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Here's another bit of arm chair philosphizing that I thought was terribly profound at the time I wrote it.

 

What is existence? There is the old idea that perhaps this life is just a dream. Perhaps we are comfortably asleep somewhere, and everyone and everything in our lives are really just a part of this dream, and therefore just a figment of our imagination. Or possibly, we are all just figments of someone's imagination.

Another adaptation of this is that we're all asleep somewhere, having a collective dream. So nothing in this world actually concretely exists. There is a place where all our actual bodies reside, and it actually exists, but this world is just our imagination. Now, if we accept the fact that there is a God, and there is a life after death, and we all have souls, the question arises, is there an actual physical place where our bodies reside? Perhaps not. Perhaps this world is the shared consciousness of all those souls living in it. If this is the case, then nothing physical actually exists.

But, is there any relevance to this argument? Whether the world is physical, or only spiritual, our perception of it remains unchanged. And that is truly what existence is. Existence is our perception, our consciousness. If a physical universe existed with no consciousness, the universe would not exist, in the sense that it would be noticed. But a spiritual universe, with no physical aspects, would still exist because it would be noticed.

Does the universe create our perceptions, or do our perceptions create the universe?