>If we were to imagine the total absence of all atoms I dare say that time and light wouldn't exist either.

Yup.

>So, are they the same in a fundamental sense? I think they are. Perhaps different formulations but they mudst have a commonality in order to be able to 'talk' in that energy can become matter and back again.

That's what the GUT and the Higgs Boson hope to explain, but nobody has found one yet.

>Light is nothing more than atoms of a certain type vibrating at a certain frequency (simply put) and we have indeed proven that light has mass.

Uhh, no. Light is carried by a messenger particle called a photon which is NOT an atom, and not even matter. The Photon like its brothers (gluon, graviton, Z and Ws) is is massless, and carries one of the four forces (electromagnetism). You stated earlier that matter decays- this is incorrect. Atoms decay, but they do so by releasing particles. These particles go elsewhere, they do not disappear.

> Timelessness, for example, is not past, or future. The "present" really wouldn't have much meaning since it derives a lot of its value from what it is not - past or future. <g> From a timelessness pov you could say that all time-based events are observable at the same ..er.. time. <g> It's tough to try and define, we're so stuck here in our thinking process.

You might enjoy Hawking's book...