Energy, and what the traditions meant by it

This page is marked tradition on purpose. What follows is what several old vocabularies say about restraint and vitality, from four parts of the world that never met. I am not claiming their physiology. I am telling you the stories, because the stories are useful, and because every one of them describes something I recognized from the inside.

What I actually think is going on#

Four traditions, four vocabularies, one direction: restraint keeps something, and indulgence spends it.

My own view is that they were describing attention and self-command in the only vocabulary they had. The modern evidence, which the research-tier pages cite, is about attention: what cheap constant reward does to it, and what earned reward does instead. Nobody has measured a fluid. Nobody needs to. You do not have to believe in ojas to notice that the weeks you kept the reserve, you could read, and work, and look people in the eye, and the weeks you spent it, you could not.

Use whichever picture holds you. A reserve. Two horses. A bird on the shoulder. The good over the pleasant. The picture's job is not to be true in a laboratory. Its job is to be true at one in the morning.