reading Brad Warner's Other Side of Nothing.... reached the section on Dogen's essays on space and time

 in the beginning there was no time. so it wasn't the beginning. it wasn't anytime at all, it was just .... then .

(coz you see, 'now' requires time (am I conscious now ? was I conscious a moment ago ? **))

in this no-time, there were all manner of forms in all their probabilities,  except without time, they were juxtaposed and compressed into one dot of possibility .so there was just this dot .. just being

Pure Consciousness got curious, and wanted to 'see' what was inside this dot. and as it did, it started teasing out forms from the murky dot of possibility. it got its hands full so to speak, and so it created space to put things in (on) , and the sequence with which it looked at them manifested them one form by one sequential form, and this was time. 

we think the universe is of many parts, but it is just the one mind, the Pure Consciousness, reading the dot of possibility, item by item.

Now I must go wash my mouth out.

** the  answers I got were 'yes' and 'cannot say'

*** many thanks to the Tao Te Ching, Terry Pratchett, Susan Blackmore , the Rig Veda, and a lot of others