Once you accept the analysis of the living being, an awkward question follows almost immediately. If those are the conditions for being alive, plenty of things meet them that we do not normally count.
This video follows that thought in both directions, and it does not stop early.
Downward, then upward
Start with your own body. The cells in it act, respond, take in and give out, and have a history. On the analysis, they qualify. So there are living beings inside you, in very large numbers, and you are the environment they live in.
Now run the same reasoning upward. If a being can be composed of smaller beings, there is no obvious reason the pattern stops at you. Martinus applies it to the Earth, to the solar system, to galaxies — and finally to the universe as a whole, which on this account is one living being with everything else inside it.
The video's phrasing for the underlying claim is that all matter is an expression of life. That is a large claim, and it is the hinge the rest of it turns on.
Two perspectives, both partial
What makes this more than a picture is the observation about perspective. A cell in your body is not in a position to perceive you. It experiences its immediate surroundings — chemistry, temperature, neighbours — and that is the whole of its world. It is not being deceived. Its instruments simply do not reach that far.
The video invites the obvious inference. If we stand in the same relation to something larger, our failure to perceive it would look exactly like this, and would tell us nothing about whether it is there.
Where it touches ordinary life
The last third is the part that stays with people, because it turns an abstract principle into decisions.
If our food is made of living beings, then eating is something that happens to them, and it can go more or less well. The video takes that seriously enough to draw a conclusion about what an ideal diet would look like — the argument is developed properly in the case for vegetarian food.
It ends somewhere most cosmologies do not go: burial. If the body is a community of living beings rather than a possession, what happens to it afterwards is a question about them, not only about us.
That is characteristic of the whole channel. The structure is argued abstractly, and then it is asked to pay for itself in practice.
Key ideas
- The principle of life units: living beings exist inside living beings, at every scale.
- Your cells meet the conditions for being living beings, which makes you their environment.
- Run the same logic upward and the Earth, the solar system, galaxies, and finally the universe are living beings.
- A cell cannot perceive the being it lives inside — and that limit says nothing about whether the larger being exists.
- The principle is not left abstract: it is applied to what we eat and to what happens to the body afterwards.
Chapters
About this article. It summarises the video above from The Eternal World Picture. The writings of Martinus Thomsen are published by the Martinus Institute.
