The fundamental starting point for this alternative paradigm has to be speculations about Universal Consciousness as laid out in the Vedanta of Indian Philosophy.
"The identity between the world and Brahman is explained. On this ground that all is known when the "one" is known is accounted for. Since all entities are real only as the effects of Brahman and as ensouled by Brahman, it has been said, "That is True". In no other way are they real. Just as, in the illustration of clay and its products, the products are real only as of the nature of clay, even so the world is only as sustained by the indwelling Brahman. [10]
The universal, omniscient backdrop of Brahman as the primary stage for all further acts and scenes of the evolutionary drama, Maya, as described in Vedanta, explains the onset of the multiple layers of differentiated Consciousness, Mind, Brain, Matter, actually in the reverse, as manifestations, that are distinct and yet one and the same as the original consciousness. A logical fallacy it would seem but defended as follows. "The signfication of an identical entity by several terms which are applied to that entity on different grounds is coordinated predication. In the illustration of (say) a Purple Robe, the basic substance is one and the same, though purpleness and robeness are different from it as well as from each other. That is how the unity of a Purple Robe is established. The central principle is that whatever exists as an attribute of a substance, that being inseparable from the substance is one with that substance." [11]
Taken from: http://sciforum.net/conference/isis-summit-vienna-2015/paper/2962
Nicholas I Hosein, Idealist