There are different explanations for how the Elements of Harmony work. Some say that the power source is the Tree of Harmony, some say the power source is the Elements, some say that the power source is completely external and the Tree and Elements are just foci, and some (cough)Legendbringer(cough) say that the Ponies are the power source and the Elemenets are just the foci.

Here's my explanation for the Trixieverse. And I believe you may consider it an interesting explanation.

The energy itself, I will call Harmony for the sake of this explanation. Harmony can be described similar to Light in how it works. And here's why. The Tree of Harmony is like a Prism, and Harmony is like Light. The Tree of Harmony splits Harmony into 5 parts, similar to how Light is split into the Light Spectrum when it goes through a Prism. This also means that the Elements of Harmony are not individual Elements, but just the "Spectrum" of Harmony. They are all part of a whole.

Now you may be asking why I said the Tree of Harmony splits into 5 parts rather than 6. But that will be explained later.

The 5 parts of the Spectrum of Harmony are, of course, Laughter, Kindness, Generosity, Loyalty, and Honesty. The Bearers of the Elements are the Ponies. But it's more accurate to say that the Elements are the bearers of the Ponies. You see, rather than the Elements being the foci, it's in fact the Ponies that are the foci. To compare this part with the Light analogy, the ponies are light the eye. The eye can't see without the Light Spectrum, but what we see is the brain interpreting the input received by the eye.

For obvious reasons, the Ponies must have virtues that match the Elements. At this point, anypony, or by extension, any creature can use the Elements as long as they have one of the 5 virtues. But if it were that simple, there would be nothing special about the bearers. It just means that any creature has the potential to become a bearer.

The 6th Element, Magic, is how that potential becomes actualized. The Element of Magic is not actually part of the Spectrum of Harmony like the other 5. The Element of Magic is in fact a focus for the other 5 Elements to be focused through. To compare it to Light once again, the Element of Magic is like a lense that focuses a normal beam of light into a focused laser beam. This why the 6th Element only appears when the other 5 are brought together. The one who bears the Element of Magic is the one who brought the other 5 together.

This is also why the bearer of Magic tends to be viewed as the Leader. In the Maneverse, Twilight was the one who knew of the prophecy and lead the other 5 to find the Elements. In the Lunaverse, Trixie was the personal student to Luna, who was willing to save everyone despite the low point she came to after making so many ponies hate her. In the Cadanceverse, Vinyl Scratch is the stone that holds the others together. In the Flipverse, Spike witnessed Celestia being banished firsthand. In the Manehattenverse, it's basically the same as the Maneverse, just with a different group. In A Minor Variation, Rarity acted as a voice of reason who kept in focus. In the Sunsetverse, Sunset Shimmer was able to make friends despite them learning about her past. And in the Trixieverse, Trixie had foreknowledge of how the Elements work, but she made friends before she knew that they needed to used the Elements. I know that there are other AUs, but I'm not as familiar with them.

So to break it down (or TL;DR), Harmony energy is focused through the Tree of Harmony, splitting into the Spectrum of Harmony, and taking the form of the Elements of Harmony, then atr focused through the Element bearers, then are focused through the Element of Magic, and finally becomes the Friendship Rainbow Laser.

The fun thing about this explanation is that it can be visualized as a crystal.
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7844155
Thanks very much for sharing this rather informative thread. The context makes quite a fair bit of sense.

7844158
If you think that's impressive, I could probably make sense of Pinkie Pie.

For example, in the Trixieverse, Pinkie Pie, and by extension, the Pie family, is able to pop up anywhere at any time as if she can teleport because, to some extent, they can teleport. They can use their Earth Pony magic to tap into Ley Lines and travel through them. That Ley Line magic can also be how Pinkie can know when someone is making a Pinkie Promise or mentioning a party. This awareness can also explain other details of the Pinkie Sense. As for predicting the future, I suppose that depends on what it means to predict the future. If the chain of events has already started, then perhaps the Pinkie Sense isn't predicting the future but predicting the next link in the chain. For example, Twitchy Tail predicting things falling could be less about predicting that something will fall but an awareness that something already is falling or about to fall. The combo that has to do with opening doors may be a combination of 3 individual Pinkie Senses that combine into 1. Since this specific combo is in 3 parts, it makes sense. Part 1 is a door in general, part 2 is some action happening (often relating to a pony), and part 3 is the action's relation to the door resulting in the likeliness that it will open.

Another way to look at it is Ley Lines not being in a linear interpretation of spacetime. It goes into Doctor Who level of complexity. So predicting the future through Ley Lines may be the same as viewing what the Ley Lines perceive as already happening. Perhaps the Pinkie Sense could be described as a temporal ripple in spacetime. The Pinkie Sense is simply picking up on these ripples.

So how about that? I just explained just about everything involving Pinkie Pie with Ley Lines. And I didn't even need to bring Discord into the equation.

That actually does make a surprising amount of sense. That is a rather good explanation.