First there is not. Nothingness. Nothingness is consciousness. Next there is an explosion. An explosion of existence into existence, because consciousness is doing something. It is being. Being existence. All of this is happening at once. Therefore, there is no “first” and no “next” except as an examination or experience within existence.
Soooo, liiiiiike, why have an origin point at all? What is the point of an origin point for life, the universe, and everything else if the truthier fact is that it doesn’t really exist? What is its function except to deceive us into believing in time?
The fundamental workings of life are fractal. If we think of existence as happening all in one motion picture, then the “origin point” of that picture tells us how the fundamentals work throughout the movie until the scene where consciousness catches up. It’s like existence is front-loaded with exposition and clues as to where the movie is going. Everything you need to know is in act one/scene one. The rest of the flick is spent watching it play out until our big entrance in some boring “picking up the pieces” scene right after an ice age or a global flood or something. Humans arrive bearing our nifty ability to bend those rules and flip the script in the noosphere. We do it consciously and we do it unconscious, too. In fact, we do it unconsciously first.
Our sense of self is modeled on the physical mechanics of the body and observations in the external world. These create the architectural framework of the psyche. Just add parents, community, and the ability to think and comprehend in a kagillion directions and you get a fuller picture of the person. But initially? Initially, we are a mental construct whose movements imitate the actions of the body first and react to sensory input from the outer world next. This is how the self comes into being and further divides and knows itself as a self within an inner world.
So, if you want to know why fractal behaviors and principles exist in nature, and therefore in you, the origin point of which they are resonances tells that story. The physics of the universe is the physics of you. Not just in body but in mind. All of our story is expressed everywhere and everywhere is expressed in all of our story. And just like a movie, every story has a beginning. In fact, every unique story secretly has a singular one.
In Truth, the singular beginning along with its innumerable stories that appear to be playing out through time are all recordings on one filmstrip. But… you know… not as lifeless as that. And because you are a character in the movie, you identify as such. It’s the most obvious thing for you to be. Less obvious, yet truer, is that you are also the filmstrip itself. Truer because the filmstrip transcends and includes all characters on it. All action scenes, cut scenes. All origin stories and picking up the pieces. You are the film and the film is you, and the second you identify as that, you see that time is but a story and origin, a mere plot point. And you understand that they are you, too. You are filmstrip, movie, and character, because movie and character are images and actions on the filmstrip.
But… you know… not as lifeless as that.