The Life Carriers

36:6.1Life is both mech­a­nis­tic and vi­tal­is­tic—ma­te­rial and spir­i­tual. Ever will Uran­tia physi­cists and chemists pro­gress in their un­der­stand­ing of the pro­to­plas­mic forms of veg­etable and an­i­mal life, but never will they be able to pro­duce liv­ing or­gan­isms. Life is some­thing dif­fer­ent from all en­ergy man­i­fes­ta­tions; even the ma­te­rial life of phys­i­cal crea­tures is not in­her­ent in mat­ter.

36:6.2Things ma­te­rial may en­joy an in­de­pen­dent ex­is­tence, but life springs only from life. Mind can be de­rived only from pre-ex­is­tent mind. Spirit takes ori­gin only from spirit an­ces­tors. The crea­ture may pro­duce the forms of life, but only a cre­ator per­son­al­ity or a cre­ative force can sup­ply the ac­ti­vat­ing liv­ing spark.

36:6.3Life Car­ri­ers can or­ga­nize the ma­te­rial forms, or phys­i­cal pat­terns, of liv­ing be­ings, but the Spirit pro­vides the ini­tial spark of life and be­stows the en­dow­ment of mind. Even the liv­ing forms of ex­per­i­men­tal life which the Life Car­ri­ers or­ga­nize on their Sal­ving­ton worlds are al­ways de­void of re­pro­duc­tive pow­ers. When the life for­mu­las and the vi­tal pat­terns are cor­rectly as­sem­bled and prop­erly or­ga­nized, the pres­ence of a Life Car­rier is suf­fi­cient to ini­ti­ate life, but all such liv­ing or­gan­isms are lack­ing in two es­sen­tial at­tri­butes—mind en­dow­ment and re­pro­duc­tive pow­ers. An­i­mal mind and hu­man mind are gifts of the lo­cal uni­verse Mother Spirit, func­tion­ing through the seven ad­ju­tant mind-spir­its, while crea­ture abil­ity to re­pro­duce is the spe­cific and per­sonal im­par­ta­tion of the Uni­verse Spirit to the an­ces­tral life plasm in­au­gu­rated by the Life Car­ri­ers.

36:6.4When the Life Car­ri­ers have de­signed the pat­terns of life, af­ter they have or­ga­nized the en­ergy sys­tems, there must oc­cur an ad­di­tional phe­nom­e­non; the “breath of life” must be im­parted to these life­less forms. The Sons of God can con­struct the forms of life, but it is the Spirit of God who re­ally con­tributes the vi­tal spark. And when the life thus im­parted is spent, then again the re­main­ing ma­te­rial body be­comes dead mat­ter. When the be­stowed life is ex­hausted, the body re­turns to the bo­som of the ma­te­rial uni­verse from which it was bor­rowed by the Life Car­ri­ers to serve as a tran­sient ve­hi­cle for that life en­dow­ment which they con­veyed to such a vis­i­ble as­so­ci­a­tion of en­ergy-mat­ter.

36:6.5The life be­stowed upon plants and an­i­mals by the Life Car­ri­ers does not re­turn to the Life Car­ri­ers upon the death of plant or an­i­mal. The de­part­ing life of such a liv­ing thing pos­sesses nei­ther iden­tity nor per­son­al­ity; it does not in­di­vid­u­ally sur­vive death. Dur­ing its ex­is­tence and the time of its so­journ in the body of mat­ter, it has un­der­gone a change; it has un­der­gone en­ergy evo­lu­tion and sur­vives only as a part of the cos­mic forces of the uni­verse; it does not sur­vive as in­di­vid­ual life. The sur­vival of mor­tal crea­tures is wholly pred­i­cated on the evolve­ment of an im­mor­tal soul within the mor­tal mind.

36:6.6We speak of life as “en­ergy” and as “force,” but it is re­ally nei­ther. Force-en­ergy is var­i­ously grav­ity re­spon­sive; life is not. Pat­tern is also non­re­spon­sive to grav­ity, be­ing a con­fig­u­ra­tion of en­er­gies that have al­ready ful­filled all grav­ity-re­spon­sive obli­ga­tions. Life, as such, con­sti­tutes the an­i­ma­tion of some pat­tern-con­fig­ured or oth­er­wise seg­re­gated sys­tem of en­ergy—ma­te­rial, mindal, or spir­i­tual.

36:6.7There are some things con­nected with the elab­o­ra­tion of life on the evo­lu­tion­ary plan­ets which are not al­to­gether clear to us. We fully com­pre­hend the phys­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tion of the elec­tro­chem­i­cal for­mu­las of the Life Car­ri­ers, but we do not wholly un­der­stand the na­ture and source of the life-ac­ti­va­tion spark. We know that life flows from the Fa­ther through the Son and by the Spirit. It is more than pos­si­ble that the Mas­ter Spir­its are the sev­en­fold chan­nel of the river of life which is poured out upon all cre­ation. But we do not com­pre­hend the tech­nique whereby the super­vis­ing Mas­ter Spirit par­tic­i­pates in the ini­tial episode of life be­stowal on a new planet. The An­cients of Days, we are con­fi­dent, also have some part in this in­au­gu­ra­tion of life on a new world, but we are wholly ig­no­rant of the na­ture thereof. We do know that the Uni­verse Mother Spirit ac­tu­ally vi­tal­izes the life­less pat­terns and im­parts to such ac­ti­vated plasm the pre­rog­a­tives of or­gan­is­mal re­pro­duc­tion. We ob­serve that these three are the lev­els of God the Sev­en­fold, some­times des­ig­nated as the Su­preme Cre­ators of time and space; but oth­er­wise we know lit­tle more than Uran­tia mor­tals—sim­ply that con­cept is in­her­ent in the Fa­ther, ex­pres­sion in the Son, and life re­al­iza­tion in the Spirit.

36:6.8[In­dited by a Vo­ron­da­dek Son sta­tioned on Uran­tia as an ob­server and act­ing in this ca­pac­ity by re­quest of the Mel­chiz­e­dek Chief of the Super­vis­ing Rev­e­la­tory Corps.]