Q: What is energy and where does it come from?

What this question is really asking is “What is the source of aliveness when the self is seen as an illusion?”

On the surface, it sounds like metaphysics, or curiosity about the mechanics of existence. But in the context of dismantling the false self, this question is rarely about physics or cosmology. It’s the mind grasping for orientation as its constructs start to erode. When you begin to see that “you” are not the doer, not the thinker, not the source, something in you panics and looks for a replacement source. The question becomes a survival maneuver: If I’m not real, then what is? If I’m not the generator, where does the current come from?

Where does energy come from? From the same place numbers come from: nowhere. Energy doesn’t come from anywhere because there’s nowhere else for it to come from. Aliveness doesn’t need a source; it is the source.

The assumption hiding inside the question is that there must be something outside yourself to plug into, that energy is a commodity, a possession, or a resource to be understood. Or that there’s a something that moves other somethings. A cause that can be traced, a first principle that can be known. This is the religion of materialism, faith in the continuity of form. You can call it physics, but it’s still theology. You can replace “God” with “energy” and “mystery” with “measurement,” but the structure of belief is identical: an external source driving apparent reality.

Energy, God, Source, Consciousness, are all the same placeholder for the unseeable thing you think you’re not. You want a cause, a first mover, a point of origin. But you can’t have an origin inside what has no outside. Everything you can name - energy, matter, thought, perception, is the same seamless whole appearing as parts. You ask “what is energy” because you still believe in distance between subject and object, observer and observed.

Within the context of dismantling, that’s the false self trying to maintain a position in a world that’s slipping away.

This type of question is typically seen in Phase Two: Disruption. It’s asked when the familiar architecture of meaning starts to crumble and the ego scrambles to find footing. The old stories about cause, purpose, and creation no longer hold, so the mind casts about for a new cosmology that can keep it safe. It’s the disorientation before the freefall into Deconstruction.

You might sit with this instead:

‘If there is no “me” to own or control energy, what is it that notices its movement?”

That’s the doorway forward - not to understand, but to see who is asking.