Why there is no up once you leave the planet | Eckhart Tolle

If you put a monkey on a typewriter or keyboard and the monkey starts— monkey means he doesn't know what he's typing— and you get the monkey to start typing, at some point, if the theory of evolution according to Darwin is correct, as the story goes, at some point, the monkey will type the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. If God is not a satisfying concept or word, as it is not to me, so I have not used it that much, because, as I said, it implies an entity. But God is not an entity. That would be very limited. Being somewhere must be— must live somewhere. Traditionally, people looked up. God. And less so now, because now we are more aware of up. There is ultimately— there is no up. There is no up and down. The moment you leave the planet, up and down don't exist anymore. You can't say there's up and there's down. It's only relative to the planet, there's up. When the Russian astronaut, the first Russian— because Soviet Union was an atheist society denied the existence of God. And when the first Russian astronaut came back from outer space, he said, I didn't see God there, therefore God doesn't exist. Exactly. So, but the moment you say God, you have an entity. So an alternative is— it's already very different— a presence, a divine presence. that is not encapsulated. God is something— concept is an encapsulated God, and divine presence is diffused. It surrounds you. It is within you. That's something that is more helpful as a concept, I believe, than God. And that presence, that divine presence, Is that divine presence that you can actually sense when you're still? You can sense that you are not only within you, but surrounding you, that there is a presence. Everything alive with presence, even the space is alive with presence. But you have to be still to sense the aliveness all around you. Ancient humans had a bit more access to that. In all ancient, old traditions, from all cultures, they perceived the world as animated. They perceived the world as everything contained a spirit. That's how they viewed things in all cultures, ancient Europe, in Southern Africa, Australia, everywhere. They could sense spirit presence in everything. Now, they might have misinterpreted it in many ways, as there's a little spirit hiding in everything or whatever, but generally speaking, they could sense the world animated, being alive, animated by spirit presence. And they could then perhaps feel themselves also animated by spirit presence. In the 19th century, when science became more and more— grew more and more, materialism became the predominant worldview, and especially with Darwin saying that all life evolved. All life is a random process of evolution. There's absolutely no meaning or purpose behind it. It's random evolution, the survival of the fittest, and all the molecules come together in a random fashion, and eventually this miraculous world appeared out of the random coming together of life forms and molecules. So there was— the world became, even for people, gradually, even for people who had never even come into, read anything about Darwin, And then it seeped into the collective consciousness that the world was actually dead, dead even. There was no— the world was no longer animated in people's— the world was a machine, regarded as a machine, lifeless and random, devoid of purpose and meaning. And so that came. And more recently, the great scientists, physicists found that there's actually— the world is more like a— as I believe Max Planck, the great physicist, said, the world is more like a mind. It's not a machine. It's like an alive mind. And what we see as Matter is not really— it's a limited perception of what's actually there. Everything is alive with spirit presence. And ultimately what that is, is consciousness in different vibrational frequencies. That is an enormous shift if you are alert and present enough to sense the aliveness of the world all around you. That changes your life dramatically. But the question may arise, is that— if there is that spirit presence that is in you that has created the incredible beauty and harmony that's there, could that have happened? Is that just all accidental? And You may have heard of the famous analogy of the monkey and the typewriter. It's, well, typewriters don't exist anymore, let's say the keyboard. The story of the monkey and the typewriter, the keyboard, is that if you put a monkey on a typewriter or keyboard and the monkey starts, monkey means he doesn't know what he's typing, and you get the monkey to start typing, at some point, if the theory of evolution according to Darwin is correct, as the story goes, at some point, the monkey will type the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. If you give him enough time. And so if you give the monkey 5 billion years, for example, The story goes, would the monkey produce the play Hamlet by Shakespeare accidentally? Probably not. That is giving us an idea how the complexity of this world is so enormous. How can there not be an intelligence behind it, a vast intelligence that gradually manifests more and more fully in this dimension. And this intelligence, it underlies everything. That is called, in ancient Greek philosophy, it's called the Logos. Logos is wrongly translated because Logos is the intelligence that is inherent in the cosmos. It's the organizing principle behind life, or behind the manifestation of life forms. Mm-hmm. And this logos goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. The term was taken up by the person who wrote the Gospel of John, because the Gospel of John starts with the words, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and God was the Word. But that word in the original Greek is the logos. He translated it as the Word. The Word is a possible translation of the Greek term Logos, but there's more to the Greek term Logos. In its deepest meaning, Logos is the intelligence behind the world of appearances. So when Jesus, in the Gospel of John, at the beginning, in the beginning was the Logos, the divine intelligence, not the Word. In the beginning was the divine intelligence, and the divine intelligence was with God, and the divine intelligence was God. That's right. intelligence was God. And then he goes on to say nothing was ever made that was not made by the Logos. Everything that was ever made was made by this divine intelligence. And now it makes sense. So he adopted Greek philosophy and merged it with Christianity. The next step there is that Jesus becomes a personification of the divine intelligence. Perhaps it is easier for humans to relate to the divine intelligence when they personify it, or perhaps it is a limitation of the divine intelligence if they personify it. It's up to you to decide what applies to you. It could be a helpful thing to see the divine intelligence personified, and if you relate to it in the right way, Or it could be a limitation of the vastness of divine intelligence. Up to you. The important thing is there is the what the ancient Romans in Latin called anima mundi. Anima mundi means the soul of the world. The world has a world soul, a world soul, and this world soul. It has many manifestations, but all the manifestations of life are the manifestation of the one world soul.