Carl-Richard

Haha no problem. Religion as a general phenomena of course has a lot of wisdom, and I would prefer to practice mysticism in an environment that is actually supportive of it and which is also not in some cult leader's garage.

Returning to the experience of God as myself, à la mysticism.

I can also talk a bit about my personal experiences viewed through the three-way split I've been talking about: In my late teens, I was stuck in a kind of Peter Pan syndrome, constantly living life in a daze of fantasy and comfort-seeking; no sacrifices, no taking responsibility of living in the world. Every real-world action had to be in perfect alignment with my highest ideals and the feeling of safety and comfort, or else it wouldn't be worth it. At some point, you're fed a dose of reality and pushed to make some sacrifices and compromises, which culminated when I was 21: I was given an ultimatum by my mother to straighten up or get lost, replaced smoking weed with meditation, started pursuing academics, became more focused on health; a transition away from primal impulses. Amidst all of that, I had a bunch of spiritual awakenings, but I realized that I wasn't ready to surrender to God, which brought me a lot of pain, but that whole journey also gave me some "edge" psychologically. Then I became very heavily focused on the mind, and today, the focus is on integrating emotional and social aspects. The next step after that is probably returning to God (mysticism).

That can certainly be true when you consider how wisdom is not easily reduced to concepts or logic. An intuition occurs to you as important despite you not knowing where it came from or what is the logical justification. That is also what distinguishes wisdom from intellect, because the intellect likes to view the world through clear-cut concepts and logical propositions. A truly intuitive person can often operate completely without logical justifications and still touch on deep truths. The problem is often that other people don't understand them, or that it's hard to communicate through language (which is why they often gravitate to more emotional forms of communication like poetry, music, art). One of the things wisdom is showing you is that the world isn't easily carved out into neat categories or linear stories, hence the saying "an image is worth more than a thousand words".

Wisdom is one of those things that is hard to capture conceptually, but that is actually true for anything in reality. We can still try. For example, I think wisdom generally correlates with life experience, and it's often displayed as a kind of maturity or self-awareness. Think about the difference between a 15 year old boy who just learned about the scientific method versus a 60 year old professor. It's not just that the boy is less knowledgeable, but he is also more confident in the extent of his knowledge than the professor. The professor has learned where science does not apply and generally what kind of egoic traps can trick you into thinking you know more than you do (self-deception). You can give both of them the same IQ (which is not such a stretch when you consider that IQ peaks in the early/mid-twenties), which can help to distinguish wisdom from concepts like smarts or witts. Other than that, the other concepts I mentioned earlier like balance, holism and general awareness (as opposed to repression) could easily be big components of wisdom. The problem is that since these are such vague concepts, it doesn't easily prompt concrete examples in your mind, but I tried to do that with this thread.

That's certainly a big feature of it

I'm just waiting for the time it doesn't produce mediocre answers to deep questions.

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.

??

Without wisdom, you're prone to self-deception, which affects your understanding.

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?