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In the long distance running model of spiritual transformation, the first energy
appears suddenly in the middle of painful fatigue and feels like a vigorous
implementation of Halachic commands or Canon Law. The second burst of energy
emerges from readiness for resignation and ends in humane comprehension and
empathy. In some Christian monastic practice, a similar transition is represented in
the ritual of Tenebrae (or Darkness). Fifteen lit, unbleached candles are
extinguished, one by one over the night, while reading the Psalms. The practice is
said to represent the desertion of Christ by his disciples, as the church grows darker
over the night. After the singing of the Benedictus, the one remaining light is
quenched, plunging the church into total darkness. In Myth and Ritual in
Christianity, Alan Watts suggests that the loss of the last light of Tenebrae induces
the realization that “| am nothing.” This reduction in egocentrism, along with a dark-
piercing alertness is said to facilitate an invasion by a loving God that precipitates
the fasting, sleep deprived and praying petitioners into long lasting ecstatic states.
These uses of energy and its attendant characteristics are not physically
specifiable but rather hermeneutic of a force. It is both a potential and a realization,
observed and inferred. It is the “energy stuff’ of Freud’s /ibido, Wilhelm Reich’s
orgone energy, Pavlov’s drive, Rudolph Steiner etheric formative force, the
arousal and attention of brain wave and consciousness research, the Ch’ of
Chinese medicine, the Hindu divine energy of Shakti, the Hebraic ruach, the
Cabalist’s Yesod, the Sufis Baraka, the Christian Holy Spirit, the Yogic breath
energy, prana, Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Galvani’s life force, Goethe’s
Gestaltung, Madam Blavatsky’s astral light, Georg Groddeck’s it, Henri Bergson’s
elan vitale, Schroedingers entropy, Abraham Maslow, Ruth Benedict and
Buckminister Fuller's synergy, Bertalanffy’s anamorphosis, Colin Wilson’s x factor
and George De la Warr’s biomagnetism. Of course, by nationality, culture and field
of study, there are many more examples, each locally defined by its particular
context and haunting with its promise of universality.
Energy in the context of mathematical physics is intuitional, abstract and
relational. It is not created or destroyed, but rather transformed. Consistent with his
deceptively simple style of physical intuition training of the young, Feynman’s
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