Is energy material?
The assumption of the material is that it's static and stable, dull, boring. While energy is dynamic.
It seems the material is counteracting forces, positive and negative charge, for example.
It's our minds that prefer the stable, otherwise it would all be a whiteout and everything would be a blur at best. So wouldn't a better term be, "reality?" Be whatever it may.
We are mobile organisms, so navigation is the logical basis for this sequential process of perception, somewhat turbo-charged by the feedback loops of imagination.
Consequently our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future, codified as measures of duration, but the reality is that change turns future to past.
Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is "conserved," because it is what is present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, colors, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
In terms of a wave, the energy drives it, as it passes through, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Energy and any information it generates, waves, particles, people, etc. go opposite directions of time.
Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions, thoughts, rise and fall, like waves, future to past.
Suggesting consciousness is an energy, always probing, never finished. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the forms/information.
Since academia is centered on thought, finding signals in the noise, it creates this feedback loop of distilling ever more stable and universal forms.
Math, for example. Though the skeleton is not the seed. Even math is emergent.
Three dimensions are really just a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. If we remove all physical properties from space, it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium.
Infinity, because there is no definition to limit it and equilibrium is implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
What fills space is this energy and the forms it manifests. Energy radiates out, toward infinity, while form coalesces in, toward equilibrium. Both entropic.
Consequently, galaxies.
So there is no need for the material, just energy and form.
Consider the problem of the excess gravitational effect, inspiring an apparently fruitless search for Dark Matter.
What if this relationship between energy and form is total? Such that gravity is not so much a property of mass, as mass is the lower end of the spectrum, of this inward curvature. Mass is an effect of gravity.
Which would start with the faintest quantification of light/energy. The bending of the light isn't caused by gravity, it is gravity. Energy falling back on itself.
While this might fall outside the window of acceptable physics theory, look at it as an argument for quantification and materialism being primary to our process of cognition, rather than how reality might be explained.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as description of our point of view, while the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
As you point out, the vitality is what is staring us in the face. Yet all we see are the forms.
