There's nuanced variations of idealism, but my main point is that idealism emphasizes the subjective while materialism emphasizes the objective. By saying the fundamental monistic substance is PATTERN we unite the subject and object in one thing. By saying everything is pattern, I am sort of objectifying consciousness and subjectifying material and so with this kind of head fake I hope to bring materialists and idealists together in peace and harmony. :)
And if we examine the concept of pattern we find that, while it is ONE word it implies THREE things: subject/object/choice. So this Trinity is the fundamental pattern from which all other patterns arise, so by meditating on the nature of this Triune pattern everything else makes perfect sense. On the other hand if you try to take one leg of this stool (either subject or object) and make it the ONE thing, then you tie yourself into a pretzel trying to explain everything. I've heard plenty of Kastrup and I still feel like he ties himself into the same linguistic pretzel. ...a pretzel coincidentally is ONE thing twisted together in such a way as to make THREE spaces. There you have it!
No nuanced version of idealism, so far as I'm aware, espouses the idea that "everything is alive". There
are versions of panspsychism, however, that approach idealism, as BK says. The principal problem seems to be that people confuse consciousness with metaconsciousness. If one believes one's God is metaconscious, then one's notion of that God becomes Abrahamic, and dualism likely becomes the order of the day.
OTOH, if, as Bernardo hypothesises, M@L
isn't metaconscious, but only its dissociated alters (living beings) have the potential to be so, one can see how everything might be
in universal consciousness rather than
being (meta)conscious.
Idealism doesn't always emphasise the subjective. There are in fact both subjective and objective versions of it. Bernardo himself, whilst tailoring his version more towards objective idealism (which particularly appeals to the modern analytical mind), claims to be simultaneously both a subjective and an objective idealist. There
are things outside our seemingly localised metaconsciousnesses (i.e. "things-in-themselves" that objectively exist) but at the same time we can't help but experience them subjectively.
There is, for example, something that we call the moon that exists even when we aren't looking. But when we
do look, what we see can only be how it appears to our perception. In most circumstances, we see what everybody else sees, which accounts for the consistency of perceived reality, but at the quantum level, according to recent experiments, it seems perfectly possible for different observers to perceive the same event differently.
Unfortunately, and if it's because I'm dense, apologies, but I don't really understand your trinitarian idea of pattern. Subject and object mean something to me, but how does
choice come into it? The choice between what and what? Object and subject? I don't get it.
To me, the standard trinity comprises 1. Father - 2. Son - 3. Holy Spirit (to use Christian terminology). In idealistic terms, one might posit the trinity as being:
1.
M@L (the instinctive, first-person perspective of the universe, or what it's like to
be the universe).
2.
Life (the potential for awareness of awareness, "self refectivity", or "metaconsciousness" that has become so well developed in the alters we perceive as human beings).
3.
Communication (for want of a better word) between 1 and 2, possibly down to the degree of permeability of the interface between them.
This interface, in a way, I see as what creates perception of an apparently external world. In some circumstances, e.g. those that occur in NDEs, the interface may partially collapse, allowing perceptions to enter the awareness of the alter that it doesn't ordinarily possess. Such perceptions I see as being self-reflectively
interpreted by the affected alter, and that's what brings in how it is described by the NDEer. S(he) has no other way of describing it except by using language, which is always limited by prior lived, metaconscious experience -- which in turn has fair degrees of similarity from person to person. Hence, for the most part, the perception of similar kinds of events, albeit dressed in somewhat different clothing.
Although an NDE is a fairly rare phenomenon, in the normal living state I suspect the interface (or boundary) isn't completely impermeable even in ordinary circumstances. It could be partially permeable, to differing degrees amongst apparently separate individuals.
Many of us have verifiable intuitions, i.e. the ability, occasionally at least, to have verifiable knowledge without knowing how we know. And, some people may be naturally more intuitive than others, or be able to develop their intuitiveness through what we might term spiritual practices, such as meditation. So in one way or another, to one degree or another, we all have the potential to experience the "Holy Spirit" in action in our lives.
It may be that the boundary is permeable in the other direction, too, viz. that M@L can become dimly aware of what's going on in the minds of alters. I'd analogise this with human beings sometimes being aware of the states of their internal organs. Most often, this seems to be by localised pain sensations. When the pain goes, the organ reverts to effective invisibility. When M@L "gets a pain", so to speak, it does whatever it needs to get rid of it.
Since M@L is One, maybe this equates to a constant tendency to equilibrise -- what one might think of as the tendency to evolve. IOW, M@L may not be unchanging, but itself be evolving with at least some degree of help from its dissociated alters. The sensation of "love" that many of us occasionally feel could be just the recognition of what it feels like to return to Oneness. Most of the time, we may be in tension, some distance away from Oneness, which might account for our pain and suffering.