When a difficulty arises, we can cope by sliding into our unchecked ego’s favorite reaction, which is the path of least resistance, and of course, spiritual entropy. The ego is well-practiced in invading us with thoughts, assumptions, and defenses triggered by our fixation. And we are so used to our fixation’s running commentary that we swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Then our behavior unconsciously expresses the fixation.

This reflection includes a story about entropy and a person who regularly trapped me in conversation. Do I fall into spiritual entropy by taking the easy way out and leaving them in mid-sentence, or do I take a more difficult approach? 

Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the tendency for a system to lose order or predictability, causing a decline into disorder. This phenomenon explains why things naturally spread out and disperse, like melting ice, decomposing plants, or perfume aroma spreading rather than staying in one conglomeration of vapor.

Psychiatrist, spiritual author, and teacher M. Scott Peck makes this startling claim in The Road Less Traveled: the original sin of humankind is not hatred, envy, or even a failure to love. It is laziness; what he calls entropy. Peck names entropy as the root of disintegration because it quietly pulls us toward the path of least resistance.