I’ve finally gotten sufficiently motivated to write out my thoughts about the discomfort I experience with the way the word “energy” is used in esoteric culture (sometimes affectionately self-deprecatingly called “woo”). This is a (very rough) draft. I welcome comments questions, and corrections from pointing out typos to “wow, it seems like you’re totally misunderstanding [important thing] here” to “wow you should really check out this [thing I have never heard of]!”

I want to be clear that I’m not making any claim of authority here – this is just some of how I see the world and some half-worked-out thoughts about it. It's kind of long and ramble-y. And I guess I'm not looking to persuade or debate? Just to share my sense of this unease. And invite you to share your feelings about the usage.

OK.

I've never been comfortable with the way people in esoteric culture use the world "energy".

At first, as an atheist child, I had no respect for what I saw as ridiculous pseudo-science. Later, as I became more agnostic and open to mysticism, magic, and weirdness, I had a sort of snobbish class anxiety about wanting to distinguish my (sophisticated, teenage, know-it-all) occultism from that of crystal shoppes, telephone psychics, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer.

But now it’s more that I’ve developed a strong intuitive model of how the "hard science" energy described by physics and chemistry manifests in living systems. That thermodynamics describes a reality that entropy increases in isolated systems. But that living organisms are not isolated! We photosynthesize, we eat, we grow-through-stuff-and-digest-it or whatever you call fungal heterotrophy.

But this energetic connection to the outside world, mere ingestion is not sufficient. Complex mechanisms carry out respiration (prokaryotic & eukaryotic) to make use of the energy entering the system. To use it to do work. An organism dies, yes, if you seal it in a box, but also if these mechanisms are interfered with or broken somehow. This can happen at the cellular level (as with cyanide, which breaks the mechanisms cells use to harness the energy in sugar) up through the organ level (for example, obstructed digestion or catastrophic blood loss). There is an incredibly complex, self-regulating process harnessing the energy in the light or food to do the work of homeostasis, of maintaining its own ability to continue, of staying alive.

I derive deeply compelling metaphor for spiritual practice from this model. I feel my home around me as a living system, animated by my conscious activity to maintain it. This human activity is the difference between a home and a ruin. I have a sense of a continuity of consciousness: from the thoughts I am typing into this document, down through more fundamental processes of consciousness, arising from / rooting into autonomic functions of the body at organ system, organ, tissue, and cellular scales. (of the ecology of microbiota in my gut and skin)

Our lives extend into the kitchen, the supermarket, the supply chain, through the farm, to the sun, rain, atmosphere, soil. Our lives extend into the trash, the garbage trucks, the dump. The toilet, the sewage processing plant, the sea. The clothes we buy, the home we rent or finance shelter us. We participate in the economy, an abstraction of cooperation with strangers (but also a self-catalyzing aggregation of power). We participate in human relationships with our families, friends, coworkers, fellow citizens, humanity. We inhabit a hive-like superorganism. We enjoy each other's company (as best we can).

I sometimes have the sense that the mind is a process carried out by neurons and the rest of the body interacting with each other in a densely recursive network of cause-effect relationships. Mutual causation, mutual effect. Inter-dependent co-arisings. That sense organs, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, proprioception draw the world into my process, that motor neurons, muscles, bones, lungs, vocal cords extend it outwards. We are engaged, the inside and outside.

If one neuron causing another to be more or less likely to fire is clearly part of my process, a part of me, what about a sensory nerve? What about a photon striking a photoreceptor in the retina? What about the distant start emitting that very photon thousands of years ago and light-years away? What about the Hubble Space Telescope? What about the scanning electron microscope? The LIGO? Bugs Bunny? What about these words reaching you through the internet? You and I are literally part of the same process of writing and reading at this exact moment. (Or, no, I wrote this a while ago. But I might revise it in response to your future feedback!)

We are also literally distant branches of the same chemical, physical process unfolding through our lives' histories, those of our eventually common progenitors. In our ancestors we are one. Human, primate, mammal, reptile, fish, weird little molusk-ey Cambrian explosion guy, multi-celled polyp thing, chemovore proto-bacterion, organic chemical slime, chemistry, complex elements, fusion, solar formation, differentiation of matter from energy, inflation of time and space, big bang, !?

Or: We can invert the whole tower of causation. Say that you are here in the present and you are aware of the world through your senses, one of which is consciousness of your thoughts, another of which is memory. You perceive something across the room with your eye, you perceive something last week through your memory. You carry a model of the world in there. It's how you know what's outside this room or that anteaters exist. Maybe everything you know about extends from the present moment through these senses. A World is implied, usually quite convincingly. What if the World grows out from you as you are learning to perceive when you are infant? What if you and the World grow toward each other, branching, intertwining until it seems like a seamless reality and you spend most of your life in this collaboratively constructed nest?

(And: Is there a real difference between these ontologies?)

In all this, energy is maybe just an element of reality’s structure, a raw, dumb substance, like matter. (or, maybe, a living, conscious substance, like matter? or space? or time?) Sunlight warms, but it doesn't feed without the cell-level consciousness of plants, the will to grow, the chemical cleverness to turn light and water and carbon dioxide into sugar, cellulose. The urge to go get something to eat, to keep breathing in and out keeps us animals alive. Hunger, thirst, pain aversion, pleasure seeking, curiosity, boredom, fear, love. Will. Consciousness.

There is a richness of texture here around consciousness as it organizes itself around the need to direct and process (actual chemistry-and-physics) energy to carry out the process of being alive.

So when "woo" people (and I now count myself as a "woo person"!) talk about "energy", it seems clear to me that what we mean is "quality of attention" or "texture of experience" or "shape of awareness". (This might seem like a kind of demotion of "woo energy" to something more mundane, but it’s not – if you share my sense of the role consciousness plays in the Universe's structure.)

Even at a colloquial level, when someone says "I don't like that person's energy," I hear "I don't like their quality of attention." or "I don't like their presence, the way they are when they inhabit a social context, their effect on how I feel or on the group's mood, the conversation."

I'm not interested in trying to control how people use language -- it's fine that people use the word energy, it's just... a bit philosophically uncomfortable to me?

And indeed I’ll use the word "energy" in this way when it's convenient for communication. I'll refer to (for example) "the energy body".

Whether the energy body exists as a subject measurable by physics feels kind of irrelevant. Even if there is a literal “physics” energy, its effects on us are what is important. It’s a real phenomenon. It's actually felt experience of what it is like to be in a body. Like, you are as likely to succeed in convincing me that being kicked in the ass or having an orgasm is imaginary as you are to convince me that Pīti is not real. I was there. It happened. It surprised me.

(Also: Imaginary things are real. But that's a whole other rabbit-hole / essay / rant.)

Sure, maybe "the energy body" is "just" an illusory epiphenomenon of "having" a body that guides me to "inhabit" that body in a healthier, more fulfilling way -- to be it better. But so what?

(And also: what if it's more than that. What if imagination is just the way into an otherwise hidden realm of experience? What if imagination is a sense, one that western materialism has allowed to atrophy or perhaps exorcised and projected on/into mass entertainment media and/or organized religion? Wait -- not going down that rabbit hole. (today))

I guess maybe it's not the idea of "energy" that bothers me, it's just that calling it "energy" reminds me of late 1800s occultists insecure in the face of the Enlightenment's dominant rationalist paradigm/crusade, and trying (with unconvincing desperation) to borrow/steal a bit of legitimacy by dressing their discoveries (largely of other cultures' work) with an amateurishly applied scientistic veneer? Feels like it lacks the courage of its convictions.

Or maybe I'm more comfortable with foreign words like Qi or Prana or Ruach or Spirit because they don't already have clashing, science-based meanings in my own language (or more precisely defined meanings as terms-of-art in science) so they don't clash/cringe. Maybe their foreign-ness helps me to disentangle myself from elements of my own culture I find profoundly alienating? Gives me a point of leverage to pull myself out of the swamp? (Kind of like scientists using Latin as a separate namespace for taxonomy to differentiate it from common nomenclature, which is often local or inconsistent.) (Or is this just Bohemianism? Appropriation? Exoticization?)

I don't feel that reclassifying "energy" as a quality of consciousness is any sort of demotion or disenchantment because I see consciousness as more fundamental to the universe's structure than (physics) energy.

To me it's clear (when l remember to look at it this way) that we are points of awareness in conversation with the World (and with each other!) and that consciousness is the medium of this conversation. The Strong Anthropic Principle seems self-evident to me. World and Person are not separable -- there is no such thing as an uninhabited universe, no such thing as a Person without a World to inhabit. They are a system. Their interaction is what makes them. They emerge from it.

World and Person Empty, in the Buddhist sense. They lack inherent existence, a "way that they really are" outside the context of a way-of-looking, a mode of perception, a frame of reference.

Outside the conversation.

The conversation is the thing.

Energy, matter, space, time, meaning, these all flow through it.

It flows through our lives.

Through us.