BEHAVIOURAL ENERGY

To that of energy we associate a series of concepts that in being guided by the connecting thread of “consumption”, seems to lead us to a conclusive idea of disappearance: work, transformation, dissipation, entropy, irreversibility and chaos. The principle of conservation – the great constant factor of the physical universe – does not affect us: as living beings – as we conceive ourselves to be – one would say that we shall be unable to benefit from this.

I therefore like to look out onto another aspect and talk about a different energy, one which is not describable by way of formulae and calculations: that of behavioural energy. It is also tied to an idea of continuous transformation-conservation although in a perspective which gives room for a process that differs from consumption. Behavioural energy is to be associated with a culture of fluids that arose contemporaneously 2500 years ago in three different places: China, Greece and India.

Lao Tze, a contemporary of Confucius, elaborated the fundamental concept of Taoism, the law of disorder, in contrast to Confucius’ law of order. In the same way as for movement, Lao Tze discovered how emptiness was important, emptiness in which one had to place life. Heraclitus of Ephesus saw the world in eternal movement and continuous transformation, the philosopher of becoming to whom we owe the concept of “everything flows” (or eternal flux).

And Buddha who even on his deathbed reaffirmed that nothing can last eternally, leaving us with a great instrument for the comprehension of the world able to help us to pass our life – albeit brief – in a joyful way.

The teachings of these masters would seem to be forgotten by modern culture, one in which human intelligence – in the words of Bergson – “… is never entirely at home, except when it is working upon inert matter, more particularly upon solids (…) our logic is the logic of solids (…) our intelligence triumphs in geometry”.

In its transformation behavioural energy is orientated towards favouring the fruition rather than the consumption of things: a process that does not appropriate what it manages and which tries to minimize the dissipation of construction and maximize the conservation of fluidity.

Two cultures, two concepts of energy and two forms of relationship with the world that are in opposition.

A possible reconciliation can be attempted by going back to the Buddhist conception of the senses, according to which the eighth and last sense is Alaya-Shiki, the deposit of the senses. Like a total and primigenial deposit, and in the same acceptation whereby Hima-alaya is the deposit of snow (Hima), in the Alaya-Shiki are conserved all of the previous incarnations of each one of us, but all the stages of phylogenesis, including those in which the living entity was a cell and, prior to this, a molecule, an atom, a quantum of energy.

The culture of fluids tries to appropriate this enormous memory, to take advantage of all of its messages.

As regards man and his relationship with things one can grasp valid indications if and without going too far back in time – one retrieves the way of life of the nomad hunters: in other words, the state in which man has lived for 200.000 years, a period that is ten times longer than the successive one of farmers and a 1000 longer still than the present-day period of the homo faber of industrial civilization.  For two thousand centuries – and even today in some minimum and residual anthropological ‘niches’ – the nomad has lived by moving, he has used what served him without immobilizing any good whatsoever, he has conserved the indispensable minimum and he has conceived himself as an event of the world without giving any form of order to the world.

In brief, he has made use of things by utilizing behavioural energy rather than destroying these same things, imprisoning the energy of matter.

If we manage to retrieve that intelligence, or the culture of fluidity, then we shall draw from more profound strata of the eighth sense, we shall to a greater degree pull back our arrow in order to make it fly further, we shall once again discover something we have forgotten and we shall learn to live differently. Better, presumably.