as ‘his-story’. When we are not recounting our past, we are anticipating our future, usually with a mixture of excitement and fear. We do anything except experience and live in the present. The story is either a chronicle of the past or a fantasy of the future. It speaks neither to our soul nor to our spirit. Whilst this everyday world occupies nearly all the attention of almost the entire population, it is singularly lacking in any spiritual consciousness of the Divine Mystery.

Spiritual consciousness is evoked through the other two lenses, at opposite ends of the continuum of perception – the alpha and the omega of our awareness.

The alpha is the cosmic view. The mystic traditions have so many ways of saying this: the Word – “in the beginning was the Word”; the big picture; the Kingdom of Heaven; the Universe; the Tao; the Source; the macro lens; the formless; the void. The alpha view is to experience something in its complete context and from every point of view. During my recent sojourn in the Sinai, I came to experience this directly. Lying on the desert floor at night, you can look up and see the heavenly panoply above – more stars and galaxies than it is possible to count, distances of light years beyond comprehension, and a process of creation that is continuing to expand exponentially. The cosmic view puts the human perspective into context. This is the Mystery. It is way beyond the comprehension of our mind. It is completely full of ‘stories’ whose sum total counts for nothing.

And at the other end of the spectrum of human awareness is the micro lens – the omega. This too has referred to in different teachings: the Presence; the ‘still small voice’; the flame; the mustard seed; the grain of salt or sand; the quantum. Referring again to my experience in Sinai, this lens is employed in the awareness of the uniqueness of each individual grain of sand on the desert floor. Physics now demonstrates that when you investigate any object at the sub-atomic level, you discover only electrical charges. Our world – and this universe – is comprised of no more than energy. Yet each tiny charge is capable of combining into the infinite variety and extent of the physical universe we see.

To experience our experiences through the alpha and omega lenses is to live in the here-now of the present. This is its beauty. The emergent thinking of quantum physics is beginning to reveal a wonderful symmetry and circularity in the energy patterns of these micro- and macro-universes.

We come closer to the experience of the Divine Mystery in the cosmic and the quantum, the two extremes of our spectrum of awareness. These are also the two spaces of transformation, the centre and the periphery, the spaces of liminality. To live life anywhere between is to live as story, subject to the whims and fancies of the errant human mind. The spiritual invitation is to experience our-Self beyond any notion of story, in the eternal Mystery of the Divine “I am” (Exodus 3:14).

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” (Revelation 22:13)