  At very early times, the universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the
assumtion that the deviation from equillibrium was large, in particular that it
is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyse the conditions for local
transitions between states that are related to different vacua. All pathways
lead to an attractor solution of a description of the universe by eternal
inflation with domains that have different low energy parameters. The generic
case favors transitions between states that have significantly different
parameters rather than jumps between nearby states in parameter space. I argue
that the strong CP problem presents a potential difficulty for this picture,
more difficult than the hierarchy problem or the cosmological constant problem.
Finally, I describe how the spectrum of quark masses may be a probe of the
early dynamics of vacuum states. As an example, by specializing to the case of
intersecting braneworld models, I show that the observed mass spectrum, which
is approximately scale invariant, corresponds to a flat distribution in the
intersection area of the branes, with a maximum area A_max ~ 100 alpha'.
