In physics, Energy is defined as the ability to produce heat or do work, or also as the quantitative property of power that is conserved. I was looking for better definitions in many places but I couldn't find any that were a little less ethereal. Even in some forum, someone had the same doubt I did. He was looking for a definition that reflected something more tangible, and the answer another forum member gave him was that to find a deeper definition, he had to resort to philosophy.
One would think that science would have a precise definition of something so basic to physics, but the reality is that language evolved long before our understanding of the physical phenomena of the Universe. And in fact, the origin of the word Energy is certainly philosophical. The word comes from the Greek 'Energeia', which means 'activity' or 'operation'. It was applied to many things including concepts like happiness and pleasure.
This means that actually spirituality didn't borrow the concept of energy from science, but rather the reverse. So we can understand that human beings have always related energy to certain states of mood. One is able to carry out the work it requires when one's energy level is high, and when it's low, well, one has to 'recharge', rest, meditate, or sleep.
In other words, it's valid to accept that there are two meanings for Energy: One physical and one metaphysical, although both are very similar: The first is the physical capacity to generate movement, heat, or transformation, and the second consists in the perception of personal capacity to carry out some activity.
In mystical thinking, however, energy is granted an additional dimension, and it is that of duality, which we have discussed in other episodes: Good and Bad energies. Here, as in the other cases we have mentioned before, the concepts of good and evil are relative to each group's worldview, but in general, good energies are referred to as perceptions related to light, consciousness, love, kindness, and happiness, and bad energies to the opposite perceptions: darkness, unconsciousness, hatred, evil, and sadness.
Common reference is made to 'energies' when those perceptions don't obey to some evident cause. It's common to hear mystics say that a person has a 'beautiful energy' or that a house has a 'heavy energy'. In both cases, the observer manifests his instinctive reaction to the presence of the observed person or thing, an intuition about the intentions or values of the observed person or about the convenience of interacting with the observed object.
The perception of this type of energies could more properly be called 'intuition', and from the point of view of science, it is one of the most important evolutionary processes that evolution has given us to survive. From the point of view of spirituality, it is one of the most powerful tools of the initiate to face the unknown.
Intuition is defined by Wikipedia as the ability to acquire knowledge without resorting to conscious reasoning. In some of the esoteric schools I knew, it was called 'intuito' (intuit), although this is an error because according to the Royal Academy of the Language, the word 'intuito' means 'glance' or 'look'. In any case, intuition is considered in esotericism as the fundamental tool of the magus.
Eliphas Levi, the famous French occultist of the 19th century, wrote in his book 'Dogma and Ritual of High Magic': 'It is important that the magus knows the secrets of science; but he can know them by intuition without having learned them'. According to Levi, the magus can develop the capacity to know all the secrets of nature without the need to study or analyze, simply 'downloading' the knowledge he needs from a kind of mystic cyberspace known as the 'astral world'. To achieve this, each author had his own techniques, including meditation, fasts, use of psychotropic substances, prayers, mantras, invocations, conjurations, and even self-flagellation.
The truth is that science fully accepts the existence of intuition, but not as something supernatural, rather as another process of the human mind, which in its functioning allows us to process much more information than we are aware of.
There's a scene in the 2013 movie 'Man of Steel', which is the story of Superman, in which Clark Kent, being a child, locked himself in something like a cabinet in the school where he studied. What happened to him was that suddenly he began to perceive at the same time everything his senses could capture, X-ray vision, sounds from almost anywhere in the world. Of course, the child was scared and over-stimulated with all those images and noises. Then his mom arrived and started talking to him, telling him to concentrate only on her voice, nothing else, and so, little by little, the child began to calm down.
In a way, the brain of all human beings works like Superman's: All the time we are receiving hundreds of simultaneous external and internal stimuli: sounds, images, bodily sensations, memories, suppositions, fears, etc. What our mind does is filter most of those stimuli and concentrate on those it considers most relevant to the present situation. That's why we can concentrate on writing without having to think about the street noises, the conversation of those next to us, the little birds passing by the window, etc.
This doesn't mean our brain isn't processing all the other stimuli. In fact, the brain has the capacity to relate the events that happen with the unconscious stimuli we perceived moments before the event happened. I'll explain this better with a fictitious example:
Let's say you live in the countryside and it's common to hear dog barks. They're so frequent that it comes a moment when you no longer hear them. They're there, but they become part of the sound background of daily life. But it happens that dogs bark unusually loudly when a certain species of birds arrive in a flock to the area where you live. It's a subtle difference so you don't pay attention to it, but your brain does perceive it. Then, minutes after the increase in barking, the power goes out in your house. It turns out the birds have landed on the cables that carry the electricity, causing a short circuit that overloaded the grid and the power went out in the sector.
This starts happening, let's say, once a month, so your brain starts associating the coordinated increase in the barking with the fact that the power goes out, but you're not aware of it, you haven't paid conscious attention to the event. Then one day, you feel like a premonition and you start saving your work on the computer when suddenly the power goes out again. You don't know why, but you already intuited that the power was going out.
This is very common in romantic relationships. Very frequently, the 'premonition' that the partner is having an affair comes as if by magic, although in reality, it's the unconscious processing of a quantity of signals that the unfaithful person themselves starts throwing off, even if subtly.
Energies then are actually the accumulation of signals we perceive unconsciously that allow us to form an almost instant judgment about something new that is presented to us. This is very important from the point of view of evolution because for hundreds of thousands of years, before civilization, we depended on our intuition to survive.
Yuval Noah Harari explains it with an example in his book Sapiens: A hungry primate in the forest comes across a palm full of bananas but at the base of the palm there's a lion lying down. The monkey doesn't know mathematics or statistics, but its brain has to calculate in seconds the probability of it making it to the branch of the palm, how high the lion can jump, how ripe the bananas are, how hungry the lion will be, and whether it could survive a little longer without eating those bananas.
This whole process becomes a torrent of sensations in the monkey's mind: An urgency to make the jump mixed with a fear in the belly that holds it back. The monkeys that evolved with too much courage surely fell prey to predators more frequently than the more careful monkeys, but the too-fearful monkeys starved more frequently than the more daring monkeys. The monkeys with a good balance between courage and caution lived longer and left more offspring, for which the genes that predispose to the ability to analyze situations and calculate risks passed with greater success to the following generations.
What mystics call energies, for the indigenous is the voice of nature, and for the religious the voice of the angels or of God Himself. We meet a person and immediately our mind starts identifying familiar traits, characteristics that can tell us if the person is trustworthy, if they have good intentions, if they belong to our social class, if they sexually interest us or not, if they can mean a threat, how educated they are, and a number of other variables, but all of this happens in three or four minutes, while we smile, shake hands, and exchange a few words. Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to remember a person's name when they've just been introduced to you? Well, because your brain is working at full capacity processing all that information unconsciously.
After those few initial minutes, we often say 'that person has something that doesn't add up' or 'wow, they have a beautiful energy.' This capacity of observation is the superpower shown in the movies and the Sherlock Holmes series, when he analyzes a suspect and can know that he recently passed by a construction site because of a faint trace of cement in the shoe, and that he used to have long hair because his nape was unusually white compared to the rest of his skin, or things like that.
This capacity is, in fact, the tool of seers and fortune tellers: A very developed intuition that allows them to read many subtle signals that would be hidden for most people. They mention your mom and without needing you to answer anything, they can perceive if you have a good or bad relationship with her by a shine in your eyes, a slight gesture of displeasure, a look of sadness, etc. Many coaches and spiritual guides use this skill constructively to guide a person in their process of growth and self-knowledge, but there are those who take advantage of their intuition being perceived as a supernatural power to enrich themselves or to manipulate their followers.
The same explanation applies to the phenomenon of the energy of places, such as houses: In those places there can be a quantity of chemical or natural substances that our senses perceive unconsciously. An unusually cold or dark house gives us the sensation of something negative. There can also be allergens such as dust, fungi, mites, or cockroach droppings that we perceive unconsciously and give us the sensation that something isn't right in the place. Or there can be subtle signals that there was violence in the house or that the neighbors can become a problem, and if we're sensitive enough, we can simply conclude that the house has a vibration we don't like, so we keep looking for another place.
Intuition has something very interesting that few people know. Part of intuition doesn't happen in the brain but in the gut. In English there's a term commonly used to refer to intuition: gut feeling, which translates as 'perception of the gut', and it's something everyone recognizes: situations, people, or places that produce in us a particular reaction in the belly. Well, it turns out we all have a system of trillions of bacteria in our body, known as the microbiome. Part of this microbiome are the famous probiotics we need for our digestion, but science has discovered that the microbiome has other functions in the immune system, and, most interestingly, in our emotions and mental health.
These microbes we have in our intestines communicate through a network of more than 100 million nerves that are found in the inner part of the intestines, known as the enteric nervous system. These nerves are the ones that fire when you feel 'butterflies in the stomach' or when you feel a 'churning' of displeasure. These sensations often occur unexpectedly, and what both science and spirituality tell us is that we must pay attention to these signals.
The chemical and nervous function of the microbiome with the enteric system is so complex that it's said we have a second brain in the intestines. A brain that is also connected with our main brain and they work together all the time. That connection between the two systems involves the endocrine, immune, and neural systems. Several studies have shown a relationship between poor intestinal health, such as microbial imbalances, and neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders such as multiple sclerosis, autism, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's.
In fact, experiments have been done with animals in which, by manipulating the intestinal flora, behaviors related to depression and anxiety have been produced.
There's also scientific evidence of something popular culture has said all along: that women have a greater natural capacity for intuition: Scientists have found that intuition operates primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain, the hippocampus, and the enteric system of the intestines, which we just talked about. Well, it turns out the white matter that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is thicker in women than in men. So, this wider avenue between the two hemispheres allows connecting intuition with the logical part of the brain more quickly. This not only in one direction but in both, so they better feedback intuition with their logical processes, and therefore they have more ease in making better decisions, especially under pressure.
It's no coincidence that we're seeing women leaders and heads of government around the world making, on average, better decisions in relation to the coronavirus pandemic.
But not everything is rosy with intuition. It also has its dark side like everything, and in addition to the possibility we already mentioned of people using their power of intuition to deceive and manipulate others, it can also lead us to deceive ourselves.
Michio Kaku says that superstition has evolved in human beings because nine times out of ten it's wrong, but one time out of ten it's right and it can save our lives. I believe it's happened to all of us: we have a bad omen, the sensation that something bad is going to happen, but nothing happens. Obviously when it happens, we become more alert, we become more careful, and we protect ourselves while the sensation lasts. This happens hundreds or thousands of times, and of course no one goes around saying 'I had a bad omen but nothing happened'; no, all those occasions are forgotten. But once in a thousand, we have the omen and it comes true, or we manage to dodge it by a hair's breadth, and then we attribute the event to a divine revelation or a supernatural power.
The problem that sometimes happens is that a person with a tendency toward anxiety can end up turning those wrong intuitions into constant paranoia or ending up in paralyzing phobias or panic attacks.
I've also frequently seen intuition called what are actually prejudices or mental biases. Particularly when a person is prejudged for their physical appearance, for their gender, their sexual orientation, or their ethnicity. Surveys show that in the United States, for example, Caucasian people tend to distrust black people, or consider them lazy or less intelligent. I've personally seen supposed spiritual masters belittle people of diverse sexual orientation by saying they have dark spirits inside or a dense vibration.
Well, to conclude, we now know that intuition is real, that it's useful, that it's there to help us, sometimes to save us. Is it okay that we call the enteric system, the right hemisphere, and the hippocampus 'angels' or 'spiritual guides'? I think it's perfect. Is it okay that we call the subtle signals of people and places energy or vibrations? Totally valid, that's what poetic naturalism tells us: We can create stories to give purpose and meaning to physical realities.
But yes, let's beware of prejudices, be aware of our mental biases, and don't use intuition to deceive or to deceive ourselves. Besides, we now know that we must take care of our intestinal health to strengthen our intuitive brain. If you're a woman, cultivate and honor your inner wisdom, believe in your intuition and use it to empower yourself. If you're a man, recognize and honor that aspect in women, because we have other strengths with which we can build winning teams with them and achieve great things together.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandramysoor/2017/02/02/the-science-behind-intuition-and-how-you-can-use-it-to-get-ahead-at-work/#2898ac90239f