I’m currently reading a book called Anathem by Neal Stephenson. He’s a deep thinker—sometimes a little too deep for me, honestly. One idea he explores is the interplay between the spiritual or mental world and the physical world: the question of whether purely conceptual things actually exist.
Take “love,” for example. You can’t see it, hear it, feel it, or taste it in a physical sense. Yet it alters your brain state and influences your actions, creating measurable effects in the “real” world. I think most people would agree that love exists. So why do so many struggle to believe that “God” exists—that a non-physical entity could have measurable effects on the physical world?
Another sci-fi book, Endymion by Dan Simmons, presents love as a “fundamental force of the universe,” comparable to gravity. Love binds people across space and time and can be viewed as a creative force. What would humanity look like without it?
In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck describes serendipity as the unexpected grace that seems to guide us when we sincerely walk the path of growth, truth, and love. I read that book at the very beginning of my spiritual journey, and it may have been the first time I truly questioned my old worldview—that of a purely mechanical universe governed only by physical laws.
Recovery, in a sense, is order emerging from chaos, which contradicts the natural tendency toward disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the total entropy (disorder) of a system either increases or remains constant in any spontaneous process. Yet everything about recovery, humanity, and life on Earth seems to contradict that basic law. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, and we believe it emerged spontaneously over billions of years?
In my opinion, there’s another force at work here—one we do not yet scientifically understand.
Living in the Solution 