Setting Intent

Setting intent is the first step, and it is the one most people set wrong. They set it on the thing they came for.

You came for something. Nearly everyone does. A body that stops hurting. Money that stops running out before the month does. A person to love. An answer that will hold still long enough to stand on. There is no shame in any of it. The wanting is what set you walking, and it is the reason you are reading this instead of something easier.

But the wanting is also the wall. And worse than a wall, as you will see.

There is a saying I have carried for years, from the Gospel of Thomas. I read it for a long time as a warning. I read it now as the whole of the method.

The kingdom is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she walked along a far road, the handle of the jar broke, and the meal spilled out behind her along the road. She knew nothing of it. She had noticed no accident. When she reached her house and set the jar down, she found it empty.

She arrives carrying nothing, and she does not even feel the moment she was emptied. That is what the crossing asks of you. Not that you give up what you want by force, gritting your teeth over it, naming it every day so you can renounce it. That is just carrying the jar more tightly. It asks instead that you let the thing spill quietly behind you on the road, until your hands are open and you did not notice them opening.

So when you set your intent, do not set it on healing. Do not set it on money, or on love, or even on peace, as much as you want peace. Set it on one thing, and only one: I wish to cross, to see what is true. That is all of it. The truth is not a prize I can hand you in a paragraph. It is shown to you on the other side, and only there. Your work on this side is smaller and harder than it sounds: to want the crossing more than you want the reason you first came looking.

Want the crossing more than you want the reason you came.

There is one feeling that does this better than any method I could teach you. Wonder. Not hope, which is always hope for something, always a hand still reaching. Wonder, which wants nothing and leans toward the thing anyway. Spend your time getting quietly amazed at the whole of it, not at the one piece you mean to carry home. It is a place unlike anything you have known, and you are going to stand inside it. Let that settle in you plainly, the way you would let in a fact, and ask it for nothing.

There is a second reason to guard your intent, and it is the graver one. Intent does not only open the door. It chooses what is behind it. There is more than one world on the far side, and the one that receives you is the one that matches what you carry. I have gone to the veil with my waking mind still closed around a trouble from this world, and I crossed into a world built of the trouble, wearing every face in it. Wonder carries you high. A wound carries you into wounds. This is not a punishment, and no one is handing it to you. It is only the law of the place, the same law of thought you will meet again further in.

Keep these thoughts near you. Carry them into the ordinary hours, the commute and the dishes and the long afternoons. This is the ground that everything after it is built on, and we are going to build on it.

But notice this much before you go. The moment you stop reaching for the thing you wanted, you are already lighter. And it has been my experience, more times than I can tell you, that when you finally set the jar down, you find you were closer to it all along than you ever were while you carried it.