but his ideas of the "participatory universe" comes through clearly, and it is certainly the same concept I have been groping towards myself.

Its almost as if someone has to be in the forest in order for the falling tree to make a sound. Although in this case, the tree (or forest) has to somehow make the woodsman/listener appear for there to be an audience. Of course, the "observer" need not be a sentient being, it can be a photographic plate or CCD chip or a microphone or just any particle of matter that can be affected by the original event. An event's legitimacy or reality is determined by how it is perceived by other matter, how it registers on other events. Somehow, just looking at the million year-old photons from a distant galaxy that enter my telescope somehow reaches out and gives that galaxy a measurable reality. My observing that galaxy somehow reaches back in time and space and alters it, or makes it possible. It isn't time that keeps everything from happening at once, its the speed of light. Its almost as if the universe has to reach forward through time to create its observers in order to make its own existence possible.

But its not that simple, is it? There's a symmetry in these thoughts that may be more of our own making than any property of the universe. This is only a metaphor we are discussing here, and it would be misleading to think we have an explanation. It is equivalent to saying that the universe time travels in order to make the observers manifest that give its phenomena reality as it is to say that the universe is conscious and it is perception that makes things real. It all sounds like navel gazing sophistry until we recall that in the quantum world the relationship between observer and observed is very real, we build machines and navigate spacecraft based on these principles. In the macrosopic universe, the relative positions of observer and observed in space-time DO alter the observations, space and time alter measures of distance, time and mass, and when you come down to it, the observation is the only thing we can know for sure. You can't build a physics on what we think the universe should be doing, we can only rely on what we see it doing. There's more than one way to skin Schrodinger's cat.

Our metaphors may be only a vague approximation, but they are not mere navel gazing sophistry. Even engineers sometimes have to take them into account.