It’s to our wants and needs, our fears, our wounds—to negative rumination. “The undirected mind tends toward chaos.” The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this phenomenon “psychic entropy.”[19] But on this, ancient Christian spirituality and bleeding-edge neuroscience agree: The mind can be retrained. Re-formed. Whether you call this process neuroplasticity or “the practice of the presence of God,” the powerful truth still stands: Our minds do not have to live in a negative spiral; they can be retrained to “abide”—to live in the presence of God.
