Twice
Let me tell you something.
Everyone treats the Universe as if it were a thing, as if it were a great bit sphere being held in the hands of God, but seeing the Universe as a thing leads to all kinds of annoying questions in the minds of educated masses, in the minds of the thoughtful, and even in the minds of clever children.
Where did the Universe come from, where is it heading to? Is this a simulation? If God created the Universe then who made Him? Where did he come from, and so on and on.
When you see the universe as a thing then you can only apply the logic of things to it; things need to be created, they need to exist in a scope of time and place... but the Universe contains time itself, it is a component of the Universe, not something outside of it.
And so we can think of the Universe as a thing, we can only think of it as a thing that happens, and event, a process. Things that happen don't necessarily need time to happen; an electron can jump in an instant, or you can suddenly realise the truth.
But events have rules too: like what caused the the Universe to happen, what started the process? Will it ever end?
Can the Fire of Creation really burn forever?
But for an event too happen you need two things: something to cause the event, and something to result from it.
And that's why there are two Universes.
See you don't need any infinities or "turtles all the way down" for the Universe to make sense; you just need two Universes, each one causing and resulting from the other in an endless loop.
See the Universe isn't made of stuff, it's made of events.
This is why we remember the past and not the future; all the things that happen have yet to properly interplay, yet to weave together into the moment just beyond now. This is why pi can be infinite; pi is not a number, it's a process of tracing a curve on a plane, it's the process of drawing a circle, but it never finishes drawing, it only gets closer and closer to closing it's curve forever.
I'm the same way, all the stuff in the Universe is wrapped in happenings, in events events which go on forever.
Where were you before you were born, where do you go when you die?
Right here.
Everything in the Universe that had to happen to lead to your birth already happened, and everything after your birth is happening now; your birth is only the throat of your existence, the moment at which everything that came before to cause you, and everything that will be caused by you, met.
Your brain will decay, your very atoms will turn to dust, one day, but all of that will only happen in the way that it did because of you.
All the things that happen in our Universe interplay on each other in a cosmic symphony, all the happenings interlinking, everything from a fart in the wind to a burp from a black hole; when you look at the sky you are touched by things which happened long, long ago, and far, far away.
The Universe: not a thing, but the sum of all things that happen.
But what about this other Universe I mentioned?
Can you visit it? Where is it? Does Starbucks exist there?
All good questions, but I can only answer a few, for now.
At the moment of creation there was a flash, an orgasm of creation, if you will; the ultimate orgasm, the loudest bang that can ever be heard, the hottest hot, the brightest bright.
The Fire of Creation.
But you can't have nothing happen, because nothing happening is still happening, and you can't have just one Universe happen because there'd be no cause and result.
And so you get two Universes, causing and resulting from each other, both going different ways, starting from the same original point, growing outwards in symmetry, on opposite sides of the Axis, on that line upon which nothing can rest upon, but which you can only ever be on one side of or the other.
I mentioned pi before, and now I'll mention it again.
In our universe the process of pi is drawing circles in one direction, and in that Universe pi is drawing circles in the other direction; they are symmetrical, but not linked.
You could destroy one pi and it wouldn't affect the other, but if your put them on top of each other they'd be mirror images, chiral, unable to be properly stacked.
In that Universe you'd be pushed backwards in time until you popped back into this Universe.
So, when you feel lost and confused, or you feel yourself detached from reality, just say to yourself:
"The Universe is happening,
"it's happening right now,
"and it's happening twice."