The Energy of Life:

THE

ENERGY

OF LIFE

GUY BROWN

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1: ORIGINS

Chapter 2: THE STORY OF LIVING ENERGY

Chapter 3: ENERGY ITSELF

Chapter 4: THE MACHINERY OF LIFE

Chapter 5: The Body Electric

Chapter 6: MITOCHONDRIA: THE MONSTERS WITHIN

Chapter 7: THE PACE OF LIFE AND DEATH

Chapter 8: GETTING FAT AND STAYING THIN

Chapter 9: EXERCISE, FATIGUE AND STRESS

Chapter 10: MIND ENERGY

Chapter 11: BRAIN ENERGY

Chapter 12: SEX AND SLEEP

Chapter 13: MOOD, MADNESS AND CREATIVE ENERGY

Chapter 14: HOW TO GET MORE ENERGY

Sources & Further Reading

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

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

‘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.