If we want to find out more about the world we extend our actions to involve more of the surroundings. The universe that we discover is the effect of our actions on all that is around us.
From our own actions and the effects they have we know that energy is a fundamental component of the universe. From the conservation of energy we can adduce that the whole universe may be fundamentally comprised of energies interchanges.
This is true of of galaxies where we see that masses of stars rotating are the fundamental dynamical principle in the evolution of mass energy at a local scale.
Galaxies superclusters are evolving sources of energy as channels through the universe to matter mass gravitational interactions that we see in action all around as the motions of all the natural material in everyday experience.