778. Before we go any further into our presentation of the "life substances", we will stop briefly here to consider various phenomena that can strengthen our previous knowledge and thereby our ability to understand the "life substances" that we will come to in due course, and their culminating interaction in the combination we call the "living being".
      So far we have been in touch with "life substance no. 1" (the primordial desire), "life substance no. 2" (hunger, attraction, movement), "life substance no. 3" (satiation, standstill or rest), "life substance no. 4" (defecation, repulsion, movement) and "life substance no. 5" (material or matter). At this point readers might be a bit surprised by the fact that we describe the first four realities in the experience of life as "substances". As the first reality that can be described as "material" is reality no. 5, how can it be justifiable or correct to express the previous four realities as "substances"? Here readers have to remember that it is "life" itself or consciousness, that is to say mainly "X3", that we are in the process of defining. We know that this "X" consists of more than what we call "material". It constitutes will, thought and perception, which are certainly not factors we are accustomed to describing as "material". But if they are not "material", what are they? The simplest analysis of them can be only that they constitute "something". If they constituted an absolute "nothing", they would not exist. But now it is a fact that they do exist. And as a result, the previously mentioned factors have to be considered as constituting "something", just as much as what we call "material". Everything that life is made up of therefore constitutes "something", regardless of whether it is what we call "material" or whether it constitutes things that in daily life we certainly do not usually include in this analysis. We cannot avoid the fact that an all-embracing "something" therefore irrefutably constitutes the material of which life is made up. Readers should here remember that in this connection "life" is the same as the I's collective "consciousness".
      But as everything is therefore "something" of which life or consciousness consists, this "something" is, from a cosmic point of view, the same as a "substance", even though, from a physical point of view, it is "immaterial". Nothing can, from a cosmic point of view, be "immaterial". A thing that exists cannot at the same time be a thing that does not exist. And, as the advanced researcher will now see, "something" that exists cannot exist without constituting in one way or another some of the occurrences of which life consists or is built up. And as all the things in this series of analyses we are now setting forth before the readers are specifically those factors that make up "life" or the I's consciousness, we have chosen to express them all by using the term "life substances". From now on this expression will therefore constitute the collective term for everything that exists as details in "X3", or for everything concerning "life" itself or the I's consciousness. "Life substances" are therefore the same as "substances of consciousness". And as everything that exists is a declaration or a manifestation of "life" (nothing here can exist as an exception) everything must be identical to "life substances", both the so-called material things and the so-called mental things, both creation and what is created, both movement and stillness, both solid and gaseous materials. And as it is our task in this section of "Livets Bog" to put all these realities or factors in place, I have thought that the simplest way to do so and therefore the way that is easiest to understand is by numbering all the elements that come under the collective term. And we will get to know each of life's most significant and important details under the term "life substance" number this or that, in accordance with the place it occupies in the sequence from the first detail of consciousness or experience, the "primordial desire", down to the great ocean of the world of forms.
      The fact that something is expressed as a "life substance" does not always mean that it is a "substance" in the usual meaning of the word. It can, as the reader has seen, also mean that it is an "immaterial" detail in the sequence of analyses of the consciousness.