I have
I have looked at this and often wondered if we are not just thoughts and dreams of say God and the universe is his brain that we reside in. Could this be sort of why God says that a million years is like a second to him because times in dreams is distorted. They say a dream that seams to last years in reality is only a couple of minutes.
I have really missed this thread due to being under the weather for the last few days. Allergies have been kicking my butt hard this year. The emboldened above in what you wrote is something like what I believe, and that's all it is, it's just a belief minus any identities of specific religious context. I tend to see a very connected big natural picture and that's why I view consciousness as an environment. The physical realm IMO is a very tiny portion of a much larger whole that a far greater portion of ourselves transcends to in a manner that we are yet familiar with. I see matter, time, and space as cognitive relevancies, rather than universal absolutes.
It makes no sense in an existence where natural recurrent perceptional states are so varied, to believe that just one such state offers us a glimpse of the "real" reality. Rather, in the tone of a uniform theme found in nature, it's more likely that each state has an integral systems purpose. One being supportive in effect to the greater whole of it's relative existence.
The greatest struggle with respect to the immensely broad spectrum that defines the human sentient experience is what is referred to as the dualism of mind and body. IMO, this is an illusion due to many thousands of years of our awareness being centered around a baseline progressive survival induction within the animalistic physical realm of our environment. One wherein our primary instinct driven nature has determined the focus of our cognitive modeling. We have been forced to sum up our environments in as many primitive isolated details as has been necessary to insure our survival in such a brutal state of affairs as has been routinely demanded of us for many thousands of years now. To focus on the big picture of interconnectedness would have meant rendering us all too quickly vulnerable, and quite possibly utterly extinct. Much like the passive agrarian intricacies whose sophisticated societal tendencies laid waste to their own indigenous people's state of survival due to the savage nature of the efficiency of conquest. We have been repeatedly conditioned to "get right to the point" as deterministically as would be possible. Forced by necessity to best avoid the select specifics of survival's threat by means of cognitively cataloging exacting physical identities of those that would have us for dinner. This alone cannot be underestimated as it has taught us, and thereby shaped the use of our memories to focus on the singular task at hand. Thus, humankind engages the universe, never in many cases realizing that our most formative intellectual teacher was a meat eating savage or caveman.
Many, many, many studies have more than underlined the significance of what the ardent materialist defines as comprising the utterly insignificant. In this consideration, the materialist are the bastions of the self proclaimed righteousness of efficiency. They are the commercial meat eaters that plunder the far and away more so sophisticated agrarian applications for which there is little commercial application in a world gone into a mad spin via the gravitational forces of greed and empowerment. How far outside the cave are we really?