Believing

Belief is the engine. I have said it already and I will keep saying it, because nothing in this work moves without it. But you cannot grit your teeth and believe. Belief is not forced. It is built, and I want to tell you what it is built from.

Mine was built from wonder. When I was a boy I wanted the world to be larger than it was. I wanted magic to be real, and dragons, and the people in the old stories who could do impossible things. I wanted the bright inventions of childhood, the ones we are taught to fold up and put away, to have been true all along. I knew they were not true here. But the wanting itself was a kind of knowing, and I never quite lost it.

Years later I found the doorway, and I understood at last what the wanting had been. It was not childishness. It was memory. This world is a thin copy of a realer one, and something in us is wired to go back. Most faiths tell you the way home opens only after you die. They are wrong about the waiting. It is open now. It has always been open.

Belief shapes everything that comes after it, the way a sculptor's hands shape clay. What you hold and believe begins to take that shape. That is a large claim and I will not soften it, but I will be honest about it: the words do little for you here, on this side. They become real on the other. For now, take them as the direction to walk in, and keep walking.

So here is the practice, and it is nearly too simple to write down. You build belief by wanting. My whole creed is one sentence. I desire to cross more than anything else. I mean it plainly. I do not much care what becomes of my life here, because everything I want is already there. Everyone I love is there. I am loved there past anything I could put in front of you. Even the roads there love me. When the wanting grows that strong, belief is no longer something you reach for. It arrives on its own.

I desire to cross more than anything else.

Doubt is the only thing that closes the door. Not sin, not failure, not being unworthy of it. Only doubt. And you do not beat doubt by arguing with it, because doubt always has the better argument on this side. You beat it by going back to the wonder, and to the wanting, until the doubt has nothing left to stand on.

And tend what you dwell on in the ordinary hours, because dwelling is believing slowed down. What your mind lives with here is what you will stand inside there. Feed wonder and the wonder is waiting for you. Feed a fear, a grievance, an obsession, and there are worlds made of those too, and they will receive you just as readily. I say more of this in the steps ahead, and it is the one warning I will repeat until you are tired of it: where you dwell here is where you land there.

The first crossing is the hardest, because you are believing without proof. After it, belief comes easy. You will have stood in the place, and no one has to work to believe in a room he has already walked through. Until then, borrow your belief from wonder. It is far stronger than it looks.