As someone who grew up around more animals than people, the problem I have with monotheism and the monist premise in general, is that abolute is basis, not apex, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, rather than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The desire, rather than the objects of desire.

What is this banquet hall of life, without an appetite?

Which would better explain both the good and bad of humanity. As each of us is the center of our view of the entire universe, but part of this dynamic bubbling up. So we fall along that spectrum from incredibly self centered and otherwise obsessed with the details, to riding the waves of light.

Think of reality as that dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. As galaxies are energy radiating out, while mass/form coalesces in.

As biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through the information precipitating out, referee the emotions and impluses bubbling up, then focus them in some relatively coherent fashion, in order not to be totally schizophrenic.

Meanwhile society is also that tension between the organic energies bubbling up, versus the civil and cultural forms coalescing in. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.

I think a big part of the problem, with seeing the bigger picture, is that as mobile organisms, we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, then sort and judge them, in order to intentionally navigate our context. Then we learned to narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so the narrative flow, from past to future, is foundational to our experience and culture. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.

Yet it doesn’t require getting too far outside that bubble to realize that it is change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this presence, as events come and go.

So there is only this physical state, aka, the present and time is an effect of the dynamics occuring within it, similar to temperature, pressure, color, etc.

We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodies and environment, not the sequence of thought, so we can be more objective about them.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

Energy is “conserved,” because it is always and only present, as there is no physical past for it to recede into, or physical future for it to arrive from, since it would be the change generated by this energy that creates the effect of time.

As such, energy is a process, while the forms generated are patterns. So process goes past to future, while patterns go future to past.

Think of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

As do lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes from one feeling and thought to the next, as these perceptions rise and fall, like so many waves.

The feedback is the patterns steer and define the process driving them.

Energy out, form in. Basically cosmic convection cycles. Like galaxies.

The opposite of the absolute is the infinite. As energy radiates toward infinity, form coalesces to the neutralization of absolute zero, or until all energy is shed. We fluctuate somewhere inbetween.

Which doesn’t mean we should just live for the present, as it is our ability to transcend it that rises us above other life forms, so much as that we do live in the present and if we better understand the feedback, reciprocity, thermodynamic convection cycles, etc. manifesting this state, we might get along with it better.

Such as politics, where with our monist idealism, premised on the narrative arc, each side of the dynamic is focused on The Goal, so those going the other direction must be complete fools.

Once we houseclean some of the cultural cobwebs and there are many, including some religious ones, then we can truly appreciate the incredible nature of this reality we inhabit.