Carl-Richard

That goes back to "anything is possible in God's infinite mind": By the way, I don't expect you to find a reason. I'm just curious if there is any reason (other than "infinity").

If all of God's thoughts exist inside the minds of other creatures, then God doesn't have any private thoughts of its own. For God to have private thoughts, those thoughts must not exist inside any other creature's mind. The illusion still exists. The fact that I am God doesn't change the fact that I can't read your thoughts. Thoughts and various other mental experiences aren't shared among individuals, which is why we come up with the concept of individual minds. The fact that all of it is God doesn't change any of that. When you say "purpose" in quotation marks, are you subtracting something from the concept? Because I think purpose is a very anthropocentric thing, and applying it to an infinite God seems very limiting, which makes the concept seem out of place. Where do you think the concept of purpose comes from? If God has a purpose, does God have a plan? Because to have a plan you need an internal narrative, and to have an internal narrative you need concepts, and to have concepts you need thoughts. Where do God's thoughts occur? Who knows God's plan?

Nobody knows what Coral is, but I doubt it.

But they're not God's private thoughts, because they're inside human minds. You can't read my thoughts, because they're not inside your mind, only mine. They're my private thoughts. Could God have private thoughts as well? Because you seem to be assigning onto God concepts like "purpose". If you pay attention to your experience, concepts seem to appear as thoughts. If God has a purpose for its creation, do you mean that God actually has thoughts about a purpose?

But does God have private thoughts independent of any human form?

But they're not God's private thoughts if you're also having them So no reasons, just assertions. I mean, yeah, I was expecting that. There is also nothing wrong with that. I was just curious if anybody has any reasons for why God should have its own private thoughts that nobody else has access to. I don't think any ego is in control.

Why do you think that? Feel free to elaborate if you want. Is there any other reason to believe that God has its own private thoughts other than "anything is possible in God's infinite mind"? But does this require the authoring of another conscious ego, or can it just be an expression of instinctive behavior? (like being an animal). When you "lose control", it's not necessarily the case that there is another ego that has gained control, but rather that you've seen through the illusory nature of your own ego that you used to associate with control, and that all that is left is an instinctive channeling of whatever arises. Is that just based on a feeling, or is there anything else to it?

Is your point that you have your own private thoughts, and that since God is creating those thoughts, why can't God have its own private thoughts?

Why do you think that?

But is the imagination always manifested as what we experience as "physical reality" (as well as our own private inner lives), or is God capable of thinking its own private thoughts that nobody else has access to?

Do you think God is meta-cognitively aware like humans (has thoughts, intentions, emotions)? In other words, does God have an ego?

Turquoise is not non-duality.

So form vs formlessness.

Purpose is creation, something you create in your mind

I realized there are many words for roughly the same "levels of complexity» with respect to how reality is conceptualized and experienced. This is me sharing some of those words with you. If you want an anchor: for level 3, think of humans; for level 2, think of animals; for level 1, think of rocks: 3. Thought, abstractions, meta-cognition, symbols, self-reflection, the conscious ego, internal re-representations, sapience, language, narrative, story, meta-consciousness. 2. Instinct, concrete experiences, cognition, perception, sensation, the unconscious ego, internal representations, sentience, emotion, behavior, wakefulness, dreaming, personal consciousness. 1. "The thing in itself", "Consciousness", phenomenal consciousness, qualia, objective reality, physical reality, subatomic particles, «the brain», egolessness, form, formlessness, emptiness, awareness, deep sleep, cessation, transpersonal consciousness. Some might think "perception" is identical to "qualia" or "Consciousness". To that I say that perception is a limited filtering of reality that arises as a result of evolutionary pressures, and it's intimately tied to your biological makeup. Meanwhile "Consciousness" is the unfiltered and raw reality that exists prior to your limited perception of it. For example, if you're looking at a rock and then close your eyes, even though you no longer see the rock, that doesn't mean the rock disappeared from reality. Other people can still see the same rock. The rock is still "experiential" despite you not perceiving it, and hence why this is placed together with things like "objective/physical reality" and "subatomic particles". Perception is a much more personalized phenomena, while Consciousness is a more transpersonal phenomena. Some might think "why make 1 and 2 separate at all?". Well, to combine them would be to discard a huge chunk of brilliant insights from fields like depth psychology (e.g. Freud, Jung), Western philosophical idealism (e.g. Kant, Schopenhauer) and modern analytic philosophy and cognitive science. And of course, to tackle the thought-terminating cliché of solipsism: no, this is not me "disproving" solipsism. I've simply given you a list of words that I think most intellectual traditions think is a reasonable account of what reality is and what most humans feel is an intuitive account of how they experience reality.

This is why I opened the thread with "how reality is conceptualized and experienced". You need to make sense of things like why when you leave your car in the garage, you still find it in the garage the next day. You can't be 100% certain that the car sits in the garage when you're not watching, but you're very certain that it is, and in fact you believe that it is until you see that it isn't. If you want to throw these kinds of observations out from your epistemology because it's not 100% certain, then fine: everything is infinite consciousness; there is no causality, no time and space, no subjects or objects, etc. But that is just not very useful for understanding how the world probably works.

Well, it certainly sounds like you are when you keep looping like this. There are good reasons to discard solipsism, but it requires exactly that: reasoning. If you just want to stick to what is immediately apparent and doesn't require any reasoning, you're stuck with solipsism. That is why it's a thought-terminating cliché, because it doesn't want to do any thinking. It's a cop-out of thinking.

Let's assume both of us have thoughts. Why can I not read your thoughts? Why can I not see through the wall? Those are examples of the limitations of perception and cognition. The thoughts inside your mind and the things behind the wall are technically all "experienceable", but for some reason our access to them is limited. If you don't want assume that both of us have thoughts, or that there is something resembling an objective reality that exists independent of our perception, then you're stuck with solipsism, and your ability to conceptualize reality becomes very flat. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a very rich way of conceptualizing reality.

@Someone here I explictly said I didn't disprove solipsism.

Blink your eyes fast, the rock remains in the same place among the blips of darkness. What does that tell you about perception?

The illusion is exactly that this is not how it appears, and that to not engage with this fact is in some way to refuse to explain it. The illusion is that it appears that there is something outside of you. "It's all just oneness, infinite youness" is to dispel the illusion, not to explain its contents.

We still need to explain the illusion.

You're pointing at the interconnectedness of all the levels. And that is true: all the levels are technically rock. All biological life, animals and humans, stand on top of rock (literally and figuratively). From dust we came, to dust we shall return.

I'm saying Consciousness is like a rock.

It's made up, but you also probably agree with some of it. When you close your eyes, do you think the world ceases to exist? When you think about closing your eyes, is that the same as actually closing your eyes?