Maybe it would help if I share some personal reasons why I am not offended by the phrase “universal mind”?
When I was a boy I spent a lot of time outside in nature, playing with friends, making dens, climbing trees. This was particularly the case when I lived in Argentina and then in Yorkshire (UK). I recall feeling at that time that nature and the mind were not wholly separate things. We spent summers in a country cottage, and would often walk down by a river that ran through rocks and hillsides, where there was a strong sense that nature - the river, the trees, the sheep grazing nearby, the bats flitting in the evening, the caves in the hillside - was a living thing in its own right (as distinct from what we humans do to it).
Later, when my family moved south to Kent (a rural county near London), we lived on the edge of some countryside, and I would often wander there after supper, after school had ended, to take in the sounds and smells of the late afternoon and early evening. Sometimes - perhaps under the influence of reading poetry, or because at the time I wanted to be a zoologist and was reading all about the natural world! - I felt a strong sense that the trees and birds around me were all part of a single, unitary intelligence or mind. Not an intelligence or mind with self-consciousness or conscious intentionality (like a human being or animal), but just a kind of impersonal intelligence that may also be conveyed by the words “nature as an interconnected whole”. This sense has never completely left me.
A few examples.
Once, when I was visiting a friend in the countryside as a teenager, I went for a walk near his house, and there were some golden coloured corn fields, with a disused barn, surrounded by green woods. I remember sitting there for some time taking in the beauty of the place, and I had the sense that the corn field, the trees surrounding it, and the blue summer sky, were all part of some kind of unitary goodness, as though they were both praising the glory of things, as well as themselves being the praise.
Once when I was in Israel, I had been visiting one of the deserts there (I think it was the Negev), and we had returned to a friend’s house somewhere in fertile countryside. The desert experience is something quite drastic - purifying and cathartic on the one hand, but emptying and annihilating on the other. Coming back to this beautiful tree lined space, with a hot yet cooling breeze still blowing, the sun setting, and one particular tree making its own presence felt in the twilight, I had the strong, almost palpable sense that the air itself was alive, ‘mindful’, intelligent in some sense.
On one of the trips I made to India I attended a meditation retreat that lasted for 10 days or so; after which I travelled with a friend to some hills-stations in the Himalayas, stopping to go on mountain treks and to see some glaciers, on our way to Dharamshala and McLeod Ganj (the residence of the Dalai Lama). During a stay at one of the hill-stations (I think it was Nainital) I remember taking a long evening stroll above the town, looking down on the lake there, with the houses far and wide covered by a blanket of darkness except for electric lights, and the stars above me head spread out in space. I recall that, for 10 or 15 minutes approx, I had a kind of vision (for want of a better word, because it was not a visual event) that the earth is part of an infinite universe - or rather a part of an infinite series of universes, coming into existence without end - and that the totality of all this is like a kind of womb, giving birth to life, to energy and matter. It seemed as though it was all one dynamic movement of infinite, unending creation.
So these kinds of experiences make me open to the possibility of a universal mind.