According to this principle, the Universe is life, and started as life. According to this principle, there is no moment before which life did not exist in the Universe, and after which it suddenly did exist. According to this principle, life is a continuum of form, evolving from the earlier simple forms to more intricate later forms. So, in the same way that early forms of life on our planet Earth, such as the protozoans, still live alongside us today, so too the even earlier forms of life - the atoms and their various primordial constituents - still live alongside us.
If you accept that the Universe is, indeed, saturated with this quality we call "life", then there is no sense of incredulity at contemplating the existence of life, or the diverse forms of life that we witness around us. Under this premise, one does not wonder with awe and amazement at the supreme unlikelihood that life could arise. What confounds us is when we commit to a very narrow view of what constitutes life. When one concludes that the very nature of the Universe is life, then we come to see our narrow view of life as being merely a more recent embodiment of life. What divides what we have traditionally considered to be alive from what we have considered to be not alive is merely a threshold of form similarity.
If one accepts that any thing of which we can say there is more than one is in fact living, then we view every thing which exists in the Universe as alive. And from this view, the atoms and the planets are no more mere cosmological phenomena than are human beings. Any thing, of which there is more than one, must reproduce (or replicate, if you like) through some process. It is naive and narrow-minded to assume that all living things must reproduce through a process that can be superficially likened to our own. We can accept that any form which is able to multiply its kind has the will to do thus and has opportunistically harnessed the means to do so, even when it may seem from a certain perspective that it is rather an external will that is responsible for proliferating the form.
Ultimately, according to the Living Universe Principle, the Universe itself was born of a process of replication and may before its final death also spawn new universes, through a process which is still far beyond our understanding.