Frank Merton
Active Member
I think your statement that existence can never cease existing is just your intuitive feel; I see no necessary reason for it. Time is a good deal more than a concept of the mind; otherwise the relativity (time dilation in a gravitational field) corrections needed for GPS would be just concepts of the mind, and the are real and have to be done.But Frank.....existence can never be made to cease existing.....so to have a beginning, there needs to be some way of making what we know is real disappear (become unreal) to have had that beginning. If that is impossible, which it is, logic dictates that there was never a beginning....existence is eternal. Now let's be clear...all cosmic forms are finite and have beginnings and endings...but the essence that these forms are made never had a beginning for the reason given...there is no nothing that doesn't exist.
As to time...it is merely a concept of the mind..an abstraction from eternal duration to represent an observed or measured finite period of duration of existence...and is relative to moving aspects of universal existence within universal space... Time is not real as a rock is real...it's a mind thing...
I would agree there can be no such thing as non-existence, but existence does not necessarily have to always exist. It is just that there is no meaning to saying before existence.
It reminds me of "Through the Looking Glass" where the white night asks Alice if anyone is coming down the road. She says, "There is no one coming." The white night says, "Ah, the wonders of life -- to be able to see 'no one' -- and at such a distance!