The Features of LIFE

Xuefeng

August 16, 2005

The essence of LIFE is a nonmaterial structure with spirituality. To make LIFE dynamic and expressive, its nonmaterial essence must be imbedded within a specific material structure with the help of energy. We will regard the features of LIFE in this sense.

There are eight features of LIVES on Earth; they have:

1. Form

2. Consciousness

3. Spirituality

4. Vitality

5. Birth

6. Metabolism

7. Death

8. Transformation

Those things which have these eight features are LIVES; those that do not, are not

Let us consider some examples. People are LIVES because:

1. They have forms which are visible, touchable, and occupy space.

2. They have consciousness and are able to respond to changes in their objective material worlds and form ideas by perceiving messages from their eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and bodies, and transforming them into thoughts that guide their words and deeds.

3. They have spirituality and souls are only its foundations, things such as their yearning for better futures, revering the Greatest Creator, worshiping gods and Buddha, loving nature, and selfless devotion to humanity are expressions of people’s spirituality.

4. They have vitality so they can move, walk, sit, lie, work, and create.

5. They experience birth, whether from their mother’s womb or even by being cloned, they have beginnings.

6. They have metabolisms which are illustrated by their processes of birth, childhood, young adulthood, middle-agedness, and old age.

7. They die: nobody lives forever and everyone has the same ending - death.

8. They transform: According to the principle of the conservation of matter, human bodies absorb energy as they grow through life, but their flesh is absorbed by microbes after they die and is converted into other energy. From the perspective of eternal spiritual bodies, human spiritual entities are nonmaterial informational structures, and after they die, they enter into the horizontal time domain and begin new rounds of a LIFE cycle in another space-time dimension.

Nobody would deny that people are LIVES, but what about livestock, wild animals, flying birds, and even fish? Needless to say, they are all LIFE and have consciousnesses. Some may have doubts concerning their spirituality and transformations, but in fact, you can find that animals have spirituality if you observe and pay close attention to them. For example, dogs and cats like to win attention; parrots often imitate sounds; horses do not commit incest; dolphins play with people. All these phenomena prove the spirituality of animals. In addition, there are stories of animals showing gratitude, the tricks of circus animals, the strange attention-getting courtship rituals of animals, the noble, self-sacrificial spirit showed by some animals to avoid species-extermination, and many others, all indicate that animals have spirituality. As for the transformations of animals after death, they only appear in the narrations and descriptions of myths and fictional stories. Humans still do not understand them from the perspective of science, which shows that science has not yet developed to a sufficient level and that human thoughts have not reached the level of such understanding.

Why are there fewer and fewer animals and more and more people on the earth now? In fact, most animals transform into people. By analyzing people’s habits, we find that some people are naturally cruel because they have transformed from tigers, wolves, leopards, and other carnivores, some are timid because they have transformed from small herbivorous prey species, some are naturally stubborn but loyal and reliable because they have transformed from cattle, sheep, and other livestock, some are born cunning because they have transformed from foxes, some are born clever, good at temporizing, and flattering, because they have transformed from domestic dogs...

Then, what about the insects and microorganisms (henceforth called microbes)? Of course, they are LIVES, too. About the spirituality of insects, please read “The Entomological Memories”, written by the famous French entomologist, Henri Fabre. This ten-volume, four-hundred-million word monograph is filled with lively, vivid descriptions about the spirituality of many insects. In fact, if we observe carefully, dung beetles shaping manure into balls to carry home, the tacit teamwork of ants and bees, and the movements and skills of flies mating, we find that insects certainly have spirituality.

As for the transformations of insects and microbes after death, they all belong to another space (world). Though insects and microbes are closely related to people, the nature of their LIVES is extremely different from ours. There are no transformations between them and us, that is, people will not become insects or microbes nor vice versa.

Now let us consider whether plants have spirituality or not.

· I will start by referring to some instances from an article on the web. Lagerstroemia Indica plants in the Nan Hua Temple on Tiantai Mountain have leaves and branches that actually swing when people touch them. Mimosa draw their leaves back when they are touched. Dancing Grass is so-named because it has small leaves that keep dancing after the wind stops blowing.

· During the war against Japan, a large number of bamboos around China bloomed suicidally (the bamboo would die soon after blooming white flowers). During the late nineteen-eighties, after the Jianghuai flood in the spring, the local bamboo also flowered, which predicted the summer floods and proved the local proverb that says, “Floods will come when bamboos bloom flowers”.

· Clivia never bloom around troubled or inharmonious families but do bloom in advance to announce good news and when happy events coming.

· Oaks will blow themselves up when loggers come and carrots will quiver in fear when rabbits enter their fields.

· Ammeters have shown that tequila plants with palm shapes react to people’s psychological feelings and even trace their owner's daily feelings of safety, danger, joy, and anger.

· If plants that are fond of light are planted in dank places, they become disgruntled and do not grow well but if ombrophyte are planted in sunny places, they will become frustrated and even die.

· Some plants release poisonous gasses. Evening Primrose can make hospital patients with hypertension and heart diseases feel uncomfortable and some plants can make the people whom they dislike become allergic and fall ill.

· Grapevines planted next to pine trees do not bear fruit but ones planted next to elms bear sour fruit.

· We have found that plants will “burst into tears" and release angry bio-waves when a branch is broken but will flourish and release joyous bio-waves when we water them, fertilize them, care for them, play music for them, and talk to them.

· Giraffes prefer a particular tree which can release toxic gases within a few minutes after they begin to eat them to force the giraffes to stop eating and go away.

In myth novels, plants, especially flowers, possess humanlike spirituality, and they are even regarded as fairies descending from the upper world.

In short, plants have spirituality. They have languages, emotions, memories, thoughts, induction, and all the features possessed by people. Plants protect us when we cherish them but punish us when we harm them.

Can plants be transformed into other LIVES after death? Yes! Non-flowering vegetation transforms into microbes, flowering vegetation transforms into insects, flowering and fruiting vegetation transform into herbivores, Vegetation does not transform directly into carnivores or people after death.

All flowering plants derive from the nimbus of celestial world and that is where they return directly, so they are not transformed into humans.

Grass also has LIFE, but its LIFE, along with insects and others, forms their own LIFE system which does not belong to the system of animals, flowers, trees, humans，Celestial Beings and Buddhas. In other words, people will not be transformed into grass, and vice versa.

Nothing but humans, microbes, insects and other animals, flowers, and trees can be regarded as LIFE, but this does not mean that they lack spirituality. All things have spirituality. Mountains, water, the earth, stones, and especially gems, all have spirituality. Metal and almost everything else has memory. Although these substances possess most of the properties of LIFE, they do not have consciousness and cannot be transformed into other LIFE after they pass on, so they are not within the LIFE category.

What about invisible Super Celestial Beings, Buddha, gods, devils, ghosts, and others who are of the spirit world? They can be seen as LIFE, only when they take on physical forms. Without a physical form, they are only spirits. This is why Jesus Christ, Buddha-Sakyamuni, and LaoTzu took human forms when they appeared before us.

The people going to the Thousand-year World or the Ten-thousand-year World after death are not spirits, but LIFE, because they will retain physical forms, but in the case of those who become Buddha after death, they have the power to change their forms, so they can exist in the Elysium World as spirits or miraculously transform into any physical form freely and omnipotently.

In short, we should distinguish between LIFE and non-LIFE with those eight features listed above. Anything that has them is LIFE, and anything that does not, is not.