An Eternal Career: I. What Is Life?

When the selective process is spiritual, the Life expressed is of that nature. Religious and ethical teachers, like Christ, Buddha and Confucius, consciously tapped Life's spiritual resources, enriching not only themselves, but humanity as well.

"I don't see what they get out of Life," one often hears people say when regarding the plight of the blind, maimed, crippled and deformed. These individuals frequently get far more out of Life than those who regard them with compassion, but who are unable to see beneath the surface. In their extremity they have turned to God and draw deeply from the wellsprings of Life. Whatever experience turns man to God is not a calamity, but a blessing in disguise.

Recently we saw, standing before a sports shop, a handsome young man, with an amputated leg, looking long and longingly at some tennis rackets. What do you suppose he was thinking about? How do you think he would answer the question: "What is Life?"

Substance, motion, consciousness are the three principles of Life we encounter everywhere. We are living not in a dead but in a living world; not in an unconscious but a conscious universe in which death implies a change of garment or form.

There is only ONE world and that is populated with living people. Billions walk this earth of which statistics take no account. The "dead" are those who are insensible to their better selves; unresponsive to spiritual vibrations; impervious to all except the promptings of their dense, physical organism, whose life is associated with the eating, drinking and sleeping form.

These are the dead—buried in graves of flesh.