What is Energy?
June 25, 2024, Payman Sattari
What is energy? If you ask a physicist, clearly you will get a very different answer than if you ask a spiritual guide or your yoga teacher. We know there are aspects of energy that can be measured with physical instruments and belong to the world of physics and matter. Yet there are also aspects of energy that have more to do with our sense of things. Energy is not only something which can be measured objectively; it is also something which can be felt.
This aspect of energy, pertaining more to our senses and subjective experience is not a part of the science we know. Our modern science is based on a purely objective and quantitative analysis of energy. Qualitative elements, like color for example, are not a part of our models. Modern physics can tell you that the color green is a wave of light around 550nm in diameter that propagates through space as electromagnetic radiation, but it can tell you nothing about the experience of color.
A quality and a quantity are not the same thing. Green, as a color we experience through our sense of sight, is a quality, not a quantity. A quality is not something which can be measured with scientific instruments or counted on your fingers. Since it cannot be counted, we cannot do math with it and fit it into a quantitative model of reality. Yet as subjective beings, our feeling and sensory experiences are an integral part of how we interpret the world. We cannot do away with “qualities” and still understand the world in any meaningful way.
The question is, do the qualitative aspects of energy also have a science to them? We cannot measure them with our instruments or do math with them, but does that also mean they are not possessed of some kind of order?
Order is everywhere we look in the cosmos. Sometimes it is hiding, but it is always there. This is the essence of science—to observe the world in an unbiased way to discover patterns that reveal nature’s architecture—the natural order. It is just that so far we have assumed that this order only pertains to physical matter and objects. But what about the subject and all the nuances of our inner experience? Is this not also a part of nature? If both qualities and quantities exist in nature, shouldn’t there be a relationship between them?
An exploration and understanding of this relationship—the relationship between qualities and quantities, or between “subjective” and “objective” elements of our observable reality—is at the core of metaphysics (as defined in The Science of Energy). It’s a journey into understanding the complete order of reality, or what the Greeks termed “cosmos” (κόσμος)–the natural order. In this context it is easier to see that metaphysics is not solely an abstract philosophical inquiry. It is an integrated study of all aspects of existence, including the place of the observer within the whole order of nature.