Several religions and spiritual traditions center their worldview on the idea that a living energy flows through the universe and connects everything in it. This isn’t one single religion but a theme that runs through Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, indigenous spiritual traditions, and modern New Age spirituality, each with its own name and framework for understanding that energy.
Hinduism: Prana and Brahman
Hinduism is one of the oldest traditions to articulate a detailed philosophy of universal energy. Two concepts sit at its core. Brahman is the ultimate reality, the universal spirit from which everything arises. Prana is the vital life force, often translated as “breath,” that animates all living things. In the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, prana and Brahman are essentially the same thing: the life force that moves through you is not separate from the energy that sustains the cosmos.
This framework treats the universe not as dead matter acted upon by outside forces, but as a living expression of a single divine energy. The individual soul (called atman) is understood to be part of Brahman, and liberation (moksha) comes from recognizing that connection. Yoga, one of the most widely practiced spiritual disciplines in the world, grew directly from this tradition. Its breathwork and postures were originally designed to move prana through the body and bring the practitioner into alignment with universal energy.
Taoism: Qi and the Tao
Taoism, rooted in ancient China, builds its entire cosmology around a flowing energy called Qi (sometimes spelled Chi). The Tao itself is the ultimate source of all reality, often described as something beyond words or categories. From the Tao comes unity. From unity comes the duality of yin and yang, the two complementary forces. And from the blending of yin, yang, and Qi comes everything else: “the ten thousand things,” as the classic texts put it.
In Taoist thought, health, harmony, and even good fortune depend on the smooth flow of Qi. When Qi is blocked or imbalanced, problems arise in the body and in life. Practices like Tai Chi and Qigong were developed specifically to cultivate and direct this internal energy. Qigong, for instance, uses slow physical movements and standing meditations to remove internal blockages, access what practitioners describe as a dormant healing power within the body, and restore balance. Traditional Chinese Medicine, including acupuncture, operates on the same principle: that illness results from disrupted energy flow along specific pathways in the body.
Buddhism: Interconnected Existence
Buddhism approaches universal energy differently. Rather than naming a vital force, it teaches a principle called dependent origination (or dependent arising), which holds that nothing exists independently. Every phenomenon arises because of its relationship to everything else. There is no isolated self, no object that stands alone.
The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism illustrates this with the image of Indra’s net: a vast web of jewels where each jewel reflects every other jewel, so that the entire universe is contained in each point. The Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh coined the word “interbeing” to capture this idea for modern audiences. In recent decades, scholars and practitioners have drawn parallels between dependent origination and ecological thinking, arguing that it describes an interconnected web of matter and processes where human beings are not separate from their environment but embedded in it.
While Buddhism doesn’t use the language of “energy” in the way Hinduism and Taoism do, its core teaching that all things are empty of intrinsic, standalone existence and instead arise through relationship points toward a deeply interconnected universe.
Indigenous Spiritual Traditions
Many indigenous cultures around the world hold beliefs about a supernatural force that permeates living beings, objects, and the natural world. In Polynesian and Melanesian traditions, this force is called mana: a power that can reside in people, spirits, or even inanimate objects and that manifests through extraordinary abilities or phenomena. Mana is not inherently moral or immoral. It simply is.
Among some Native American peoples, similar concepts exist. The Dakota (Sioux) use the term wakan, and the Iroquois use orenda, both describing a spiritual power woven into the fabric of reality. Early 20th-century anthropologists noticed these parallels across unrelated cultures and proposed that belief in an impersonal, pervasive spiritual force may represent one of the most fundamental layers of religious experience, one that predates the development of personified gods and organized worship.
New Age Spirituality and “Vibrational Energy”
The modern New Age movement draws heavily from Hindu, Taoist, and indigenous traditions, blending them into a framework centered on the idea that reality is fundamentally composed of vibrational energy. In this view, the universe is a vibrational field, and individual consciousness is an expression of that field. Everything, from physical matter to thoughts and emotions, vibrates at a particular frequency, and spiritual growth involves raising or harmonizing your personal vibration with the larger cosmic energy.
Some New Age traditions trace this vibrational energy back to the concept of Om in Hinduism, a primordial sound believed to underpin all of existence. Others incorporate Reiki, a healing practice developed in Japan that works with what practitioners call universal energy. In Reiki, a practitioner channels this energy through their hands to promote healing, reduce stress, and clear energetic imbalances. The practice emphasizes stillness, breathwork, and meditation as tools for establishing a connection to this energy.
A growing number of people identify with this general worldview without belonging to any specific religion. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that among Americans who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” 73% believe in “some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe” rather than God as described in the Bible. Only 16% of traditionally religious Americans said the same. This suggests a large and growing population whose spirituality is oriented around universal energy rather than a personal deity.
Pantheism and Panentheism
Two philosophical frameworks help organize these beliefs. Pantheism holds that the divine is the universe: God and nature are identical, and there is nothing supernatural beyond the cosmos itself. If you feel a sense of the sacred when looking at the stars or standing in a forest, and you believe that feeling reflects reality rather than just emotion, you’re thinking along pantheist lines.
Panentheism goes a step further. It agrees that the divine permeates the universe, saturating everything from within, but adds that some aspect of the divine also extends beyond the universe. The divine is both an inner presence within all things and something greater than the sum of those things. Many Hindu and Taoist ideas map more closely onto panentheism, since they describe a source (Brahman, the Tao) that generates and infuses the universe but is not limited to it.
Spiritual Energy vs. Physics Energy
It’s worth noting that “energy” in these spiritual traditions means something different from energy in physics. In science, energy is a measurable quantity: the capacity to do work, measured in joules, expressed as heat, motion, or electromagnetic radiation. Spiritual energy, by contrast, refers to a felt quality of aliveness, connection, or consciousness that animates the universe. The 19th-century tradition of vitalism tried to bridge this gap by proposing that living things contain a distinct force absent from nonliving matter, but modern biology has not found evidence for such a substance.
That distinction doesn’t necessarily invalidate either framework. They operate in different domains. But if you’re exploring these ideas, understanding that spiritual traditions use “energy” as a metaphor for something experiential and relational, not as a synonym for the energy measured by a physicist, will help you navigate both worlds more clearly.