271. Besides the milky way systems, solar systems and the planets which belong to those conditions of being or forms of life which terrestrial mankind is still not accustomed to regard as "living beings", there are in addition still many beings whose identity as "living" otherwise elude primitive sight. To these belong, for example, all the organs which build up the bodily structure. And so the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver and other organs, each constitute a "living being". Next we have cells, bacteria, molecules, atoms and electrons which, to cosmic sight, all without exception appear as living beings.
      For living beings who are endowed with cosmic faculties of sensing all existing independent energy-units thus show themselves as identical with bodily structures for manifestations of living beings, irrespective of however fantastic these life-forms or experiences would appear for us, compared with those we are accustomed to accept as signs of life. On this account, absolutely no energy or movement with which we come into contact could exist without being the same as the effects of living beings. This will again be tantamount to all the universal energy constituting a combination of living beings' bodily structures. As it is, these bodily structures and manifestations which are subject to eternal evolution or the process of transformation, will constitute the steps or stages of that process. And thereby we come to realize that all those beings, both the ones within whose organisms we ourselves see the light of day, and those who obtain experience of life within our own interiors, both those who are near to us in the flesh and those who are situated in the most remote regions of eternity, upwards into the immense and downwards into the minute, backwards into the darkness of the past or forwards into the future's dawn, all together constituting the whole universe - all of those beings, according to the stage each one represents, make visible the universe in the form of the above-mentioned vast stairway which we have described as the "ladder of evolution".