Cloudscape

""Before' implies time""


No, no.
"Time" implies "before."
Time is basically movement. There's no way you can separate the two concepts whatsoever.
If you remove movement, there's no more time, et vice versa.
So if you'd say there was no time before the Big Bang, how did it come into being?
Obviously such line of reasoning as what there was "before there was time" is bound to lead into sophistication, and therefore I will continue to assume in the nature of an infinite and eternal universe.
I just don't believe in a beginning of existence because of Occam's razor; an existence which had no beginning is simple simper, requiring less tortuous logic.
The only reason why one would favor a universe with beginning is because it's intuitive: everything in our world, after all, has a beginning. But if beginning itself would have a beginning, then that as well would have to be part of the beginning. In other words, there is no reasonable way in which one can "exclude" something from existence and assign it the cause of existence. Anything that would have caused existence would already have been part of it.

Doing is being. Being is doing.

One's personality is made of inclinations, things one tends to do or would do: thus whatever one does is part of who one is.

If you do not love life, life will not love you; if you do not love yourself you will not love life. For life is you.

We are ourselves - I am I and you are you - because we perceive ourselves. We are, then, who or what we perceive. We are, therefore, just as much the world we perceive as our minds we perceive. Mind and matter are but two parts of our perception. Matter, therefore, even if it has a discrete existence on its own, is at the same time part of our own mind.
But the world around us - within us - does things we do not choose to do. This is because we are not conscious of doing them, just like we do not choose anything that happens in our mind - addictions, complexes, phobia… The first step to gaining control over our subconscious is to become conscious of it rather than, as we often do, repressing it.