If the act of looking at matter can affect its state of being, simply by observing it sort of makes me wonder on the larger scale how that is affecting us.

Think of atoms as solar systems etc, and we can affect them by thought. What if our universe is impacted in the same way by some larger force? The driving force behind the state of our universe.

Also since mass is tied to time, the fact that once you get at larger scales things seem to move slower, maybe to the point of a being living on an atom, time is slow, but to us it is a blink of an eye. So our perspective of time is limited to our size. The universe has a massive force propelling it but it could be a simple quick thing from the perspective of a god.