A Divided Or Abiding Mind

Inspired by Ian McGilchrist

May 07, 2026

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. — John 15:

A Divided Mind: Distraction and Chaos

A few days ago, someone sent me an episode of Ali Tabrizi having an interview with Ian MacGilchrist.1 As I really like his ideas, I watched the long video. At one point, Ali says that the meaning of “dia-bolos” - another name for the devil - is “the great divider”. He links this to the issues with left versus right brain hemisphere, where they should normally cooperate.

If this idea is true, it seems that it is a tactic as ancient as time (or older than that) to sow division: not only between people or between God and man, but in ourselves and in our ideas about God and the world. For example: the division in our bodies between the working of our left and right brain hemisphere. The division in our world between the material and the spiritual. The division, in many people’s spirituality, between God as Man and God as God, causing heresies and tensions between different groups in the Church. Recently, someone wrote an interesting post on the division between left-wing and right-wing politics.2 This also reminds me of what Ian McGilchrist says about how our left- brain-hemisphere-dominant society tends to think in extremes and can’t have a balanced, overall view of things. The divisions and dispersion in our current society are very obvious.

Another big example of division in our time, is the extreme dispersion of our attention. Somewhere in the video, Ian explains something astonishing: scientists discovered that schizophrenia - an extreme dominance of left brain hemisphere - only started to exist when industrialism and cities came into existence, and up till this day, it is most present in cities. After some more research, they concluded that living in the city could indeed trigger schizophrenia. When we have any kind of right brain hemisphere deficiency, and become too left brain hemisphere dominant, some of the consequences are that we have difficulty seeing the broader picture, and we are pulled in by extreme logic and distracted by facts floating by. I personally find that walking around in the city, as well as having constant messages and notifications on my phone, sometimes leaves me so dispersed and distracted that I’m no longer able to gather my thoughts into oneness and form coherent trains of thought for writing or creative work.

Emily Wilson Hussem, a Christian speaker, author and Youtuber wrote something astonishing about this in her book Sincerely, Stoneheart, containing letters in the style of The Screwtape Letters from C.S. Lewis. If you are not familiar with those, the idea is that a demon writes letters to a fellow demon to explain how he needs to work to get his human away from God. Wilson’s version is ingeniously adapted for women in our current modern world. This is what she makes her demon write about distraction (note: when Stoneheart writes about “the Enemy”, she means God):

At this particular conference the Chief set the foundational plan for destruction of the modern era. It was titled “Distraction”. (…)
That was the ticket — a one-way ticket to misery and emptiness. If we could distract them to pay attention to things that don’t actually matter — if we could divert them entirely from their feelings, from their relationships, from their families, from their emotions, from looking at one another, from living in the present — then the unraveling would begin. That one keynote changed everything. A distracted world is a chaotic one. Look at how far we’ve come. (…)
The root of the greatest distraction for her started as an invention called the World Wide Web. Let us revisit what a web is and does: It allows a spider to catch prey. An unassuming insect flies right into the almost-invisible trap of that spider’s web and becomes stuck there with a great sense of helplessness. The Web was also like an invisible trap, and these subjects were all the prey. Floating about their lives freely, they didn’t understand when the Web was invented that it would encompass the globe, just waiting until they flew into it and became ensnared forever.
They thought the Web gave them power; it only made them prey. And over time developments made the Web capable of entangling the subjects not just at home but everywhere they went. Its sticky substance has now infiltrated everything. (…)
The distraction of this Web is now the world’s heartbeat. Most of our subjects barely look at or speak to one another. They sit with their hands wrapped around a little rectangular device that constantly sucks them into the Web. Note this: Her hands are almost folded in prayer, but there’s a black hole between them — a chasm that is only a few square inches physically but figuratively is a limitless abyss. (…)
Many of them wonder why their thought processes seem chaotic. Distraction is a gateway to internal chaos. Many of their minds are like a grandmother’s house half a century ago, where every inch is cluttered with knickknacks. Their minds are cluttered to the point that many of them, including your subject, cannot think clearly anymore — all because of that noise coming through their eyes. (…)
She’s searching for something meaningful but keeps coming up with misery. When you maintain a high level of noise pouring in on her from all sides, it will be difficult for her to focus on our Enemy. It will grow steadily more challenging to hear His voice. This has been carefully orchestrated from the beginning. When most of the noise is silent, she won’t realize how deafening it truly is.3

When I read this, I was painfully struck by the accuracy of the observance. Why did I never see te parallels between the internet and a spider’s web? It is almost too obvious. But it is clearly what is happening to us: we are being caught and enslaved. The tendency of our fallen nature towards chaos and division is fully realised by these latest inventions.

Who can save us then, if we are so prone to division? “What’s impossible for man, is possible for God”. Where the diabolic forces divide us, God reunites. The universe is proof of it: where the main natural law is tending towards chaos since the Big Bang, the existence of our planet is a miracle. God literally holds us all together, bundles errant particles so that it becomes something real: creation, nature, human persons. The new insights into the science of quantum physics (not the pseudo-science that claims many other things about it), shows us this. To hold our world together, there is a need for a Master Intellect who looks at it and thus brings it into being. He created us and is creating us incessantly. He can re-create us, make us new, if we allow Him to heal our bodies and souls and purge them from all its tendencies to distraction and dispersion. He can make our brains new, if we do our best to meet Him where He can be found.

An Abiding Mind: Contemplation and Mysticism

Where can we find Him then? It is in the present moment, in the depths of our heart, in silence. To not have a divided mind, a mind that is distracted or at war with itself in our time, there is only one solution: to abide. I admit, it’s a bit of an archaic word, but not so in biblical terms, where it means to dwell or remain. Where or in whom? In our divine Healer who unified us all with God, each other and ourselves, by dying on the cross - a very real symbol that itself unites the horizontal and the vertical, heaven and earth - and rising from the dead. And we can welcome this healing if we make ourselves receptive. We cannot have an abiding mind without an abiding heart, a heart that opens itself up to the healing love of our Creator and Redemptor.

An abiding mind or heart could also be explained with the words contemplation or even mysticism. It is my personal conviction, and I am sure I am not alone in this, that the best way to heal, unify and pacify our world and our lives, is by seeing the bees and smelling the roses again - literally and figuratively. By taking time to look up into the sky and wonder at the movement of the clouds. We were made to contemplate beauty and to be inspired by it, because it points us to the true story of the world.

If we look at the etymology of inspire, it comes from the Latin word inspirare, which means “to breathe or blow into” and emerged in English around the fourteenth century, as a reference to divine influence, filling the mind or heart with grace, breathing life into a person. Inspiration, brought about by contemplation, is life-giving on an existential level. We see truth, goodness and beauty, which point us towards our Creator.

Let’s look at the etymology of contemplation and mysticism. Contemplation originates from the Latin contemplatio, meaning “act of looking at” or “observation”, and the verb contemplari, meaning “to gaze attentively”. Mysticism, then, has somewhat more complex roots. In the fourteenth century, the word mistike started being used, meaning “spiritually allegorical, pertaining to mysteries of faith”, coming from both the Old French mistique, Latin mysticus and Greek mystikos, all pointing to the mysterious, secret and connected with the mysteries. Definitions of the word point to an experience of divine illumination or the belief in it.

At the beginning of my prayer time, I pray with the Celtic morning prayer from the Northumbria Community, which always begins with the following verse:

One thing I have asked of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in His temple.
(psalm 27:4)

I think this sums up contemplation and mysticism very well. To behold the beauty of the Lord and to dwell - to abide - in His house. When I can dwell in His house, and behold His beauty, it is also the most powerful experience of coming home to myself. And this, I think, is essentially unifying, healing and life-giving. There is another verse that I think of in the same sense. It is when Jesus tells Martha, who is complaining that she needs to do everything by herself and her sister is sitting at Jesus’ feet instead of helping her: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)

Here, Jesus Himself defends those who seek to contemplate from those who angrily say that we all need to work, perform and be worried “about many things” as much as they do so themselves. This can teach us something very important, which is that it is only Christ who unifies. It is in contemplating Him, listening to Him and following Him that we learn to unify ourselves and our societies.

There is one ultimate example of what it means to live a life grounded and balanced in Truth, free of dispersion: the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is so absorbed in her Creator, that she cannot be dispersed. Everything in her is unified to the core, to her abiding heart and mind. Let’s try to spend some time every day to look at her peaceful recollection and her receptive attitude. Let’s also look at the saint who was very close to her: Saint Joseph. Let’s look at the simple life of a little family in Nazareth that hid the most precious gift ever given to humanity: the One who would bring our divided earth and humanity back to union with the Heavens.

Are you searching for ways to be less distracted and find more time for what is essential? I am developing a project that aims at this through a reading plan of the Great Books from the perspective of the Inklings and Sacramental Imagination. You can find more information here:

Join the Agia Paideia Project