Spiritual Energy?

Over the past several years I've been digging into the year by year, decade by decade, century by century, progression of modern thought concerning the largest questions that humanity faces: life, death, material reality and whether there's any other version of reality than what's perceivable and palpable. I wasn't interested in radical or revolutionary thought. I wanted to know how the world's thought leadership came upon those notions that would eventually become axiomatic.

One thing jumped out at me as being overwhelmingly consistent. Humanity's most culturally successful Reality narratives are and always have been based on successful societal/technological staples that had – to that point – become integral to the everyday lives of the average person. In other words, what successfully passes as Reality is what it is that's widely available and easily relatable that the human mind can impose upon whatever it is that remains otherwise impenetrable, while being fundamental to the existential structure (and therefore impervious to wholesale dismissal).

Yes, that's quite a statement, but a cursory examination of the definitional evolution of our Universe alone is enough to make my case: Newton's mechanistic universe – static and even more infinitely precise than the finest Swiss clocks of the day, Einstein's expansive, potential/release, energy-centric Universe – reflecting the steam-powered, society transforming technology of his day, and now, as the first fledgling steps toward redefining Reality in terms of bytes and ones and zeros collect across the world of theoretical cosmology, we see (yet again) the digital information technology of our day being applied to the narrative that will be used to define Reality for yet another suite of modern human generations, with all "serious science" eventually falling dutifully into line with that narrative. Nothing ever actually changes. It carries on in lockstep progression, but in that sense, it never really changes.

That said, for the moment, we're still mired in the technologically cemented Reality narrative of our fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers; the "everything is energy" narrative of the late 19^th century. And, when I use the word everything, I mean everything. Even those things that science – to this point in its evolution – dismisses out of hand; spirits and afterlife and discarnate humanity carrying on in willful disregard for the fact that the body has fallen and begun its slow decay into raw elements. In these waning days of the steam-powered Reality narrative, energy is still the Alpha and the Omega of all that is, was and will ever be.

So what is energy? Is it really everything? Can it actually be everything? What is the physical basis of energy? Are we just manifestations of energy? Is spiritual existence its own form of energy?

I'm going to get extremely strict in my terminology here, and use a dictionary to precisely define the word energy before we go any further. The one definition that spans all dictionary definitions of the word energy is actually pretty simple:  

• The capacity of a physical system to do work

Okay, so I'll admit that this definition doesn't really satisfy our needs here. Perhaps if I go to the Internet's most beloved source of hard-fought, technically accurate (even if it's often philosophically skewed to one recognizable slant or another) information http://wikipedia.com. Here's what wiki has to say about the nuts and bolts of what energy is.

The total energy of a system can be subdivided and classified in various ways. For example, Classical mechanics distinguishes between kinetic energy, which is determined by an object's movement through space, and potential energy, which is a function of the position of an object within a field. It may also be convenient to distinguish gravitational energy, electric energy, thermal energy, several types of nuclear energy (which utilize potentials from the nuclear force and the weak force), electric energy (from the electric field), and magnetic energy (from the magnetic field), among others. Many of these classifications overlap; for instance, thermal energy usually consists partly of kinetic and partly of potential energy. Some types of energy are a varying mix of both potential and kinetic energy. An example is mechanical energy which is the sum of (usually macroscopic) kinetic and potential energy in a system. Elastic energy in materials is also dependent upon electrical potential energy (among atoms and molecules), as is chemical energy, which is stored and released from a reservoir of electrical potential energy between electrons, and the molecules or atomic nuclei that attract them

The one term in all that, that seems to show up in every sentence is the term kinetic, so I want to take a better look at that term to see if it can help us get to the root identity of energy as something that actually exists. Here's what my dictionary says about the word kinetic:

• Pertaining to motion

Again, my dictionary isn't filling the emptiness concerning what the hell kinetic has to do with the kind of energy we all use in our everyday lives. That said, I know that this is a blog post and not a physics dissertation, so I'll save us all the grief and get right to the punch line; all energy is, is the release of motion in response to a requirement for motion that has been imposed upon a material system of some sort. That system can be anything from a rock being held off the ground (creating a rock-to-ground "system" that features a gravitational energy potential) and then released and allowed to drop to the ground (featuring the energy of that rock's kinetic momentum until that energy is transferred into a force impact as it hits the ground) to a chemical excitation of molecules; causing those molecules to move rapidly and kinetically create heat energy (as a result of friction) until that energy is transferred in some manner away from that system to another system.

Basically, what I'm trying to point out is that energy isn't some vague, nebulous quantity that hovers about here and there, possessing ethereal powers that have – as yet – been ill-defined. At its core, energy is movement, and that's all it is. Energy potential is what builds up when that movement is restricted. That restriction of that movement is what scientists refer to as mass, and if that mass is successful in trapping that movement long enough, and in a sufficiently organized manner, what you end up with is matter; the stuff that our bodies and brains are made of.

That means that unlike the claims that everything that we know to exist is comprised of energy, it's sort of exactly the opposite of that claim. Everything that we know to exist is made up of the restriction of energy. Not the elimination of energy, but the organized restriction of energy.

So, what does this mean for the claims that the human mind is a form of intellectual energy? Or that there's such a thing as spiritual energy? Well, unless you're crafting your own version of the English Language, I'm not seeing the term energy as being relevant to any of it. Energy is movement. Period. That said, I can see why it (energy) is still the catch-all term for whatever it is that cannot be quantified. We're still laboring under the steam-powered 19^th Century's view of Reality as being based on energy and force and this moving with power against that.

I wonder if we'll be better served under the emerging narrative that everything that exists is digitally based on ones and zeros; highs and lows. Like our computers.

In future posts, I'll get into what actually bases pretty much everything that exists – material and non-material in nature. And yes, there is a full realm of non-material existence, and yes, it shares a common physical substructure with all that we know to exist here in the Material Realm. That said, none of it is based on energy.

Then again, perhaps I'm being a bit too hasty here. After all, spatial change is the primary survival strategy of the quantum of Now.

Well, enough of that. Just so long as we've cleared up that whole "spiritual energy" nonsense. More to come.