Energy which is potential refers to “the potential to bring about change.” That is a useful definition for our purpose, because clearly individual survival for the vehicle that supports the Life Force requires potential change. In physics, the energy of a system is defined as the work needed to bring the system to a certain state from some previous reference state.
As energy is a conserved quantity, it is neither created nor destroyed, but it can change its form. This is because the laws of nature do not change with time. So although the Life Force can fail, energy does not and simply changes into something else. When the energy of a particular Life Force fails, that energy is released to join all other energy, which is not in itself a Life Force.
When a fire burns wood, that energy is transformed into ash and heat. When the human creature or any living thing dies, then that energy is also transformed and released. If you wish to bundle a part of that released energy together and call that a soul, that is your privilege. Or, if you are not one who wants to invent an afterlife of that sort, then you can bundle another invisible part together and call that karma. Do what you want, it is still called energy.
The Life Force then is really a definition of a particular form of energy that sustains life for as long as it is possible to do so until the major part of that energy is released. We are not interested here in after-death energy or where it goes, for it is of no use at all in curing the ills of this insignificant planet called Earth, hurling in an elliptical orbit around the sun, or the ills of the insignificant human creatures aboard apparently doing their best to change it into an uninhabited rock. Science, trying to reduce everything to its most simple form objectively and subjectively, dissects and names everything and will do so endlessly. Others, with less criteria, look for a big “One” and name it, giving it the human characteristics of both loving kindness and destructiveness without really finding it either. But we, being neither, will take the middle ground with two ideas of energy.
1. Potential energy, which is unreleased, has a form for each of the four basic forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetic, and also strong and weak nuclear forces. The energy of the human creature, which we call “subtle,” is electromagnetic. Potential energy exists whenever an object which has mass has a position within a force field. This concept of a force field was coined by Michael Faraday, an English chemist and physicist, as a theoretical construct for the behavior of electromagnetic activity. The term force field refers to the lines of force one object (the “source object”) exerts on another object (receiving object) or a collection of other objects.
Two genes exert influence upon each other. Cells exert force upon an adjacent cell and there is an interaction. Two organs of the body exert their forces upon one another and there is an interaction. Two human creatures exert forces and there is an interaction. A human creature and a simple flower generate a combined force field. Can you see then that the world is made up of an everchanging mass of force fields of potential energy?
When a mass is in motion with some velocity (for example, a living creature) then a different energy is generated from the potential which we call kinetic.
2. Kinetic energy, as motion, exists whenever a living creature or any part of it pulses or moves. Everything you see moving about, including you yourself, has kinetic energy. Even when sleeping you have kinetic energy.
The Life Force acts in a special way. If we say that the Life Force program produced by genetic evolution drives the human creature, then the energy of the Life Force is kinetic and the motion is directed towards one end, which can be summed up in one word: survival. All plants and animals possess the Life Force that protects them and their offspring from destruction, but there are two other more advanced variations of that Life Force.
One is survival of the tribe or pack, which exists in many advanced animals, including the human creature. This aspect of the Life Force clearly has its advantages, for the Life Force aiding group survival is more effective in a dangerous world of conflict than a single force. The Life Force has its programmed nature but not a brain or a conscious volition so, within a group, the individual has far less importance.
The more evolved aspect is unique to the human creature. It is the survival of the environment in which the human creature lives, and this includes the natural balance and harmony of all things.
The impulse to help others is the Life Force and it operates as a driving force. If we look in a more profound way, we can see that the Life Force is that which acts as a motor to keep life on track in a natural and balanced way. That natural and balanced way can only be correct if it is in conformity with the four aspects mentioned:
Survival of the apparent self
Survival of offspring
Survival of the tribe
Survival of the ambit in which all must be born, live and die.
In the Abhidhamma, or Buddha Dharma psychology, this Life Force is called Jivitindriya and that word is made up of two components: Jivita, which is “life,” and Indriya, which is a “controlling faculty or principle.” Thus we can conclude that as far as Abhidhamma is concerned, Jivitindriya is the controlling principle of life. It is divided arbitrarily into two aspects, which appear useful for this discussion. One element is the psychic Life Force (Nama-Jivitindriya) and the other is the material Life Force (Rupa-Jivitindriya). It is said then logically in the Abhidhamma that the Life Force sustains the mental states and material phenomena. What that all comes down to is the fact that the Life Force sustains the mind and the body, which includes all phenomena.
It is important to understand what the word “sustains” really means. It simply means that the Life Force supports continuing survival. Of course, we all know that eventually the apparent individual Life Force fails, for both mind and body atrophy and there is death. With the death for that consciousness, which appears individual, all phenomena cease. But the Life Force has an ace up its sleeve, for it sustains the continued survival of itself by reproduction. It seems then that the Life Force isn’t concerned with just sustaining individuals, but with something more. Its essence is, by its very nature, to sustain itself.
Now that leads us to an interesting conclusion: the Life Force requires the presence of a vehicle which consists of mind and body. We are then in a beautiful cycle in which the Life Force sustains the mind and body of any living thing at its particular level, in which that living thing not only carries the Life Force, but can reproduce and transmit that Life Force to its offspring, thus perpetuating that force. Clearly that cannot go on indefinitely, for when a line of reproduction ends, then that apparent particular Life Force ceases.
In the legend of Genesis in the Torah, which is the Christian Old Testament, God said to Adam and Eve after their creation, “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
So the Life Force is to be fruitful and multiply; that takes care of continuation of the Life Force in self and progeny. But then man was supposed to replenish the earth. He doesn’t seem to be doing so well in that department.
Then he had to subdue it. What does that mean?
It does not mean to conquer and bring under subjection, or to bring under control by intimidation or like means. In the Biblical sense, it means to bring land under cultivation, to subdue the wilderness. Certainly man seems to be failing in that department too, for covering the land with cement and concrete and cutting down the life-giving forests hardly qualifies as subduing the wilderness in the correct sense.
Then man is instructed to have dominion over every living thing that moves, which includes plants and the tiniest microbe that exists. Man seems also to have failed dismally there too, for dominion does not mean kill and conquer, but to rule like a wise sovereign.
So there is a natural Life Force which has evolved in such a way as to produce a human creature whose energy is directed at perpetuating that Life Force by generating the survival of itself, its offspring, tribe and the children of its tribe, who are all sentient creatures, and the environment which supports them all.