Kudos to everyone posting on this topic. Here's my go at it - excuse the wordiness as I stepped my way through it.

The universe is a living creature.
The universe is filled with consciousness, and IS consciousness.
Matter is the outgrowth of conscious information processing that occurs in the universe.

Consciousness does become fractured, and each fracture can take on a characteristic of its own.
Such fractures can appear to work separately from the rest of the universe; however, they only exist for a limited time before merging back into the wholeness of the universe.
These fragmented portions of Universal Consciousness can be acted upon by new information, creating change or modification in that particular fragment.
Such a fragment can be a tree, a mountain, an insect, a planet - ANY ISOLATED OBJECT NAMED AS A NOUN IS IN ACTUALITY A SYSTEM OF FRAGMENTED ENERGY BEING PROCESSED BY INFORMATION.
(Such a system may be more of a verb than a noun, being in the process of being and acting, but let us not quibble over semantics here.)

Certain things are tangible because you can touch, feel and perceive them within the logic of your senses.
Yet we know, because science tell us, that everything material is a formation composed of atoms and molecules.
The reality of the atoms lies beyond our senses, and CAN ONLY BE PERCEIVED THROUGH THOUGHT, OR THOUGH THE MIND, AND NOT THROUGH THE SENSES.

It has been said that the universe appears and disappears every four-quadrillionths of a second.
Visualize a universe composed of atoms that make things that appear to be material objects, but which in actuality are tiny shimmering somethings vibrating at tremendous speed that appear and disappear every four-quadrillionths of a second.
The subatomic particles are appearing and disappearing at an even faster speed.
These are in actuality frequency vibrations.
These are aspects of consciousness permeating everything – atoms and galaxies.

The five fruits of the Tree of Knowledge give the senses – sight, sound, touch, smell, taste – which allow us to perceive IN A CERTAIN LIMITED WAY.
This is the great deceiver found in the Garden of Eden.
Thus material realities are only realities to the senses, but not in the ultimate sense.

The universe is energy being processed through information, through the mind that perceives.
The universe is an image held within mind.

We came into existence by imagining ourselves, participating with the creation of ourselves.
Attunement with Universal Mind and the fragmented consciousness enabled us to reflect our own essence in our creation of ourself.
Consciousness fragmented and created a whirlpool or eddy of energy called “self”, which is a reflection of our accumulated essence up to that point in its evolution.
Thus what we consider ourself is a material representation of our soul’s accumulated evolution.
And mind’s imagination created it.

Thanks for listening. I had fun progressing through this thinking.