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.

The imagination of the universal mind. It is not your own imagination. You are being imagined all the time, so is the chair and everything else, just like being a figure in a dream, and the figure in the dream believes he or she is real. Imagine you have a dream when you see people and one of those people believes that they are really real while they are being dreamed by you. Your situation is exactly like that. Exactly. This is what is referred to as the Universal Mind, or the Divine Mind.

We have seen that the ego defines reality according to the physical part of the Universal Mind. That’s basically what the personal mind is all about. You see yourself and your life and what it means from that perspective. So clearly, the Work is a matter of reeducating the personal mind, disposing of the deluded education from your childhood, and bringing in an education that comes from the Universal Mind. Let the Universal Mind start educating you about how things are. However, because the ego uses concepts ultimately to define everything, it will hold on to any concept to maintain its existence. It will even hold on to universal concepts to make itself exist. It can take experiences of Essence, and say, “Oh, I am Essence.” It is conceptualizing and reifying, and saying, “I am Essence, I am Essence.” It is defining itself as Essence instead of experiencing itself as Essence. So you have a memory of an essential experience, and you say, “That’s me.” But it’s a self-image, as opaque as any other self-image. Although the experience comes from the Universal Mind, the personal mind can use it to continue defining itself. This is why we need to go beyond the Universal Mind to the nonconceptual reality where there is nothing for the ego to use to define itself—there is nothing there to define. So in the Work we need to go from a personal mind to the Universal Mind, which means to go from the realm of the personality to the realm of Essence and its dimensions. But we also need to go beyond that to the realm of the nonconceptual. Otherwise the ego can still use even the objective differentiated perceptions, remembering them and holding onto them in order to define itself.

AHA: Your question reflects a belief that if the personal mind is not in control, things will not go the way that you think is good. However, the Universal Mind has its functioning; it moves in its natural way. And part of its functioning is that when you are sick, you might do something to take care of it. But to do something about it does not mean to reject it. You do not have to be afraid or angry or reactive in order to act. This is the interaction between the personal mind and Universal Mind, which is very difficult to understand. It is not obvious how to go from one to the other; there is a lot of ambiguity. For instance, allowing nature to function does not mean not having technology. Universal Mind is what creates technology. The more we see the Universal Mind and the more we let go of our constricted beliefs and ideas of how things should be, the more that nature will take care of itself, and our natural beingness will function. And that will bring health. Nature has its own health and well-being. People get into confusion wondering what is the difference between nature and civilization, nature and culture. It’s not necessarily a conflict. Technology and civilization are not necessarily against Universal Mind. If we are not controlled by our personal beliefs and ignorance and preferences, how will things happen? How will we deal with nuclear energy? Will we want it or not? We don’t know. Someone might say, “Civilization is no good. I’m going to go live in the jungle.” That’s not necessarily being natural. Universal Mind includes machines and atom bombs. All these are part of Universal Mind. As we make a transition to Universal Mind, how will we go about things? How will we live? How will we look at things if we are infused by Universal Mind, by perceiving what actually is happening without our own prejudiced reactions to it? That is a function of the Work.

The mind that knows is pure presence itself, which knows its own differentiations. It is the knowing of Being, the knowing of true existence, differentiated into the knowing of beings and existents. It knows through the soul, for it needs to be localized for there to be discriminated knowledge of forms. It provides the soul with her knowing faculty, with her mind and intellect, just as the dimension of divine love provides her with her heart and feelings. This means that it is not an individual soul that knows, although that is how things appear. When we know the boundless dimension of pure presence, which is the dimension of pure basic knowledge, we recognize that it is basic knowledge that knows. Basic knowledge is a dimension of true nature, and not limited to the individual soul. It operates through the soul; for the soul is the organ of perception, similar to how the eye is the organ of seeing for the body but it is not exactly the eye that sees.

The totality of all that exists, with all this variation, is the Universal Mind or Nous. The Nous includes everything that exists in reality, with all the differentiations. It includes everything that can be perceived or experienced and anything that can be conceptualized.