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This question appears on the home page of this website. Knowing what you know, how would you answer?
Life is a bestowal. Life is the gift which allows energy systems to self-perpetuate, self-propagate and self-adapt.
What I find so amazing about life is its intimate correlation with mind. It seems that the two almost always go together and both are bestowals of the Infinite Spirit. In fact, we are told that Adam and Eve’s progeny were immortal as long as they could maintain unbroken intellectual synchrony with mind-gravity. Their lives were dependent upon the mind-gravity circuit of the Infinite Spirit. How about our lives? I would think that our own immortality is also dependent upon the mind-gravity response of the soul.
Hi Mara,
We probably will not be able to fully discover or define what is life while we are yet mortal Urantians. It is likely true we will discover more for the question as we ascend. We do know from reading the UB that life only comes from life. Life is active, not passive and not stagnant. It seems stagnant is the opposite of life, as in there is none.
Life is energy and on inhabited worlds, is passed through the Life Carriers upon a special arrangement through the Universe Mother from the Infinite Spirit on Paradise. What human being can fully understand that arrangement!!!!!!!! Life we know is found in everything and is action manifested throughout the Grand Universe. We may even learn a bit about life by studying those material dead objects that no longer exhibit energy of life. A deadwood stick, maybe?
Even studying what is spiritual energy we could learn more of what is life in material objects. Maybe.
This topic could go on ad infinitum!
Peace abound,
Mark
I know that the UB describes the spark of life as an “energy spark”, but I think they are using the word energy metaphorically in that regard. This is because the author of Paper 36 describes energy systems as lifeless until the Infinite Spirit supplies the vital spark, then further iterates that life is something different from energy manifestations because life is not responsive to gravity. It would seem to me that life is something added to energy systems. Energy systems are put into place first and then life is added to them. Then, after life is added, the various mind ministries activate life by providing a gravity responsiveness to mind circuits. This activation unleashes life’s inherent capacity to mobilize and transmute energy.
Supporting quotes: 36:3.4; 36:6.1; 36:6.4; 36:6.6; 41:2.5
Another remarkable thing about life is that it comes from the Father through his Sons. Life is eternal because the Father is eternal. Once he gives you life, you have it forever, if you want it. But I don’t think it is possible to have everlasting life without maintaining a connection to the living vine, and the living vine is the Father’s Sons.
Supporting quotes: 2:2.1; 3:0.1; 100:2.1; 135:11.12; 147:5.7; 180:2.1
Mark wrote: “We probably will not be able to fully discover or define what is life while we are yet mortal Urantians.”
Bonita wrote: “Life is eternal because the Father is eternal… But I don’t think it is possible to have everlasting life without maintaining a connection to the living vine, and the living vine is the Father’s Sons.”
168:0.7 Then said Jesus, looking straight into the eyes of Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live. In truth, whosoever lives and believes in me shall never really die. Martha, do you believe this?”
Perhaps rephrasing the question “What is life” to “Who is Life?” would be edifying…
…the Master, who was the Father incarnate, could truly say:
182:1.10. I am the bread of life.
182:1.11. I am the living water.
182:1.12. I am the light of the world.
182:1.13. I am the desire of all ages.
182:1.14. I am the open door to eternal salvation.
182:1.15. I am the reality of endless life.
182:1.16. I am the good shepherd.
182:1.17. I am the pathway of infinite perfection.
182:1.18. I am the resurrection and the life.
182:1.19. I am the secret of eternal survival.
182:1.20. I am the way, the truth, and the life.
182:1.21. I am the infinite Father of my finite children.
182:1.22. I am the true vine; you are the branches.
182:1.23. I am the hope of all who know the living truth.
182:1.24. I am the living bridge from one world to another.
182:1.25. I am the living link between time and eternity.As incomprehensible as this “truth-fact” is for mortal-finite minds, by “tenaciously” trusting with “childlike” faith, we see and know our relationship to God-Life, eh?
32:3.6. …The lower creatures — and sometimes even the higher personalities — find it difficult always to envisage the Universal Father in his Creator Sons. And so, pending the time of their spiritual exaltation, when perfection of development will enable them to see God in person, they grow weary in progression, entertain spiritual doubts, stumble into confusion, and thus isolate themselves from the progressive spiritual aims of their time and universe. In this way they lose the ability to see the Father when beholding the Creator Son. The surest safeguard for the creature throughout the long struggle to attain the Father, during this time when inherent conditions make such attainment impossible, is tenaciously to hold on to the truth-fact of the Father’s presence in his Sons. Literally and figuratively, spiritually and personally, the Father and the Sons are one. It is a fact: He who has seen a Creator Son has seen the Father.
For our local universe, human-divine Jesus/Christ Michael IS LIFE. Amen and Hosanna!
Another thing to think about is the metaphor, the breath of life. The local Universe Spirit, the Creative Spirit, is the source of the breath of life.
The Holy Spirit is the personal presence of the Creative Spirit within the soul of man. She creates the arena, the soul intellect, necessary for spiritual interpretation to take place. When value is properly recognized and made comprehensible by the Spirit of Truth, it is ready for decision-action. When the personality chooses to act upon those values made relative and personal to mind by the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit then gives them the breath of life. This, of course, is meant metaphorically to mean that the chosen action conforms to the will of God and is now an integral and eternal part of life, an experience of the Supreme. This is another way of saying, living in the spirit.
Supporting Quotes: 34:2.5; 101:3.2; 101:6.7; 111:4.2; 117:0.1; 143:2.4;
What is life?
65:0:1 BASIC evolutionary material life — premind life — is the formulation of the Master Physical Controllers and the life-impartation ministry of the Seven Master Spirits in conjunction with the active ministration of the ordained Life Carriers. As a result of the co-ordinate function of this threefold creativity there develops organismal physical capacity for mind — material mechanisms for intelligent reaction to external environmental stimuli and, later on, to internal stimuli, influences taking origin in the organismal mind itself.The life process is one of dying. The cyclic universe is a cycle of life and death, growth and decay, inspiration and expiration.
49:1:7 The process of planetary evolution is orderly and controlled. The development of higher organisms from lower groupings of life is not accidental. Sometimes evolutionary progress is temporarily delayed by the destruction of certain favorable lines of life plasm carried in a selected species. It often requires ages upon ages to recoup the damage occasioned by the loss of a single superior strain of human heredity. These selected and superior strains of living protoplasm should be jealously and intelligently guarded when once they make their appearance. And on most of the inhabited worlds these superior potentials of life are valued much more highly than on Urantia.118:8:2 Mortal man is a machine, a living mechanism; his roots are truly in the physical world of energy. Many human reactions are mechanical in nature; much of life is machinelike. But man, a mechanism, is much more than a machine; he is mind endowed and spirit indwelt; and though he can never throughout his material life escape the chemical and electrical mechanics of his existence, he can increasingly learn how to subordinate this physical-life machine to the directive wisdom of experience by the process of consecrating the human mind to the execution of the spiritual urges of the indwelling Thought Adjuster.What does your TA tell you. Please do not ignore your Thought Adjuster as you read about Thought Adjusters.
102:1:5 God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of proof or no demonstration of so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know him because we trust him, and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality.
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