Life

There is no reason why a human being cannot live a life of truth, love, strength, impeccability, dignity, and self-respect. You do not need any special situation. You do not need any unusual occasion. Any interaction, any transaction, is a place for you to be that way, and that is when you see the grace and the beauty of life. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 82)

That is the task we have in this life: to learn how to live on earth in physical bodies, do things and enjoy things that the inner being is usually not concerned with. In other words, how can essential Being manifest as a human being? What we are doing – the task of life – is developing Being into a human being. That is the stage of evolution we are engaged in. Being is already here; you come as Being. It is true that you forget, and you forget because you still are learning how to bring this Being into life. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 85)

Therefore, we can say that one’s life is a current of experience, a current of perception, a current of impressions. Experience includes all the modalities: vision, hearing, feeling, sensing, thinking, imaging, altogether as one unified current. If you close your eyes, the current continues; only the patterns and colors change. (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg 155)

Life and true will

This is a true life, then: instead of trying to get satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness, love, we allow ourselves to have basic trust. Then all that we do, our relationships and all our activities, are an expression of the satisfaction, fulfillment and love. The true life is a spontaneous activity that arises out of our Essence, and there is no need for the efforting kind of will. You've got everything. You simply need to see the truth, and what needs to happen just happens. You don't need to do anything about it. The functioning of true will causes you to do what is needed. (Diamond Heart Book 2, pg 122)

Our life is not what we experience, but the experience of what we experience. It is the vision of the ocean, the sensation of coolness and wetness when I am swimming, the taste of the bitter saltiness of the water. All of these are what actually constitutes my life. My life is my experience of both inner and outer events. (Inner Journey Home, pg 114)

This line of thought demonstrates that in some fundamental and literal sense our life is our soul. Our life is constituted by the various forms that arise in our consciousness, which is our soul. Our life is actually the transformations and unfoldment of the soul. This is the Essence of our life, the felt core of our experiences. To put it differently, our life is the life of the soul, where the life of the soul is her flow and unfoldment. (Inner Journey Home, pg 114)

In our view, life is inherent to the universe, rather than merely being a potential that arises when self-organization reaches a high level of complexity … the universe is not only alive; it is growing. This growth is what we see as cosmic evolution … (Inner Journey Home, pg 120)

We discover that life, or aliveness, is a particular dimension of the soul, a basic property of its presence. It is actually a Platonic form, independent from bodies and from matter in general. It is always inherent and present in the soul, but we can experience it explicitly. In other words, just as we can experience our soul as pure knowledge, we can also experience it as pure life. We are then not only alive; we are life. We are fundamental life, present as life, life that can imbue the body with its vigor and dynamism and empower it to function. (Inner Journey Home, pg 125)

Life and suffering

When you look at your life from the perspective of the objective view, you realize everything that happens is guided by an intelligence greater than your own. As long as you maintain that you want it to happen a certain way, you are striving toward an egoically determined outcome and you remain entrenched in suffering. (Facets of Unity, pg 285)

Life, a property of the Soul

Various wisdom traditions have detailed teachings about what happens after death. Here we are concerned with the recognition that life is a basic property of the soul, and that the presence of the soul in the body is what animates it and imbues it with life. It becomes very clear for us, in beholding a corpse and especially if we can perceive the departing soul, that death is the departing of the soul, and hence, life is not a property of the body. Life is not a property that a self-organizing system develops as it attains a certain degree of complexity and self-organization. Life is immanent in the universe; it appears as its self-organizing property, and as it reaches a certain maturity of self-organization it manifests explicitly and fully as biological life. (The Inner Journey Home, p 125)