269. For the ordinary terrestrial person there appear to be innumerable kinds of living beings. There are other human beings like himself and there are the so-called mammals, birds, fish and insects, but however innumerable this host of living beings which are accessible for physical sight may be, it is greatly limited compared with all the living beings that surround terrestrial mankind but which it is unable to see or recognise as "living beings" because those beings manifest themselves in forms of experience of life diverging to such a degree from the ordinary terrestrial person's life-form that quite different senses would be needed from the usual physical ones in order to comprehend them and thus recognise them as synonymous with "living beings". This does not mean that many of these beings are not found on the physical plane. On the contrary, we are to such an extent in contact with a large number of these beings' physical bodes that they are simply indispensable for our own existence; but as these bodies are found in sizes both so huge that they cannot be comprehended with ordinary physical senses, or so microscopic that they, too, lie outside the limit of what is physically visible, all these bodies become more or less unreal for those living beings who have not yet developed senses with the help of which things other than the physical can actually be observed. In order to understand this, one first has to adjust oneself to the idea that vibration or movement - as we have touched on previously and will return to again later - cannot exist independently in any case whatsoever, but only in connection with living beings. This will again mean that all the existing forms of movement we meet in daily life - not only the ordinary manifestations we know and can easily identify as those of living beings but also such movements found under the idea of the "forces of nature" - all of these appear with living beings as their source. When storms rage over the Earth, when the ocean roars with all its might, when lightning flashes and thunder rolls, when the sun shines and the corn waves, the breeze whispers and the brook murmurs, when generations are born and generations die, when civilizations arise and civilizations fall, all these realities will - for the advanced researcher equipped with cosmic senses - show themselves as identical with functions in the organism of a living being; in other words the whole of the life we are experiencing at this moment is actually within the organism of a living being.