Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1697

1697. Vegetable beings appear to us as "plants", and animal beings as "animals" and "human beings". Thus from a particular point of view plants must be units in a "vegetable substance", while animals and human beings are units in an "animal substance". But for whom do the vegetable and animal beings respectively constitute "vegetable" and "animal substance"? They are "substance" for all the beings in whose organisms the vegetable and animal beings in question live and have their daily experiences. This thus means that beings in a higher spiral than the one in which we are situated must of necessity perceive us, the beings in their underlying spirals, as "substance", since, from this elevated perspective, they can be seen only as a collected mass in which each individual being is such a small particle that it can be seen only along with thousands of other particles of the same kind. And this view of a collected mass of units that we cannot distinguish individually will always appear to the senses as "substance" or "matter". In the organism of the Earth all the vegetable beings or plants will together constitute a "vegetable substance" just as all the animal beings – animals and human beings – together constitute in the same way an "animal substance" when viewed from the physical sensory plane of the I of the Earth.