Per the Cosmology section, all that is what you are made up of eventually came together as our solar system and then the Earth formed. Then, something extraordinary happened. Biology. Animated and reproductive life then formed from that which was inherently lifeless. Whether within the living or lifeless, atoms and molecules do react with each other, as they naturally are at liberty to do. Importantly, however, is that within an environment that was reactive but lifeless, "life" then came to be. There are numerous theories hypothesizing how that may have taken place, and we won't touch on those here.

From a personally significant perspective, it is true that the contemplation of how all that is Real actually came to exist in the first place may be one of the most compelling things to engage thoughtfully. But then there is the emergence of "the living". Had among All That Is "the living" not emerged, there would be no contemplation of any of this! And certainly no gratitude felt for it. Understanding the emergence of the living, how it works, and how it replicates and adapts is another of the most Spiritually oriented endeavors undertaken by humankind.

"Life" too is governed entirely by all the relevant physical and chemical processes that are possible for any collection of molecules. However, as "life" emerged these processes became organized, compartmentalized, and regulated in such a way that local collections of these reactions became maintained. They continued on. Importantly, it is not the specific individual chemical molecules that continued participating in the living process. They would come and go. Individually they were at times part of the "living" or "maintained" process, and at other times they were not. It is not the individual molecules that we consider alive, but rather it is the process itself that is continuing, and thus that we consider alive. The process is what is alive. If one considers the timeline of this process, at one moment one collection of molecules is participating in the living process, at another moment another collection is participating. The lineage of which individual molecules are participating in the living process is made up of changing individuals. If one considers the process as being alive, one can also consider the lineage as being alive, since it is what continues on, even though the components of the lineage change over time.

And of course, since the components change over time, there is also opportunity for variation along the way. Thus, as the lineage unfolds, variation within it unfolds. Which variants continue as part of the living process? Well, those variants that are consistent with surviving to the next step in the process, of course. And since the environment that the process is experiencing does change all the time, the fact that variations present themselves as part of the living process becomes an advantage that increases the likelihood that a process will continue as time, and changing environmental conditions unfold.

So it is the lineage that is living. The lineage is made up of a succession of individual participants, and many times these participants may differ (more or less) than the one before. And so with the right combination of similarity and variation, the process continues as a maintained reactive phenomenon. Appropriate for continuation within its particular environment, which may change over time.

In the realm of the "living" process, the means by which a living process advances along its lineage, supplying "copies" of itself that are mostly similar but occasionally having variation, is referred to as replication.

Today, all that is alive on this planet can consider itself part of a lineage of replicating processes, starting off simply but over time becoming more complex, that began perhaps 3 billion or more years ago on this Earth. Not quite everlasting living, and perhaps not likely to endure the events that may transpire as our sun burns through its fuel, but not bad. And certainly a longer amount of time than any of the individual participants themselves had participated with it.

You, the reader, are thus a participant in an extraordinarily long and rich and varied living process, and one that will continue forward for a very, very, long time. You are thus stardust that has become part of a maintained living process that, among other things, is actually able to consider that it is made up of stardust that itself is not alive, although the process it is involved with is.

As time moves forward, these life processes evolve.

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