I wrote about universal consciousness a while back and that got me thinking about universal mind. What’s the difference between universal mind and universal consciousness?
Universal mind is sometimes referred to as God’s mind or the mind of God.
Consciousness is not necessarily self-reflective though it contains the potential self-knowing.
The url UniversalMind links to a web application site. I find this hilarious! Is the Internet moving toward being the universal mind?
Perhaps this quote from A.H. Almaas puts it in perspcetive:
We call it the Universal Mind because when we go beyond it, we see it as mind. But it is not mind as created by me personally. It’s the mind that actually exists as the totality of the Universe. Some people call it God’s mind. So from the level of the nonconceptual, the physical universe and Essence and all that exists are mind. They are concepts, like ideas or forms that are filled out with something. What they are filled out by is the nonconceptual, the original consciousness.
And here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson says:
Who shall define to me an Individual? I behold with awe & delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my being embedded in it.
Quoting Mark Epstein:
What does universal mind mean? The problem with the concept of a transcendental reality is that it sets up a duality in which we are always other. This leads to a feeling of inferiority and a tendency to disparage one aspect or another of our experience. Buddhists prefer the idea of “no mind” to that of a universal one.
When you contemplate universal mind – what/who is contemplating?