Chapter 4

MEANINGS
Language, Energy, and Consciousness


New Age holistic-spiritual metaphysicians and materialist reductionists make strange bedfellows.  Nevertheless, when it comes to talking about consciousness, both turn to concepts and images derived from physics.  Materialists claim that consciousness is ultimately “nothing but” a form of matter-energy; New Agers often talk of consciousness or spirit in terms of “vibrations,” “waves,” “fields,” and so on, as though it were a form of subtle energy.

Why Consciousness Is Not Energy

If you tune in to someone’s “vibrations,” are you picking up some form of energy they are emitting--perhaps something we might call “psychic energy”?

It may be tempting to think so; to think of consciousness as a form of energy.  But is it?  What might be going on when we say we feel someone’s vibrations?

Well, one possibility is that their brain or their body could be sending out waves of  energy--something, perhaps, like electricity.  If so, it must be far more subtle than any form of energy known to modern science, because no physical instrument yet devised has detected any such energy.

But even if  the vibrations were subtle energy waves they would still be physical because they pass through space.  Anything  that moves through space must be located somewhere in space.  And anything that is located in space can be measured.  That’s what “physical” means:  It occupies space.  It is objective.  It can be measured. ...