Do you mind?

As the sole Reader of the Book, you are entrusted with its meaning. Just so, according to Rumi, Adam was entrusted with the naming of all beings, and humanity was entrusted with all creation.

You are an ocean of knowledge hidden in a dew drop, a world concealed in [a few feet] of body.… So man is in form a branch of the world, but in attribute the world’s foundation.… Whatever appears within him is His reflection, like the moon in a stream.… The Prophet said, ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord.’

— Rumi (Chittick 1983, 64-5)

Or as Dogen put it, ‘all the myriad phenomena in the entire universe are nothing other than this one mind, with everything included and interconnected.’ Uchiyama Roshi comments that ‘I always translate this one mind as life … In Buddhism, mind nature (essence) is never understood as psychological mind. Mind nature is undivided life as a whole, the whole world in which we are living’ (Okumura and Leighton 1997, 182). Readers of the whole of Turning Signs will recognize that C.S. Peirce also used the term ‘mind’ (and ‘thought’ as well) in a similar non-psychological sense.

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