A client asks: “Is the difference between consciousness and body energy like having a big pile of sand, and a block of marble in that it’s easier to do more complex things with the marble, like create a Pieta, than with the pile of sand, especially if the only tools allowed are a hammer and chisel?”

This is a too simple depiction of the qualities you wish to understand. There is much greater complexity in everything you observe than is currently appreciated, and the internal structure and external appearance both have many, many, criteria and variables governing them. The ability to be repurposed has little to do with primary function, but is a secondary characteristic. So one must ask what is before you, and why is it there? What is its function? What is its range of potentials? Everything is subjective in assessing such criteria. So this again is a matter of the beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Whether a block of stone exists within the face of the mountain and has never been quarried, or exists as the Pieta matters little to the stone. It is only of differing value in the mind of a human in observing the two bodies of compact energy and making a judgment about the net worth on criteria like beauty and form that are pleasing to the human eye. The mountain may well miss its little brother that ends up as statute and cannot be happy it no longer looks like a mighty mountain, but looks instead like a lowly human. So this is a very egocentric perspective.