The accurate use of energy by a self makes for pleasure; for in the accurate use of energy, there is the motion, or force-in-action of the energy, and the rest quality of the accuracy. Motion and rest, felt together by a self, make for pleasure.
The question facing every self is: What should its energy be; which means, how should the power of the self show what that power is?
We are always doing things to ourselves and to other things, at the same time. The question is, how should we do these things?
We see that our selves want, or demand, or desire, or go for various “objectives.” We see that we, in what we do, affect other persons or things. If we are using our energies in a way we deeply can see as good or right, we are at peace with ourselves; we are at energetic peace with ourselves. The energetic peace of a self is another term for its happiness, its well-being. Well-being, in other words, is well-doing; and well-doing is a right, proportionate, not needlessly restrained use of energy, and not disproportionately unrestrained use of energy.
Ethics, then, which answers the question of what should a self do, cannot be disconnected from the problem of self-energy.
The question of energy for a self falls into two phases or parts: How much energy, and how the energy? It is a question of quantity and form.
It seems clear that if a self does not use all the energy it might, there will be something wrong; it also seems clear that if the energy is not used with accurate form, there also will be something wrong. And where there is something wrong as to the self, dissatisfaction can, with propriety, be expected.
Therefore, it needs to be asked: How much can a self be; how much can a self do?
I have stated before, in the definition of Reality, that the biggest danger as to reality is making it less. For when a self makes reality less, it is also making itself less; and this means that it has accepted unnecessary curtailment of its energy.
Subsidiary to the question: How much energy for the self?—is the question: What is the energy to be used on, to be employed for, to affect? What, after all, is it we do things to? It is necessary to see that everything we do is done to everything; that the action of a self is unlimitedly reverberating, is of existence as such. We are acting in the world, on the world, for the world; also through the world, by the world, and, as some might say, against the world. Our energy is within existence, towards existence, about existence, in behalf of existence—or opposed to existence.
We don’t do things just to people, our friends, furniture, food, streets, buildings, cities, counties, countries, books, rivers, and so on. These are all the representatives of something else. What we’re really always saying when we act, is, that if we do something to being as such—as represented by a friend or a coat or a room—it will be good for us. The self is inevitably a whole-world-acting-on mechanism or process or desire—and nothing less. It is never anything less.
To be sure, other things are whole-world-acting-on mechanisms, too. Everything is related to everything, and so does things to everything; but the self is a thing which can know it does things to everything; and in fact, if it doesn’t, it has accepted less than what it is.
I’ve said that existence is always as much as it was. Consequently, in the good energetic doing of a self, it hasn’t made existence more, just so. What the self has done is to give new form to existence; that is, make for a new thing seen as belonging to existence, not something new in the sense that it was not of existence—even as existence was before.
Our energies are of the new and old. We can be seen as eternal and definite. What we do is really never over; this means what we are is really never over. And this is not “religious,” “mystical,” “wishful”; it is just hard fact. If reality, in its scope, profundity, endlessness, quaintness, chose to have us of reality, in reality, we are just there; and being just there, we are of that reality which includes space, time, event, in its completeness. If we are, we are of being; and if being doesn’t stop (and it doesn’t) we don’t stop. This is not about immortality, eternal life in the “gooey” sense, the “nice” sense; it is about the nature of the self in its exactness. It is a mathematical, logical assertion.
So what is our energy for? It is to enable us to feel what our selves really are.
Every action of ours is also an action on us. When we cut a tree, or make a speech, or feel the body of another, something is happening to us. If we do not feel our energy both as from us and to us, it is incomplete, corrupted energy.
Energy is, then, the ability to receive energy, too. When we receive, we take. The energy of mind is what all energy seems to be going towards. When, for example, a mind is diversely and with form, and deeply and with comprehensiveness, thinking of the past, the mind as thing is doing something to the past as thing; and in having the past do something to the mind, what is going on is the other side of the mind doing something to the past.
Where there is purpose with energy, there is more energy—for purpose implies that the mind having the purpose will be affected, too. For example, a mind can say, “I will study French literature so that French literature will do something to me”; just as a sick man might say, “I will cut down a tree so that the work of cutting down the tree will do something for me and to me.” The energy is full circle, then. It is like the energy of the world itself, which is from itself, through itself, and to itself.