What Is Energy?

There is an old Chinese proverb to the effect that a person can live for three weeks without food, three days without water and three minutes without oxygen, but you can’t survive for more than three seconds without Chi. Chi, Prana, Spirit, Mana. Ancient belief systems from India to Polynesia mention a Life Force that animates all living things. WIth the right cultivation, this force can be harnessed: for health, for longevity, to gain mastery over oneself or opponents. Harmonize yourself with this energy, and almost anything is possible. 

Stiff-collared Europeans also pontificated on life's motive powers, and not just the crude electricity used by Victor Frankenstein. We had Odic energy, named after Thor’s dad, or Vril, which began as a psychic life-energy used by an underground civilization in a novel, but which took on a life of its own, inspiring the foundation of the Vril Society and, somewhat less esoterically, the beef-based restorative drink Bovril.

Modern times also furnishes us with unseen energies. We have The Force, used with an increasing lack of restraint in sequential Star Wars films. Before this we had Orgone energy, posited by Dr Wilhelm Reich in the 1960s. Reich was a dedicated scientist and original thinker but unfortunately seems to have over-reached himself with orgone, creating medical devices which claimed to channel this force, which led to his eventual jailing. Yet, his central tenet - that energy directs life - was by no means wrong, and we still intuitively grasp that somehow, behind all of our activity, our moods and our well-being, is some kind of energy. It’s just not always clear what we mean when we talk about it.

Science, as ever, raises a skeptical eyebrow and lends a hand. We now know what generates most of the energy in our bodies: microscopic intercellular organelles called mitochondria. We inherit these from our mothers. We all owe our energy-producing capacity - our life force if you like - to our mothers (for which I am very grateful, though I feel I’m paying it back with interest every time I try to teach mine how to operate her smartphone). Cells which don’t have mitochondria are relatively passive, they just can’t generate enough energy to grow, reproduce and perform special functions like muscle or brain cells. It’s the difference between a single-celled bacteria and a eukaryote - the type of cell that makes up people, plants and fungi. Eukaryotes are relatively huge and packed with mitochondria, a nucleus and all manner of bizarre nanoscopic machinery all requiring a steady flow of energy. 

Some of our cells don’t have mitochondria. Red blood cells for instance, but they don’t need them; they are simply pumped around our system delivering oxygen. Muscle has a few thousand mitochondria per cell. Heart muscle has even more, not surprisingly given its non-stop activity. Liver cells are also rich in mitochondria, given how active this magical organ is in building proteins and detoxifying our systems. 

The human body is made of trillions of cells, so that’s even more mitochondria. They produce energy by creating a ‘proton motive force’ across their inner membrane, using the energy we get from food to pump positively charged particles - protons - into the space between their inner and outer membranes. This is analogous to how lightning is generated, with a tremendous build up of potential energy in the separated positive and negative charges. Indeed, the potential ‘field strength’ over the membrane of the mitochondria is 30 million volts per meter, equivalent to a bolt of lightning. 

Thankfully, rather than blowing us up, the mitochondria uses this potential to power the production of a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, ATP, often referred to as the currency of energy. Our mitochondria turn over well over half our own body weight, around 60kg, in these molecules per day (much in the same way casinos ‘turn over’ many tons of chips per day, with none actually leaving the building). These chips are then spent wherever they are needed; the human organism is a veritable energy bazaar. ATP is spent on moving muscle, digesting food, building proteins and chemicals, reproducing, immunity, thinking, you name it. Once spent, the molecule travels back to the mitochondria to be ‘refreshed’ - that is, converted back to ATP (or 80p if you want to be waggish) and so it continues, until some process disrupts this production. When this happens, cell death follows quickly. The Tai Chi masters were not far off; of all life’s essentials, energy is fundamental. 

That, in a nutshell, is how we make energy. Is this all there is to it? Life, energy, everything, a mere ATP? Is there no mysterious vital force after all? Well, that all depends on how you define mysterious. We may have uncovered the raw currency that carries energy throughout our bodies, but I haven’t yet attempted to explain how the body’s ‘energy systems’ regulate it, literally down to the quantum level. What is more, this incredible sophistication is running along smoothly more or less all of the time, like the proverbial perfectly tuned engine that doesn’t make a noise. We don’t have to think about it. 

Actually, it’s often when we start to think about it, or even worse try to make it do what we want, that the problems begin. We begin to believe that we have too little, or too much energy, or that we’re blocked, or that our energy is ‘bad’ in some way. When this happens we might blame our bodies and then try to fix something that has been working well for billions of years. Sometimes it’s best just to let your energy do its thing. As the Zen masters would say: ‘when the sky is blue, there is blue, when it is white, there is white’. And with that in mind I’ll stop talking, lay on the sofa and try to accumulate some much needed orgone energy.