Here again is Thomas 18:
(1) The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”
(2) Jesus said, “Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is the end will be. (3) Blessed is one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”NHS
Compare Analects 11.11:
Chi-lu asked about serving the spiritual beings.
Confucius said, ‘If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings?’
‘I venture to ask about death.’
Confucius said, ‘If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?’(Chan 1963, 36)
If we want to serve God, how do we know that we aren’t already serving God’s purpose without knowing it, as the followers of Bokonon believe?
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle, Chapter 1
I never finished this book (Turning Signs) either, but i don’t know whether it would count as a kan-kan. I have my beliefs about how humanity is organized, and have tried to articulate some of them, but i can’t see my own mission from outside of it. Every guidance system is situated, and every player sees the game, or the play – or God’s Will – from within that situation, and not as a supreme being would see it. For us (sentient beings) collectively, the only ethical certainty is that our acts will have consequences beyond our intentions, and we will have to live with them as long as we live. We are at best beginners, even to the end.