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The Energy of Life:
Guy Brown
This edition does not include illustrations.‘A book that lives up to its title – Guy Brown handles an exciting topic with the energy and expertise it deserves. A first-rate read!’ Roy PorterEverybody knows what it is like to be short of energy, or even full of energy, but what is this stuff that drives our bodies and our minds? Where does it come from, and where does it all go? How does it move our muscles and stir our imaginations? Above all, how can I get some more? This brilliant book follows the development of our ideas of biological energy, from their origins in the very concept of life itself to the latest research on body clocks and brain energy.The Energy of Life answers questions like ‘How is it possible for me to lift my arm just by willing it?’; ‘Why can living things move and dead things not?’; ‘Is there a relationship between mental energy and physical energy?’; ‘Is plenty of orange juice the best prevention of cancer and heart disease?’; ‘Is one girl a fat slob and the next a slim livewire by the accident of metabolism, by having too much or too little thyroid hormone?’; ‘Why are there epidemics of obesity in the developed world and of starvation in the developing world?’; ‘Why don’t diets work?’; ‘Are we born shy or bold?’; ‘What are boredom and fatigue for?’; ‘Why is it that some people are more creative, productive or energetic than others?’ Brown explains our sexual energy too: what causes us to be aroused, and how sexual arousal is sustained; what drives our motivations and passions and why does biting your partner beforehand lead to better sex?
THE
ENERGY
OF LIFE
GUY BROWN
Copyright (#ulink_80e61229-e715-5160-92fd-420f4a551d0b)
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by Flamingo 2000
Published in hardback by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Guy Brown 1999
Guy Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006530473
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007485444
Version: 2015-12-31
CONTENTS
Cover (#u02fa309e-091e-5dad-a111-7dad87fb61a0)
Title Page (#uc11530d4-0ddf-5417-93b8-4b154259d5d7)
Copyright (#u8027c440-0078-5e69-b989-1f23edf6f729)
Introduction (#uf9d3a2ab-0113-5464-9b88-43d1a1ee91ca)
Chapter 1: ORIGINS (#uaf8eac62-1eb3-5820-8353-cf66f2b3aac7)
Chapter 2: THE STORY OF LIVING ENERGY (#uf439b9c1-3ebf-58f4-bcb5-16a9296e4e51)
Chapter 3: ENERGY ITSELF (#u6653089d-c672-5343-96bf-2c92ed37c01c)
Chapter 4: THE MACHINERY OF LIFE (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5: The Body Electric (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6: MITOCHONDRIA: THE MONSTERS WITHIN (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7: THE PACE OF LIFE AND DEATH (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8: GETTING FAT AND STAYING THIN (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9: EXERCISE, FATIGUE AND STRESS (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10: MIND ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11: BRAIN ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12: SEX AND SLEEP (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13: MOOD, MADNESS AND CREATIVE ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14: HOW TO GET MORE ENERGY (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources & Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_50a513c4-322e-59c3-9bd0-183fffe11514)
Every morning of our lives we wake up and reach out from unconsciousness to consciousness, from nothingness to being, from dream to reality. And when the full force of reality hits us, we must choose between falling back into nothingness, or grabbing hold of reality. To wake up and get on with life we need energy: both body energy and mind energy. We need body energy to get out of bed, make the tea, run for the bus, beat our competitors, and drag ourselves home again. Whereas mind energy arouses and motivates us, to actually want to get out of bed and do something. This book is about what energy is, how we get it, and how we lose it again. But in discussing these practical things we will also be touching on more fundamental issues. What is life? How does it work? And why do we bother getting out of bed in the morning at all?
But what is this thing – energy – that divides the strong from the weak, the young from the old, the living from the dead? How does energy animate the body and mind? How does it enable a body to grow, a finger to move, a mind to think? Energy is the basic constituent of the Universe, even more fundamental than matter. Energy is the origin of all change. Every event in the Universe, from the collision of atoms to the explosion of stars, uses energy. And our own bodies, even when in dreamless sleep, require large amounts. To be alive is to be a continuous transformer of energy, a machine transmuting the food we eat and the air we breathe into a dancer’s leap and a poet’s dream.
There is abundant evidence that how energetic we feel is a major element of how happy, healthy, productive and creative we are. It may be more important for our overall well-being to track what boosts or drains our energy, than to follow our calorie intake or bank accounts. Energy is a central aspect of our lives. Without it, our personal world shrinks to a few essential tasks, people, and places: for we have no energy to face anything more than an essential minimum. But with an abundance of body and mind energy our world opens up, as we expand our interactions with people, projects and places to fill all the available time.
Vitality, passion, dynamism, confidence, the ability to concentrate and work without rest, to think fast and coherently, to resist fatigue and exhaustion – in short ‘energy’ – are the essential qualities, above all else, required to succeed in life. Top of the Harvard Business Review’s list of vital qualities for business success is ‘a high level of drive and energy’. Everyone looks for that sparkle in friends and lovers to ‘make things happen’. Most of all, everybody is looking for energy within themselves: the motivation and drive to get up and do something; the endurance, stamina and resolve to carry through what we are already doing and need to do; and the courage and will-power to change direction and break out of the old routines, when necessary. We may know how to do something, but without will and energy, it is not going to happen. Without mental energy there can be no joy, excitement or enthusiasm. But physical and mental fatigue seem to have infected almost everyone: the most common symptom reported by patients to their doctors today is lack of energy. Depression and exhaustion appear to be endemic to our society. Everybody wants more energy.
The Energy of Life follows the evolution of our ideas about biological energy, from their origins in the prehistoric concepts of life itself, to the latest research on the body electric and psychological motivation. The story of living energy twists through various manifestations as the vital heat or pneuma concocted in the furnace of the heart in ancient Greece; as chi energy coursing through meridian lines of the Chinese body; as prana convulsing the body of yogis in India; as the vital force sought by the alchemists in their dreams of gold and life everlasting and through, in more modern times, to the discharge of Freudian sexual energy.
The last fifty years have finally enabled us to answer the fundamental questions of what energy is, and how it drives body and mind. But the answers seem, at first, more fantastical than the questions. Our body and minds are powered by electricity. Our cells are energized by huge electric fields driving vast currents through tiny molecular machines: motors, gates, pumps, switches and chemical factories together creating cellular life. It would be possible to imagine a happy electrical hum within the cell were it not for the incredibly frantic pace of activity, the colossal forces, and sparks flying from the life-threatening leakage of electrons. The electric energy is produced by trillions of bugs that invaded the ancestors of our cells billions of years ago, and thousands of which now live in each cell of our body. But these invaders who appear to live peacefully in symbiosis with the cell, may also be the enemy within. Recent research shows they are the silent assassins and executioners of the cell and are implicated in a multitude of devastating diseases and disabilities, and in the processes of ageing itself, leading to an irreversible decline in body and mind energy.
The energy moving and motivating the mind has always been a mystery. But modern technology now enables us to image and visualize changes in energy inside our brains, from moment to moment, as we think and feel. The brain chemicals and pathways controlling arousal, anxiety and motivation have now been found, so that we are finally close to understanding what excitement and depression are, and how to control them with drugs. We now know that obesity and body weight are regulated by a signal released by fat and acting on the brain, to control appetite and energy expenditure. The origin of sexual libido has been traced back into the dark recesses of the brain. We are beginning to understand how the body and the mind communicate in health and disease, why stress and depression cause illness and why illness in turn causes fatigue.
No matter how fast knowledge accumulates, questions remain: Why do we use so much energy? Why is life so short? Is there a relationship between energy and time? Why does time seem to go faster and life get less exciting as we get older? Why do children have so much energy? Why do the body and mind tire, and why do we need sleep? What is chronic fatigue? What is the mind, and what motivates it? There are no solid answers to these questions yet, but there are fascinating possibilities.
Our feelings of energy and tiredness wax and wane during the day, and during the course of life, in predictable cycles. Perhaps you feel tired now. But what is tiredness and fatigue? Are you exhausted at the end of the day because you have run out of energy, or because your brain is trying to put you to sleep? What is this spectacular daily oscillation in energy level for? Do you get tired as you get older because you are running out of energy, or because your genes are trying to put you to sleep – permanently?
Current theories of body and mind energy are split between many different disciplines and conceptual frameworks. This book seeks to bring these ideas together, to show how central energy is to our lives. Literally everything we do uses energy. It ebbs and flows within us every minute of the day, with every burst of adrenaline and every thought swirling through our mind. During dreamless sleep, the body is still, and the mind empty. When awake the body and mind are in ceaseless motion. Whenever motion appears from non-motion, or activity from inactivity, we say that ‘energy’ is involved. This energy produces the motion or activity. The energy may be stored, or it may be supplied from outside. Thus, when a sleeper wakes, the energy to move and think comes from energy stored in the body and mind. But those stores need to be replenished from external sources. This is the everyday concept of energy: something invisible that produces motion or activity, but in producing activity is used up, so it needs to be replenished. When we complain we are short of energy, we mean that our capacity for physical or mental activity is low, and we need this capacity to be recharged.
There are many words expressing a high-energy state: vitality, vigour, vivacity, strength, arousal, ardour, drive, fervour, stamina, gumption, zeal and zest. Just as many words describe the opposite: lethargy, apathy, timidity, weakness, languor, weariness, tiredness, fatigue, and depression. These words cover many shades of meaning, but what they have in common is the idea of a capacity or desire to do things, beyond the technical skill to perform the particular task. The popular concept of energy has extended into many different capacities and fields; so now we have physical energy, mental energy, sexual energy, emotional energy, psychic energy, creative energy, etc. While the meaning of ‘energy’ in physical science is a much more restricted and concrete one, the flexibility of popular concepts of energy captures something crucial to all of our everyday lives.
The Energy of Life takes the popular and ancient concept of biological energy, and looks at it from the perspective of the latest science. In so doing we will cover a vast territory from history to physics, energetics to psychology, through the evolution of life to the origins of cell death. We will look at how and why energy was discovered. How the delicate machinery of our cells makes the miracles of motion and thought possible. And how that same machinery creates fatigue, obesity, disease, ageing and death. We will also examine how energy is related to the perception of time, why we sleep and dream, the connection between energy and sex, and the link between creativity and madness. Then finally we will return to the more practical question of why we, as individuals, sometimes lack energy, and what we can do to get more.
Chapter 1 ORIGINS (#ulink_102e5fb7-57bd-57c5-9610-e701de898fe0)
‘In the beginning’ the meaning of energy was inseparable from the meaning of life. ‘What is life?’ was an unavoidable question for people confronted with death and the dying on a daily basis. A newly dead body may appear identical to the live one existing only moments before, but it is missing an important ingredient: life. What is this invisible thing animating the living but disappearing with death?
Important clues are given by the subtle differences between the living and the dead: movement, breath, heartbeat, pulse, warmth, growth, and (less obviously) consciousness. These differences were central to the concept of life (and death) in most early cultures, and are still important to our own modern and scientific ideas of life. But a bare list of the differences cannot give us a general theory of life or death. What is the need for a general theory? Because daily confrontation with death prompted urgent, practical questions: can death be prevented? And if not, can it be reversed? Finally, if all else failed, the ultimate questions: was death the end? What happened to the body and mind after death?
Imagine a caveman bent over his recently deceased cavewoman: with knotted brow, Rodin pose and a thought bubble full of question marks, the dawning thought: ‘What are life and death?’ Of course, no such caveman ever existed – we are merely indulging in a narrative device. But if our prehistoric sleuth can mentally capture the essence of life perhaps he can feed it back into his mate and love once more. However, he must hurry, before her still warm and lovable body rots and turns to dust. To tackle this cosmic conundrum he must decipher the differences between his loved one before and after death. The only clues he has are those he can see, hear or feel; his only evidence the body. He must read the body. The meaning of life is not some grandiose theory, but instead the rather gruesome differences between a live body and a dead one.
The most obvious difference is movement. The dead can’t dance, while the living gaily cavort. In early cultures, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, movement was often taken as a sign that the object in motion, even if it was the sun moving across the sky, wanted or intended to move, and thus that it had some kind of mind willing it. But there is some subtlety here: for a dead body can also move. If we lift up the arm and let go, it will fall. If we hold the body up on two feet, and wave its arm, it will stand and wave. If we push up the two ends of its mouth it may even give us a ghoulish smile (assuming rigor mortis has not set in). The essential difference between the living and the dead is not movement itself, but rather spontaneous or willed movement. Willed movement is a sign of mind, a kind of mind energy. It was this concept of self-generated motion that early cultures used to divide the world into the animate and the inanimate. If spontaneous movement was not due to living humans or animals, then it was attributed to souls, spirits, devils or gods. A stone is not living because it does not move of its own accord – even a rolling stone is not living if it has been pushed down a mountain – but an avalanche can suggest the work of an angry god or devil. The apparently spontaneous movement of wind, lightning, sun and planets was associated with spirits or gods, by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks and American Indians. Indeed the distinction between living and non-living things was not as clear or important then as it is now, because the world was full of supernatural spirits, and even inanimate objects could be seen to have intentions and desires.
We should note that the type of movement regarded as ‘self-generated’ is dependent on the theory being used. Thales, known as the ‘grandfather’ of Greek philosophy and science who was active around 600 BC, thought that a magnet had a soul because it moved iron. It may be because all things move in apparently spontaneous ways in certain circumstances (e.g. when dropped) that he famously said, ‘all things are full of gods’. Around 350 BC, Aristotle, perhaps the greatest ever philosopher and scientist, described God as the ‘unmoved mover’, the first source of free, unforced movement and change. Today we have gone to the other extreme, and many scientists believe that there are no spontaneous movements or change, even within humans (because each change is caused by a prior change via some mechanism), and thus there is no need for gods, souls, or spirits. However, the modern concept of energy has replaced gods and spirits as the source of all movement and change in the Universe.
When our caveman-penseur presents his beautiful new hypothesis (that the difference between life and death is self-generated movement) at neighbouring caves, it is not long before some overly smart cavewoman points out the flaw in his argument, that when he is asleep or knocked unconscious, he has no self-generated movements yet is, to all appearances, alive. She may continue that anyone with any sense knows that in such circumstances the way to tell the living from the dead is from subtle, internal movements: breathing, the pulse, and the heartbeat. These internal motions are still used today in the diagnosis of life or death, and it was the investigation of them, and their associated processes, that led to our modern concepts of life and body energy.
Breath was central to ideas of life and energy in most early historical cultures. In Egypt, breath was associated with ka, a soul which separated from the body after death. Breath-energy was known as chi in ancient China, thymos and later pneuma in Greece, and prana in India, although each of these terms meant different things to the different cultures involved. The first entry and final exit of breath from the body were synonymous with life and death. In Greek legend, the first man was fashioned by Prometheus from earth and water, but the soul and life were breathed into him by the goddess Athena. If breathing is stopped, it leads to loss of consciousness and finally death, and so it would have always been obvious that life depended directly on breathing. But breathing is associated with much more than just staying alive. Changes in breath and breathing occur during most emotional states, as is recognized in phrases such as: ‘she took his breath away’; ‘panting with eagerness’; ‘gasping with astonishment’; ‘sobbing with grief’; and ‘yawning with weariness’. These emotions are associated with sounds and chest movements, which might lead us to believe that all emotions are located in the chest and expressed in sound (as in the phrase ‘get it off your chest’). We may also consider talking itself to be a kind of breath, as words appear to be carried by the breath from the chest. In pre-literate and semi-literate cultures, thought was often considered to be a kind of talking, perhaps because much thinking was done out loud. And as talking and expressions of emotion were connected with breathing, then thought and emotions could be associated with the breath in the chest.
In the pre-Classical Greece depicted in the Iliad and Odyssey, thought and emotion were seen as a kind of breath-energy known as thymos, which was stored in the lungs or chest (phrenes), and breathed forth as speech, anger or grief. The Greeks appear to have conceived thymos to have been a hot vapour, coming from the body or blood, an idea perhaps inspired by the vapour in breath visible on a cold day, or by the vapour escaping from gushing blood. Thus, we have images of the spirit and soul as a partially visible vapour, as in the soul escaping from the body in a dying man’s final breath. The root of the modern word ‘inspiration’ means both breathing in and the receipt of divine or supernatural thought and feeling. This usage may derive from Homer, where often exceptional thought, feeling, courage, strength, anger and dreams were derived from the gods, who ‘breathed’ them into humans, as thymos to be stored in the chest/lungs, before the humans exhaled them out as speech, feeling, willed action, or thought.
Breath may well have been important to conceptualizing life in another way. It is (usually) invisible, yet when we blow hard our breath can move things and we can feel it against our hands. In this respect it is like the wind, which was often conceived of as the breath and will of gods. Thus, breath was an invisible source of movement outside the body, and might therefore act as an invisible source of movement within the body, to move the limbs and vital functions.
In China breath-energy was known as chi (pronounced chee, as in cheese, and sometimes written as qi) and chi was a fundamental component of the Universe. According to the Huangdi Neijing: ‘That which was from the beginning in heaven is chi; on earth it becomes visible as form; chi and form interact giving birth to the myriad things’. There are many different types of chi, sometimes earthly and material, at other times heavenly and immaterial, and its effect can be seen in the growth of a plant, the power of thought, or the energy that activates any process. Life originates from an accumulation of chi; and death from its dissipation. Chi also means ‘air’, but air was thought to be a non-material empty space; thus chi is not a material substance, but rather a process, force, or energy. Within the body chi is known as true chi, and was derived both from air by breathing, and from food and water by ingestion. The Huangdi Neijing states: ‘True chi is a combination of what is received from the heavens and the chi of water and food. It permeates the whole body’.
True chi circulates around the body via twelve main pathways or meridians. These meridians are mapped onto the surface of the body, so that acupuncture can control the energy flows, although the meridians cannot be identified with any anatomical structures in the body. However, each meridian is also associated with a particular organ and function, and the flow of chi along the meridian actualized that function via the transforming action of chi. As the Chinese put it:
‘The meridians are the paths of the transforming action of chi in the solid and hollow organs’ (Yijiang jingyi).
There were several different types of chi associated with different organs and their functions:
‘Thus one is able to smell only if Lung chi penetrates to the nose; one can distinguish the five colours only if Liver chi penetrates to the eyes; one can taste only if Heart chi penetrates to the tongue; one can know whether one likes or dislikes food only if Spleen chi penetrates to the mouth’ (Zhongyixue gailun).
The Chinese thought of chi as flowing along the meridians, much as water flows along a riverbed. The meridians and their smaller branches irrigated the whole body, as a river and its canals irrigate the fields of a valley. If a disease arose in the body it affected these rivers of life, so that either no water flowed at all (lack of chi), or the river was blocked at a particular point, with excessive water and flooding above the block (swelling, and congestion of chi) and insufficient water below the block (atrophy, lack of chi). It was thought that the acupuncture needle removed the block, either directly or by increasing the force of the stream. In order to live a long and vital life people were encouraged to nurture their chi. And this was achieved by moderation in all things, avoiding either excess or lack in their diet, exercise, or sex. But also by avoiding external sources of ‘bad’ chi, such as cold, damp, fright, or even, sex with ghosts.
Indian concepts of breath-energy – prana – may have predated and inspired those of Europe and China. Hindus teach that in addition to the physical body, there is an astral body, occupying the same space and connected to the physical body by a thread, severed at death. The vital energy, prana, flows through this astral body within thousands of channels – nadis – connecting seven energy centres or wheels of light, known as the chakras. Health and consciousness can be controlled by regulating the flow of prana, using pranayama (breathing exercises), asanas (yoga postures), and meditation. Normally, most of our prana is carried by the Ida and Pingala nadis, which pass through the left and right nostrils respectively, and carry cooling moon energy or warming sun energy respectively. Yogis claim to control their level of consciousness by minutely regulating their breath and thus the flow of prana, by changing the depth, rhythm, and nostrils used for breathing. In one type of yoga, ‘Kundalini Yoga’, the yogi uses breathing techniques and meditation to mobilize the creative female energy (Kundalini) latent in all – men and women. This energy is symbolized by a sleeping snake coiled around the bottom chakra at the base of the spine. The yogi attempts to create an inner heat that rouses the serpent-power from its sleep, driving it up the central nadi along the spine, piercing each chakra in its path, and absorbing their energy, until finally uniting with the male energy of the crown chakra at the top of the head. Kundalini may be experienced as if a bolt of electric charge were passing up the spine, and, if successful, results in a higher level of consciousness where all illusions are dispelled.
The heart and heartbeat were associated with the soul or spirit in most early cultures, and it is not hard to see why. The heart beats rhythmically and continuously at the body’s centre from birth to death. It speeds up during strong emotions and exertion. It slows down with age and rest. Its stopping is synonymous with death. It is the only internal organ with spontaneous motion, and can be extracted from the body still beating. It is associated with the pulse and the movement of the blood. In Egypt, the heart held the power of life and the source of good and evil. According to the Book of the Dead, the heart of each human was weighed on a scale against a feather after death to determine the balance of good and evil, and thus the fate of the spirit. In many Indian and Chinese languages, the words for heart and mind are more or less synonymous. The Toltecs and Aztecs of ancient Mexico ripped the still-beating heart out of their human sacrifices to offer to their sun god. Most early cultures located consciousness and emotions in the heart (or chest/lungs). Interestingly, the soul (psyche), which survived death and produced new life, was often located elsewhere, usually the brain. However, many early cultures did not have such a strongly dualistic concept of the separation of mind and body. Thus it is not always appropriate to talk separately of the mind and body, or of locating the mind in a particular organ of the body.
The Ilongot, a society of headhunters with relatively little contact with the modern world, living in the Philippines, have a word liget which means something like energy and anger. This force arises in the heart, because for them ‘motions of the heart are emotions’ – a belief not far removed from modern, psychological theories of emotion. However, the word liget is also used by the Ilongot in ways that we might regard as metaphorical. For example, chili gives liget to a stew, ginger revitalizes liget in a killer, and winds have more liget when obstructed. Liget is also revealed in people when they pant and sweat, flowing inwardly and generating redness in the self. It is dynamic, organic, chaotic violence, and also the stuff of life.
Early cultures often did not distinguish between the literal (or concrete) and metaphorical (or abstract) use of a concept – the concept of metaphor was only invented by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. So the ancient Greeks used a word such as psyche to refer to both a substance in the body and the behaviour of the soul. The temptation is to say that the ancient Greeks and other early cultures were more literal minded and their thought was less abstract. Yet, most modern discourse also fails to distinguish between literal and metaphorical uses of words. The word ‘energy’ is popularly used to describe everything from the charge supplied by electricity wires, to the intensity of an artistic performance. One manifestation of literal mindedness is the tendency to explain a property of something as due to a discrete substance within the thing (an unfortunate tendency known as ‘reification’). For example, Dr Pangloss, in Molière’s Candide, explained falling asleep as due to a ‘dormative principle’ within the body or mind. Similarly ‘living’, which is essentially a state or way of being, has been explained in terms of substance: life or vis viva (the life-force). Doing things intensely or passionately has been explained in terms of the possession of ‘energy’, the energizing substance swirling around the body or mind. In some cases, thinking of a property or behaviour as a ‘thing’ can be helpful, but more usually scientific or intellectual progress has been made by explaining ‘things’ in terms of processes. Thus most scientists no longer think of life or energy as things to be explained by separate substances, rather they are particular arrangements or processes of matter. However, in popular culture, life and energy still have mixed literal and metaphorical meanings, which partly reflect those of much earlier times.
In early cultures the heart’s beating was associated with the movement of blood in the body, which was indicated by the pulse and by the rhythmic spurting of blood from severed arteries. The pulse was used in the diagnosis of health and illness, vigour and death in the medicine of ancient Greece, India and China. The violent colour of blood, its dramatic eruption from wounds, its ability to rapidly congeal once outside the body, and the fact that its loss was associated with death, all contributed to the idea that it was intimately connected with life. Indeed for some cultures, blood was seen as the substance of life itself. Many stone-age burials have been discovered where the bones have been covered with a red ochre probably representing blood, which would suggest that the connection between blood and life (or death) was very early indeed. The drinking of blood, either literally or symbolically (as in the Christian Eucharist), was a means of transferring the soul/energy of the human, animal or god to the drinker.
Our caveman has now got some theories, but it does not seem to be doing his cavewoman any good. She has gone cold. The caveman now needs to add one more item to his list of differences between living and dead: body heat. The body temperature of living mammals and birds is normally higher than their surroundings, cooling to that of their environment at death. If our body temperature is lowered by more than a few degrees, if for example we fall into freezing water, then we rapidly die. Clearly heat has an important connection to life. In pre-industrial times, the only significant producers of heat were animals, fire and the sun. Aristotle, for example, thought of the life-force partly as a kind of fire inside the body. And the association between heat (and movement) and the life-force, may well explain the widespread belief that the sun was a god, and the use of fire in religious rituals. In fact there are a number of other important similarities between life and fire: both are produced by the burning of organic matter (fuel/food) with air (supplied by a bellows or breathing), which generates heat, movement, and residual waste (ash/faeces). This analogy was important both in ancient Greece and in much more modern times. For it was the key concept in the development of the modern scientific idea of body energy, although the theory could not be used productively until chemical concepts of burning were developed by Lavoisier in the eighteenth century.
Back with our caveman, things are looking bleak. The cavewoman’s body has started to decay. First the flesh rots away, leaving the skeleton, then the bones themselves disintegrate to dust. Although the process is slow, its effect is dramatic: we start with a highly organized human body and end with a pile of dust, which merges into the soil. There is obviously little hope of reversing this process, and nowhere for the soul to hide afterwards. This is clearly the great disaster of the human condition. Many cultures have expended immense efforts trying to either prevent or circumvent this problem. The ancient Egyptians were the most zealous, utilizing mummification, pyramids, tombs, sacred objects, temples, an extensive priesthood, literature and mythology to evoke a whole parallel world beyond death. In Egypt, bodies were at first buried in dry sand in which they could survive for up to a thousand years, but were shrivelled and dried out. Subsequent use of stone coffins resulted in the flesh disappearing – supposedly eaten by the stone. This is the origin of the Greek word sarcophagus (meaning ‘flesh eating’) perhaps reflecting a prehistoric notion that the body and soul of the dead could enter into and be preserved in stone. The bodies were, in fact, eaten by micro-organisms too small to be seen. The Egyptians developed mummification to prevent this process, although of course lacking any knowledge of the existence of bacteria. Mummification was, however, never entirely successful, and the final resort of both the Egyptians and later cultures was to circumvent the problem by favouring the idea that the mind or soul could separate from the body at death, and either live independently (in heaven or another world), or in other objects (such as in statues), or another body (reincarnation).
The decay of the flesh leaves the bones. Some cultures believed that the bones represented the essential core of the human, the flesh its disposable clothing. The bones contained a vital fluid, which we would now identify as the marrow encased by major bones, the spinal cord encased by the spine, the brain encased by the skull, and the cerebro-spinal fluid permeating the cavities of the brain and spine. All these ‘bones’ surround, as if protecting, a greyish-white gelatinous material or fluid, which in ancient Greece was thought to be the origin of semen, another off-white gelatinous fluid. Thus, semen was thought to be derived from this vital gel, a kind of creative force, constituting the brain, spinal cord and bone marrow. The Romans consequently believed that men’s tiredness after orgasm and ejaculation was due to the draining of creative force throughout the body. The myth that masturbation causes blindness may originate from this ancient concept that the sperm partly derives from the brain. In Greek legend, gods and goddesses were born directly from Zeus’s head (Athena) or thighbone (Dionysus), because this is where the creative force was thought to be located. The belief that bones were the essential core of the human being, encasing an individual’s procreative powers, may have motivated the preservation of the bones of ancestors in many cultures.
The body’s decay after death appears the counterpart of its growth in life. The growth of the body is dependent on food, and it is all too evident that when a human stops eating, they stop growing, shrink, then die. Clearly there was something in food or in eating that was related to life, and this link was all the stronger because food consisted of recently dead animals or plants. Food could thus be thought of as containing either a soul or soul-nourishment. In most early cultures, there were religious rites involving human or animal sacrifice and the eating of the flesh. Often the food was blessed or otherwise transformed so that a god or soul might enter and be absorbed into the body of the eater. The Christian mass is partly derived from earlier Greek Orphic and Bacchic rituals, where food was magically transmuted into the body and soul of a god, which then entered into the body and soul of the person eating. A version of this is described in Euripides’s Bacchae, where the normally well-behaved, upper-class ladies of Athens achieve an ecstatic state, hunting a wild animal representing the god Dionysus, tearing it limb from limb and devouring the raw flesh. This was a means of obtaining ‘enthusiasm’, which in Greek means the entry of a god into the person. Thus, enthusiasm is a kind of mind energy, and these rituals were a means of obtaining it.
The idea that food was incorporated into the body – that when eaten, the substance of the food became the substance of the body – predates Classical Greece, but just how this transformation might occur was not elaborated until the Greeks devised various schemes. One idea was that food was broken down and transformed into blood, then congealing (as in blood clotting) in various ways to produce the body’s organs. While this might explain the growth of children, it did not really explain the fact that although adults do not grow, they require large amounts of food. Later the idea of ‘dynamic permanence’ was developed by Alcmaeon in the sixth century BC, according to which the structure of the body was continuously breaking down and being replaced by new structures and substances derived from food. This would account for the fact that the body slowly decayed after death, when no food could be eaten. The general concept that material things consist of smaller components, which can be rearranged to give all the different forms or structures of things (such as food or the body), was an extremely important and fruitful one. It was particularly developed by Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Democritus, leading to much speculation as to what the simple components might be, for example water, fire, air or earth or atoms of different shapes.
During illness and starvation, the fat of the body shrinks, while in times of health and plenty, it expands. Until comparatively recently, fat was often associated with health and riches. Some Andean Indians still associate the fat with the spirit, and thus when a man ‘fades away’ in chronic illness or starvation, his spirit fades away too, often thought to have been stolen by a sorcerer. Fat, blood and air are the basic body fluids in traditional Andean physiology, and fat is the energy principle distributed from the heart via a system of channels and rivers mirroring the hydraulics of the Andes. This imaginative physiology is indeed partly based on an analogy of the body with the mountains and rivers, so that the head is like the mountain peaks lost in the clouds, while the legs are the river valleys. Illnesses associated with particular parts of the body can be treated by offerings of coca, blood and fat at earth shrines located at appropriate parts of the mountains. In the modern West, where food is plentiful and wasting illness rare, being fat now has the connotation of being unhealthy and poor. But, of course, only a couple of hundred years ago a rotund outline was celebrated, and the skinny figure, favoured today, was feared and pitied.
Our caveman is now distraught. He has watched his mate die: first she stopped moving, then she stopped breathing, her heart and pulse stopped, then the heat left her body, which then started to decay leaving bones and then dust. Watching this process, he has formulated new ideas about life, but these are completely useless in actually dealing with death. Many thousands of years later, we are in the same position: although we know much more about death, we are completely incapable of reversing it. However, let us return to our caveman, who is now in a reflective mood. Many of the differences between the living and the dead are visible and obvious, but perhaps the most important difference is neither visible nor obvious: what happens to the mind? What happens to our perception, thoughts, feelings and will at death? Thoughts, feelings and perceptions are not visible in other people, even if we open up their bodies, and there is no obvious machinery for producing them inside the body. The caveman could not see his mate’s thoughts and feelings when she was alive, so it is conceivable that when dead she is still capable of producing them, although they remain invisible to him. Perhaps the mind or soul enters the body at birth and leaves it at death. Accordingly, the mind of the caveman’s mate may still be alive though her body is dead and gone. This thought may not provide the caveman with much immediate relief, but implies that when he himself dies his mind may survive in some form, and may even enable him to meet up with his mate again.
Different cultures had quite different ideas about whether and in what way the mind might separate from the body at death. But the ancient Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, believed that the mind could survive death. This belief has obvious repercussions on how we view the relations between mind, body and matter generally. If the mind can separate from the body at death and survive as an invisible but active entity, then we could conclude that life consists of two separate entities: an invisible active mind (or soul) which occupies a passive material body. Furthermore, all other entities in the world might also consist of a similar combination of mind and matter. This dualistic distinction between active mind (or spirit) and passive matter foreshadows that between energy and matter, which replaced it: the modern concept of energy has its ancestors among the spirits.
Early explanations of the world attributed intentions or desires to objects, and interpreted events in terms of the desires of spirits and gods. This type of explanation (known as ‘teleological’ or ‘intentional’) mirrors that which we use to explain other people’s behaviour. Thus, if someone hits me over the head with a baseball bat, I might explain this behaviour by attributing it to the attacker’s anger or his intention to rob me. Similarly, if a stone fell on our caveman’s head he may have seen this as the anger or intentions of a spirit, god or even the stone itself. Nowadays, we would look for a ‘mechanistic’ explanation of such an event (for example the stone fell from a building), rather than ascribing evil intentions to the stone or the event itself. In the ancient world, there could be relatively few genuine ‘accidents’ because most events were thought intended by someone, something or some god. Thus almost everything was seen as meaningful; in complete contrast, today most physical events (such as atoms colliding or the Universe exploding) are thought intrinsically meaningless and accidental, except where human intentions are involved. And even where humans are involved, scientists often prefer mechanistic explanations. For example, the scientist may trace that blow to the head with a baseball bat to the effects of the attacker’s upbringing on his brain biochemistry, rather than a premeditated intention to rob me.
Modern science is based on mechanistic rather than teleological explanations, making a strong distinction between passive matter and the invisible mind. And the advance of science has caused a gradual retreat of intention (and mind) from the world: first from non-living matter, then from the body to the brain, and, more recently, attempts have been made by both philosophers and neuroscientists to banish it from the brain itself. Yet as individuals we prefer intentional or anthropomorphic explanations of the world, rather than cold mechanistical explanations. We prefer to think that people and animals do things because they want to, rather than because their brains make them do these things. We like to see the world and Universe as having meaning, rather than being meaningless accidents. Part of the reason science alienates people is its rejection of intentional explanation; and perhaps in turn much of the appeal of religion and literature could be their generous use of anthropomorphism and intentional explanation. You may notice as you read this book that the parts that describe the behaviour of molecules and cells in terms of their intentions, wants or needs, are more readable than the strictly scientific parts cast in terms of cold mechanism. And, moreover, there may well be a good mechanistic explanation of why we prefer intentional explanation, which is that it is hard-wired into our brains. Recent psychological research indicates we develop the ability to attribute intentions to others at the age of three, and children who fail to develop this ability (perhaps because of brain defects) are much more likely to become autistic and unable to interact functionally. Thus, our preference for intentional explanations of other people and the world is because that’s how our brains work, presumably because such explanation has been successful in promoting survival during evolution. However, during science’s evolution, it has been found that intentional explanation is relatively unsuccessful in predicting the behaviour of the world in comparison to mechanistic explanation.
The relevance of intentionality to energy is that the concept of energy has evolved partly to replace intentional explanation. Energy has replaced gods, spirits and inanimate forces as the source of all motion and change in the Universe. But fundamental theories and concepts (such as mind or energy) are not labels that can be attached to the world without distorting it, but are rather like a pair of coloured spectacles through which we can see and interpret the world. If we are short-sighted, it may be impossible to see the world at all without some spectacles (or some theory). Or the spectacles may be locked on (as happened to Dorothy and her companions in The Wizard of Oz), or imprinted in our brains, so it is well-nigh impossible to see without them. The concept of energy is one basic idea through which we now perceive the world. And we have already seen how the origin of the concept of energy is rooted in even more basic ideas about life, movement and mind. In the following chapter we follow these ideas’ evolution into our current conception of energy.
Chapter 2 THE STORY OF LIVING ENERGY (#ulink_5425d145-885f-5fed-b8e4-e62ed12d4828)
The modern concept of energy originated in the nineteenth century, a child of the industrial revolution, but its origins extend back to ancient Greece, amongst the elements, humours and spirits of the classical world. We will follow the evolution of these ideas of energy and life up to the present, as it is extremely difficult to understand the current concept of ‘living energy’ without seeing where these ideas came from.
THE ELEMENTS, HUMOURS AND SPIRITS OF THE CLASSICAL WORLD
Science started in ancient and Classical Greece, and it is there that we can begin to pick up the trail leading to our current ideas of energy and life. The Greeks were astonishingly creative thinkers. Indeed it is almost impossible to characterize clearly what the Greeks thought about anything, because they thought so many different things about any one thing, most of them mutually contradictory. (Much like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, who could believe six impossible things before breakfast, without spoiling her appetite.) Indeed the Greeks were spectacularly wrong about many things. And this in itself is important because for almost two thousand years after the fall of Athens, Greece’s intellectual heirs in the Hellenic, Roman and Islamic worlds, and in Medieval and Renaissance Europe believed that whatever the Greeks thought was the unquestionable truth. The thoughts of the wise men of Greece on philosophy, science and medicine were held in the same awe and reverence as those of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed on religion and ethics. Now we know that many of the ‘truths’ discovered by the Greeks are ‘false’, but the forms of their ideas, the type of questions they asked, and the ways they went about answering them, have had a fundamental influence on the development of modern knowledge and ideas. Were it not for this relatively small number of thinkers in ancient and classical Greece, science, philosophy and western culture as we know them would not now exist.
Empedocles (c. 490–c. 435 BC) was one of the greatest all-rounders of all time, exemplifying the enormous diversity and creativity of ancient Greek thinkers. Born to an aristocratic family in the city-state of Acragas, Sicily, he assisted in a coup against the oligarchy ruling the city and was offered the crown. He refused, establishing instead a democracy, and becoming himself a politician. But, in his spare time, he also managed to be one of the greatest poets, scientists, philosophers, and doctors of his age. As if this were not enough, after banishment and exile from his home state, he became a prophet and god. Legend has it that he could work miracles, control the winds, restore the dead to life, and killed himself by jumping into the volcanic crater of Etna to prove his divinity. Whether this leap did in fact prove this or not, history does not say, though apparently all that remained of Empedocles physically were his sandals. However, his thoughts remained to haunt the intellectual landscape for over two thousand years.
Empedocles devised the theory of the four elements, described as the most successful scientific theory ever, in terms of popularity and longevity, although it was not, of course, correct. It held that everything in the world consisted of a combination of only four elements. This theory appears to be a diplomatic compromise between earlier contradictory ideas that the world consisted solely of water (Thales), an unknown and unknowable substance (Anaximander), air (Anaximenes), or fire (Heraclitus). Empedocles suggested that there was not a single fundamental substance at all, but rather four elements (or ‘roots’ as he called them): earth, fire, air and water. The advantage of having four elements rather than one, was that it was obvious to anyone that the world consisted of an incredible diversity of things, and it was hard to explain this diversity if everything consisted of the same single substance. It was also difficult to explain how anything could change, if everything was, in essence, the same. Empedocles suggested that each different type of thing in the world consisted of different proportions of the four elements, and further that change was due to exchange of some of its constituent elements. For example, he said that bone was composed of fire, water and earth in the proportions 2:1:1 and flesh was composed of all the elements in equal proportions.
However, change could not just be left to the elements. After all, why should objects alter if there was only inert substance in the world? Why should rocks fall? Why should volcanoes explode? Why should thunder and lightning wrench the skies? Change was a big problem for the Greeks. It is also intimately related to energy, as energy can be thought of as the hidden source and cause of change. How were the Greeks to explain it without invoking gods or souls or minds? How could matter alone cause change? How could something new appear from nothing? Empedocles proposed that, in addition to the four elements, there were also two forces, which he called ‘love’ and ‘hate’. Hate (or ‘strife’) pushed things apart, while love pulled them together again; and when the two forces were balanced there was no change, a standoff. This sounds like a plot for a romantic novel, but Empedocles partly conceived of love and hate similarly to the modern conception of a force, as an inanimate pushing or pulling between matter. Thus, Empedocles’ overall conception of the world as consisting of different immutable elements, pushed and pulled by forces, so that change is due to chance and necessity rather than purpose, is strikingly similar to that of nineteenth-century physics. This similarity is no accident, of course, since the modern concept is partly derived from Empedocles.
Empedocles’ view of the world does, however, diverge radically from the modern in many ways: he also saw the two forces, love and hate, in a religious sense, as a struggle between good and evil (with the four elements each identified with a different god). His scheme of things also differs from ours in that his elements correspond more to the modern phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas, and plasma) rather than to modern elements (such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon). This difference partly arises from the fact that Empedocles appears to have rejected the idea of empty space – the void or vacuum – a space where there was nothing, no elements or anything else. Since he had shown that air was a substance, he saw no reason to believe in empty space between the elements. Thus he conceived of the elements as homogenous substances, which blended together when mixed, like different-coloured paints.
Earlier thinkers (such as Anaximenes) and later thinkers (such as Democritus) took the more modern view that a substance consists of a vast number of small particles separated by empty space, and conversion from liquid to gas is not due to a change of elements, but rather to the elements moving much further apart. Thus, ice consists of water molecules held rigidly together, while liquid water consists of the same water molecules flowing over each other, and steam, or completely evaporated water, consists of the same water molecules very far apart. The Atomists – Leucippus and Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) – pushed this view of the world to its most materialistic extreme, by taking Empedocles’ world, ridding it of its religious components, but adding the void. Thus, their view was that there was nothing in the world except a vast number of tiny particles (atoms) moving through empty space. Each of the four elements had a different shaped particle, and this shape determined the properties of the element. This explanation of the world had great advantages over the no-void view, because it could explain easily how the elements could mix and then separate: particles simply passed between each other; whereas this was hard to explain if there was no empty space between elements. Similarly, Empedocles had considerable difficulty explaining why the millions of things in the world had such startlingly different properties, if only differing in the proportions of the four elements. Why should a difference in proportions cause new properties? Democritus (and modern science) could explain this by the arrangement of the atoms within the object. New properties arose from new spatial arrangements or configurations of the atoms. There were an infinite number of ways of arranging atoms of four elements, and consequently an infinite number of possible things or materials. This is the essential secret of the success of modern chemistry and biology: explaining the properties of things in terms of the microstructure of the elements of which they consist. Unfortunately for the Atomists, the technological means did not exist in Greece to probe the microstructure of things, and thus test their theories.
We have been pursuing these ideas about matter, because they lie at the root of modern notions of energy. But Empedocles was far more than a creative physicist (physis was Greek for nature), he was also an inventive biologist (bios, Greek for life). According to Empedocles, the body’s flesh and blood consisted of equal proportions of all four elements, and these attracted similar elements from the environment. Thus, the same four elements constituted non-living and living matter, mind and the immortal gods. The blood circulated from the heart to the surface of the body, where air was taken in through the pores, and back again, alternately expelling and drawing in air. The motion of blood in and around the heart created thought, and so the heart was seen as the organ of consciousness. But Empedocles had a very concrete view of consciousness, seeing for example, thought as simply blood in motion. Perception occurred by elements in the blood meeting and mingling with the same elements in the environment. An external object was perceived by some elements from it entering the body and meeting the corresponding elements in the body, and their meeting or mingling was perception. Nutrition occurred through direct assimilation, that is, the elements of the body attracted similar elements in the environment to them, and these new elements fitted in place to form the growing body.
The theory of the four elements was astonishingly popular and long-lived, lasting from the fifth century BC until the chemical revolution of the seventeenth century. Yet it is hard to see quite why thinkers stopped at only four elements. Aristotle suggested a fifth – the ether – to compose all extraterrestrial things. The Chinese used five elements also (or phases): water, earth, fire, metal and wood. In modern science we have about 100 different chemical ‘elements’, which can combine to give an infinite number of possible molecules. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the Cambridge physicists J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and James Chadwick discovered that these chemical elements were not in fact elements in the classical sense (fundamental and indestructible particles of matter), because they were destructible and composed of three simpler, indestructible particles – the proton, electron, and neutron. And these three particles were later found to interact via a fourth (short-lived) particle – the photon. Therefore, Empedocles’ four elements and two forces theory is, in outline, not that dissimilar to much more modern theories of the Universe.
