The beginning of an imago is inherited from the end of a chrysalis. Clearing what are considered weeds from an area of earth, could be the event marking the beginning of a garden. Invading a country is often the event which precipitates the beginning of a war. The flash of lightning event is the energetic event which is the precursor of thunder.

A beginning is an event which itself has a beginning and an end. Thus birth, as a designated beginning of a life, is itself an event with a start and an end. The beginning of a race is often a starter-gun firing, which is an event itself having a beginning and an end.

Being an event, a beginning is in the mind and has a duration. A beginning is an event perceived and located in the context of an awareness's sense of periodicity. A beginning does not and never can somehow start time. The cosmos did not begin spontaneously from a singularity and hence start time any more than maggots, in the days of pre-microbiology, appeared spontaneously on dead meat and started consuming it.

In a similar fashion, locating the beginning of an entity can only be done by indicating another entity which is designated to be the start. The physical start of the chrysalis could be designated as being the stalk structure which attaches the main body of the chrysalis to the support material, but this structure itself has a beginning in the region of attachment, and so on.

Attempts to identify the beginning of an entity or an event may in many cases be very pragmatically agreed to, as in the starting of competitive races or the beginning of organizational meetings, but in a wide range of scenarios, coming to any sort of consensus as to what should be deemed to constitute a beginning, is less than straightforward. The beginning of a pottery bowl could be designated to be when the first clay molecules were geologically formed, or when the clay was first mined and wedged, or when the design was first envisioned in the potter's mind, or when it is first turned on the potters wheel, or when it first emerges from the kiln as a glazed and functional object. The beginning of a book could be thought of as the moment it first comes off the press, or the first physical sentence of page one, or when the ideas in the book were first conceived. The beginning of a biological entity might be considered to be at the mitosis cell division stage, or the moment of fertilization, or perhaps the moment of birth or germination. The beginning of a sausage may quite reasonably be supposed to be the instant the comestible emerged from the machine, or the first stage of the meat-works process, or perhaps even the moment that Ferdinand the steer most unwisely got into the vegetable garden. The beginning of the cosmos is a conceptual impossibility. Things have beginnings because they are assembled from the cosmos. The cosmos has nowhere to come from.