Here is what you’ll learn in this article:

If you’ve ever ended a busy evening exhausted with nothing to show for it, this piece names what’s actually happening to you – and shows you which way to turn.

• Why Your Worst Evenings Are a Law of Physics – That scattered, spread-thin feeling isn’t a personal failing or simple stress. It’s entropy: the same quiet, lawful force that is slowly unmaking the stars. Once you see it, you can respond to it.
• The Apple That Rots and the Appleness That Can’t – There are two things happening in every object: the thing that decays, and the pattern it briefly wears, which doesn’t. Only one of them dies – and understanding which changes what you reach for.
• Why a Room Never Tidies Itself – Decay needs no one, but order always has an author, and that author is always a mind. Unlike the apple, you are not passive. Every act of gathering is a small climb against the drift.
• The Two-Line Instruction Hiding in Plain Sight – How the greatest commandment turns out to be a precise description of the physics of the soul: the ascent toward the source of order, and the return that lets it flow back through you.

How to Move Your Mind

Let me describe an evening I have had more times than I would like to admit. 

I get home. Nothing was wrong, at least not exactly, but nothing was right either. There were the dishes. An email I had been not-answering so successfully that it had developed its own gravitational field, which was sucking my mind towards it. A text I owe my mother. A thing at work in the morning which I would rather not think about, which seemed to be making me think of it constantly. And so, I moved through the evening touching everything and finishing nothing; a plate rinsed here, half an email drafted there, three minutes of a text abandoned mid-sentence, until I fell into bed having been busy for four straight hours with absolutely nothing to show for it, wondering where the evening went and why I felt like I have been slowly coming apart.

Later, as I tried to sleep, a truth entered my mind: I actually was coming apart. Not poetically. Not physically, but in a very real sense, a sense that is baked into the very fabric of the universe. I could see it so clearly: the same thing that was scattering my Sunday evening was the thing that was quietly unmaking the stars.

Stay with me, because this goes somewhere useful.

There is a law underneath everything, and it was named in 1865 by a German physicist called Rudolf Clausius. He called it entropy, from the Greek for transformation. His one-line summary has never been improved on: the energy of the universe is constant, but the entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum. In plainer words, “nothing is ever destroyed, but everything spreads out”. Heat leaks from the warm cup into the cool room and never gathers itself back. Order loosens. Things left alone drift, always, from concentrated toward scattered, from structured toward smeared-out, until, if you follow the line all the way to its end, the whole cosmos settles into a lukewarm, featureless sameness in which nothing can ever happen again. Death. And this is where my mind ended up, slowly but surely, I realised, I was dying!

OK, so I had a moment there. That is not chaos, by the way. That is the surprising part. Entropy is not a dramatic explosion; it is a quiet, patient, lawful dissipating of energy. Which is exactly what my Sunday evening was. My attention, that finite pool of energy, dissipated evenly across twelve things until it was too thin anywhere to actually accomplish anything. I hadn’t descended into chaos. I had reached room temperature.

And yet, the next morning, I did something small that undid the whole slide. I picked one thing. I washed the dishes, only the dishes, all the way to the end. And the fog lifted. The other eleven things were still there, untouched, but something in me had changed: my mind had stopped spreading itself thin and had gathered onto a single point. The relief was not psychological fluff. It was the exact reverse of the scattered feeling. If the scattered evening was entropy, this was its opposite, felt from the inside. I had gathered something back against the drift, and I could feel it work. I was alive again!

It turns out that the reverse-of-entropy has a name, and the story of the name is one of the strangest in modern thought. But before the name, I want to show you the apple, because the apple is where I finally understood what was actually happening.

If I leave an apple on the counter it rots. Give it a week, and the thing in front of you slumps, browns, and returns to the general soft chaos of the world. Entropy wins every time, over that particular apple. But here is the strange part, the appleness does not rot with it. What an apple truly is, the whole pattern of it, is entirely untouched by the ruin of this one on my counter. The next apple will wear that pattern perfectly. Decay took my apple. It did not lay a finger on what an apple is.

So there are two very different things going on, running on two entirely different sets of rules. There is the physical thing in front of you, which falls apart. And there is the pattern it was briefly wearing, which does not. Entropy only ever touches the first. The pattern lives somewhere the decay cannot reach.

Once you see that, you cannot unsee it. Every triangle ever drawn is smudged and fading, but the triangle itself, the perfect idea of it, never ages. Every circle chips; roundness is immortal. The world is full of decaying things briefly expressing patterns that do not decay. Plato said this two and a half thousand years ago, and we have been arguing about it ever since, but you already knew it the moment the apple made sense: the thing and the pattern are not the same, and only one of them dies.

Now. Here is the turn that changed how I live, so I will say it slowly.

The apple cannot do anything about its situation. It cannot reach toward its own pattern, cannot better itself, cannot climb. It embodies appleness for a few days and then it is gone, passive from beginning to end. But I am not like the apple. Neither are you. Because a mind can do the one thing the apple never could: it can move toward the pattern of its origin. It can gather itself, generate order, and lift itself, even a little, off the plane where everything rots and toward the plane where the patterns are kept. That is what happened at my sink. In miniature, almost invisibly, I climbed.

In 1973 a researcher called J.J. Hurtak described an experience that changed his life. Fully awake, fully himself, he had a direct encounter with what he understood as a higher intelligence, and spent years afterwards working to understand what he had been given. One part of it speaks directly to our decaying apple.

He described a principle woven throughout reality: that against the universal drift toward decay runs an ordering power, and that this power is bound up with mind. That sounds very abstract, so let’s head back to my house and unpack it in the bedroom. My bedroom is generally a mess. I do try, but I am quite busy, and occasionally things just don’t get put away. Cups gather on the desk. On some days the floor requires complex navigational skills to avoid stepping on laundry or damaging electronics. So, from here I can draw a conclusion. If I leave my room alone, it only ever drifts one way: toward being a mess. Granted, I am the architect of most of it, but even if I were not, the spiders, moths and dust would happily take my place over time. And there we have our old friend entropy, doing its patient work of disorder. So, let’s go further. Mess is what happens, in time and space, when nobody is home. Unfortunately for me, my room never tidies itself. Order only ever arrives when I walk in with a picture of how the room should be, and pull the scattered things toward that picture.The tidiness didn’t come from the objects. It came from my mind with a pattern in view, a mind serving an order it could picture but had not invented. That is the whole asymmetry of the universe in my bedroom: decay needs no one, but order always has an author, and the author is always a mind. That authoring power, the reaching-in that gathers scattered things toward an idea, is what was explained to Hurtak as centropy: the power that leans towards ordering.

So let’s recap what makes us different from the apple. The apple cannot reach toward what it is; it wears its pattern for a few days, and then it is gone, passive from start to finish. But you are not passive. Every time you walk into that messy room and pull it toward order, you are doing something the apple never could: you are mentally reaching toward a pattern and dragging the scattered world up to meet it. In miniature, you are climbing.

So where does that pattern come from? Somewhere, and it cannot have come from the decay, because for entropy to author a pattern would be a snake devouring its own tail; entropy is an unmaking of order, not an ordering force of itself. The patterns of things cannot live in the falling-apart world. They must be held somewhere outside of decay: in a reality beyond the reality of our five senses or we would be able to measure them and we cannot. And a reality beyond what the senses can access is exactly what spirituality has always pointed to.

Stillness, meditation, prayer, the slow reading of sacred texts: these were never gentle hobbies for people with time to spare. They are training for the climb of a person’s consciousness, the deliberate exercise of the one thing in you that can pull upward against the drift, toward a pattern that exists outside it, towards what is truly eternal.

As it turns out, we reach into that eternal realm a lot more than we realise. Every time we recognise something as true, or feel the pull of what is good, or are stopped in our tracks by something beautiful, we’re touching it. Truth, goodness and beauty are the nature of the pattern that creates this material world, the very furniture of that higher reality, and, in some deep way, the truest part of what we are, or it would not be possible for us to recognise them at all.

Which means that turning a mind toward them is learning to say, “reality is really like this.” And by nature, a mind turned that way becomes more ordered. It gathers. It grows coherent, whole, and alive.

The reverse is just as real, and you have felt it too. A mind fed on what is false or base does not stay whole. It fragments. Dishonesty is disordering; you can feel a lie scatter you. Cruelty leaves the one who commits it more broken than before. What the old language called sin is the entropy of the soul, the mind turned to face the drift, toward the place where everything comes apart. What the old language called virtue is centropic, a mind turned to face the other way.

If we look at what every serious tradition prescribes, we always find the same two things bound together: a practice and a direction. The practice, contemplation, prayer and stillness are a climb. The morality, the turning toward the good, is the destination. Neither works without the other. Our forefathers understood that the purification of the heart before illumining the mind was necessary to grow. They saw clearly that a proud mind cannot be filled; the light only enters what has first made room for it. Why? Because they were of another level of mind and they were describing the true physics of the soul, the actual mechanism by which a human being either falls into chaos or joins divine order. And sacred texts, are patterns transmitted almost undiluted from that higher reality, which is precisely why dwelling on them reorders the mind of one who does.

Two thousand years ago someone compressed spirituality into a single instruction, so simple it has been hiding in plain sight ever since. Asked for the greatest commandment, he gave two as one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbour as yourself.

The first half is the entire upward climb in one line: the whole mind, heart and soul turned toward the highest good there is, opened all the way toward the source of order. And the second half is that same gathered order flowing back down and out, into the place where the dishes and the unanswered email and the neglected friendship live, ordering the world through you. The ascent and the return, the inner and the outer, the physics of the soul.

I still have my Sunday evenings. I still come apart. But now, when I feel myself going lukewarm, I understand what is happening, and I know which way to turn. Not toward the twelfth scattered thing, but inward the one, and then, on the good days, toward what is higher than any of them. Our greatest gift is our ability to choose our direction.

Reflect on this week’s blog and notice whether putting spiritual wisdom into practice brings more order into other parts of your life. Can you notice things that actively scatter your mind and where coherence comes? Be the scientist and the results!

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The Conference for Consciousness and Human Evolution – bridging ancient wisdom and modern science. TCCHE.org