Carl-Richard

Let me also tie this to my insights about meaning (or rather Jordan Peterson's insights lol): At the bottom of the evolutionary tree, you have an organism purely driven by instinct, and its experience of reality is likewise simple: it has not yet developed a complex social brain, definitely not a rational brain. Yet, this organism can be said to experience meaning by fulfilling its survival needs, which in this case is limited to things like the need for competence (the simplest form of this arguably being movement itself). This becomes obvious when you walk it up the evolutionary tree: What does a social organism experience as meaningful? Why do people go to parties? Why are social gatherings, religious ceremonies or holidays experienced as meaningful? Because they fulfill your social needs, but also because they provide meaning in a more abstract sense, because humans are able to experience meaning through abstractions. The things that make a book, or a movie, or even a scientific theory appealing is that they're abstract representations of meaning (narratives), or simply abstract representations of movement. A narrative involves direction, movement, a start and an end. If an organism's movement through a concrete environment is experienced as meaning, then a human's movement through an abstract narrative is also experienced as meaning. But you're not just limited to experiencing the meaning of narratives as a mere abstraction inside your mind. You can also do it through concrete activities. Rituals — be it religious ceremonies, holidays, parties or nature hikes — all have direction, concrete steps, starts and ends. They're the concrete embodying of narratives. Maybe the fancy glitter of religion is not all for nothing?

Bingo. The question you're really asking is "does God care about me over other things?" One creature's pleasure is another creature's pain. You're breathing oxygen molecules that somebody else could use, you're eating food that somebody else could eat, and you're eating living organisms. You can limit unnecessary suffering for yourself (which you can think of as aligning yourself with God), but that is a subtle process in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't protect you from asteroids or vulcanoes. Aligning yourself with God entails accepting that God won't save you. It's bigger than yourself.

Forum goes under social media.

My thoughts and experiences. My mind is not your mind: my thoughts are not your thoughts, my experiences are not your experiences. But all of it is God's Mind.

??

Asking ChatGPT for metaphyical insights is like asking McDonalds for a four-course meal.

And then you have this one:

Not all death threats are equal. There is a difference between receiving a death threat in a comment thread versus receiving an email with your address and demands.

They're already on the forum ?

Ok, so your position is that God does not have private thoughts. Illusions do exist. An illusion is when something appears as something it is not. It was just that you brought up something that was irrelevant (the fact that I am God). It doesn't change the fact that I can't read your thoughts, and it doesn't change the fact that we use that observation to invoke the concept individual minds. I've never catched a thought, it doesn't seem to exist inside my skull, yet I can't read your thoughts. What do you make of that? I just prefer to say that God just is. When you invoke concepts like purpose or intention, you start proposing things that are related to advanced minds capable of conceptual thinking, and that is why I'm asking whether you think God is a thinking being or not, i.e. something closer to a mainstream monotheistic interpretation of God rather than a pantheistic interpretation.

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.