I am energy trying to understand energy, but whatever would step outside to observe it would also be energy. That's where my understanding ends.

I have kind of hit this limit in my life. I am a polymath, and I cannot be loyal to only one subject for my whole life. My love of understanding is for everything. I can easily take care of my finances through my core competency in physics and maths, but otherwise I have a lot of time to think about literally anything. I just cannot stop it.

Earlier, when I was trying to figure out life from my childhood, I simply looked at the world and was trying to understand how things actually work around me. So, I started with physics, chemistry, and maths, and later shifted to geography, history, economics, politics, programming languages, and what is happening in the world with all the current events, all the geopolitics, and how power operates. I am not an expert in such things, but as I started reading more and more diverse books over multiple decades, I began to get an above‑average understanding in every subject, and my vertical and horizontal understanding expanded exponentially. It really gave me a very clear understanding of why things occur the way they do, how the world does its transactions, and answered many questions for me. But I was not satisfied with this understanding, as the question I was asking myself was, what is the point of life, and why are things going on in the first place?

After that I went deep into myself and wanted to understand why the world is working the way it is working. For the last many years, I’ve been exploring many deep and fascinating subjects like evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, praxeology, epistemology, ontology, thymology, anthropology, endocrinology, and more. My main focus has been understanding the unconscious brain in living organisms. There are many great thinkers and teachers like Dr. David Buss, Robert Sapolsky, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, E. O. Wilson, Dr. Gad Saad, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and others who have helped me learn and think deeply. Moreover, I also read about philosophy; Western philosophy and the religious philosophy of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, specifically their Advaita Vedanta and Upanishads. I also read and learned a great deal of Buddhism; I attended their ten‑day and thirty‑day Vipassana meditation courses and learned a lot. Hinduism’s Consciousness‑first model is impressive, but I am still not convinced by them, and I still haven’t obtained an understanding of why this whole game is going on in the first place. For me, it was still a hypothesis.

Now, in the last two to three years, I have been able to see and understand that all the events that are happening on the earth, or being reported in the media, social media, or newspapers, are like the leaves of a very big tree. The tree is so big that it has trillions and trillions of leaves, but it is all connected to the small branches, which are further connected to the bigger branches, which are again connected to the thicker branches, and those branches are connected to the huge bark of the tree, and that tree has roots diving deeper into the ground. And I can also see from where that tree has actually come; I can see and understand that seed which has now become the tree, and how we as humans keep jumping from one leaf to another our whole life, or fixing one leaf if there is some problem going on, but never have enough understanding to see through the complete tree. One is not able to see how the whole game is going on and why things are the way they are, so we all keep jumping from leaf to leaf, hoping that this one will be good.

So, I went deeper into my understanding, and now I want to understand consciousness. We really don’t know consciousness, and there is also the hard problem of consciousness by David Chalmers. I thought that if humanity is able to figure it out, then we can understand why this whole game of coming into the world, feeding and protecting this specific atomic configuration called a body, feeding it with a very particular atomic configuration called air, water, and food, and protecting it with the specific atomic configuration called clothes and home, and transporting it with the specific atomic configuration called a car or an aeroplane, and using a specific atomic configuration called fuel, and so on; all of which are following the laws of physics, which are pretty deterministic; so why follow this script?

Now what I think, where I have hit the limit in understanding, is that even if we still figure out consciousness, at the end of the day it is still an energy. Everything in the universe is energy; even the vacuum is energy, and virtual photons keep popping in and out. The problem is that we really don’t know anything about energy.

Richard Feynman describes it best in the Feynman Lectures:

"In this chapter, we begin our more detailed study of the different aspects of physics, having finished our description of things in general. To illustrate the ideas and the kind of reasoning that might be used in theoretical physics, we shall now examine one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.

There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law, it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. (Something like the bishop on a red square, and after a number of moves and details unknown, it is still on some red square. It is a law of this nature.) Since it is an abstract idea, we shall illustrate the meaning of it by an analogy.

Imagine a child, perhaps “Dennis the Menace,” who has blocks which are absolutely indestructible, and cannot be divided into pieces. Each is the same as the other. Let us suppose that he has 28 blocks. His mother puts him with his 28 blocks into a room at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, being curious, she counts the blocks very carefully and discovers a phenomenal law that no matter what he does with the blocks, there are always 28 remaining! This continues for a number of days, until one day there are only 27 blocks, but a little investigating shows that there is one under the rug and she must look everywhere to be sure that the number of blocks has not changed. One day, however, the number appears to change and there are only 26 blocks. Careful investigation indicates that the window was open, and upon looking outside, the other two blocks are found. Another day, careful count indicates that there are 30 blocks! This causes considerable consternation, until it is realized that Bruce came to visit, bringing his blocks with him, and he left a few at Dennis’ house. After she has disposed of the extra blocks, she closes the window, does not let Bruce in, and then everything is going along all right, until one time she counts and finds only 25 blocks. However, there is a box in the room, a toy box, and the mother goes to open the toy box, but the boy says “No, do not open my toy box,” and screams. Mother is not allowed to open the toy box. Being extremely curious, and somewhat ingenious, she invents a scheme! She knows that a block weighs three ounces, so she weighs the box at a time when she sees 28 blocks, and it weighs 16 ounces. The next time she wishes to check, she weighs the box again, subtracts sixteen ounces and divides by three. She discovers the following:

(number of blocks seen) + ((weight of box) − 16 ounces) / 3 ounces = constant.

There then appear to be some new deviations, but careful study indicates that the dirty water in the bathtub is changing its level. The child is throwing blocks into the water, and she cannot see them because it is so dirty, but she can find out how many blocks are in the water by adding another term to her formula. Since the original height of the water was 6 inches and each block raises the water a quarter of an inch, this new formula would be:

(number of blocks seen) + ((weight of box) − 16 ounces) / 3 ounces + ((height of water) − 6 inches) / 1/4 inch = constant.

In the gradual increase in the complexity of her world, she finds a whole series of terms representing ways of calculating how many blocks are in places where she is not allowed to look. As a result, she finds a complex formula, a quantity which has to be computed, which always stays the same in her situation.

What is the analogy of this to the conservation of energy? The most remarkable aspect that must be abstracted from this picture is that there are no blocks. Take away the first terms in both the equations and we find ourselves calculating more or less abstract things. The analogy has the following points. First, when we are calculating the energy, sometimes some of it leaves the system and goes away, or sometimes some comes in. In order to verify the conservation of energy, we must be careful that we have not put any in or taken any out. Second, the energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy. If we total up the formulas for each of these contributions, it will not change except for energy going in and out.

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives “28” and it is always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas."

So, now for the last few months nothing new has been happening to me. Whenever something happens, I think of all the known reasons, and sometimes I figure out why it is happening and sometimes I don’t, but I still think it is just energy and it will figure itself out. It is just converting from one form to another, but the problem is I really don’t know what exactly energy is, and I, being energy, cannot step out of myself to see what exactly energy is, because what would be looking outside would also be energy.