Nothing, a still and endless nothing.
No Time, Gravity, Waves, nothing. Beyond the bounds of the Universe is still nothing, endless nothing. No beginning and no end. The Universe much less than a grain of sand to the oceans, in nothingness.
The latest I have heard fits my thinking. The Universe was formed in an instant, much faster than the speed of light. Something far above the natural order we know, Supernatural. Had the Big Bang created as the older theory said, we would be mass moving near the speed of light to get where we are now. We are not shooting into the void at the speed of light.
A burst of energy that formed Hydrogen clouds on the skin of a beach ball, Gravity drew it into centers, which became stars, which exploded after ten billion years. Gravity drew the matter into stars, and what the first universe could not have, planets and moons, odd rocks, the Ort Cloud, Comets. five billion years ago.
The DNA of life is too complex to have formed by any natural means, and we are all of one DNA. It was not formed in the first universe, the material did not exist, or at the beginning of the second, for there was no place for it to survive. DNA was created later, and seperately. The ground was prepared then seeded.
Being the only known bubble of Time, Gravity, Matter, Energy, it excerts a gravational pull on the energy that went beyond, curving it back to the bubble. A sphereical lens, radiating, mostly on the single point from which it came. Fifteen billion years of a universe, focused on a single point.
From every point on the beach ball skin a flow of energy reaching the point of origen. A Unity.