What do you believe, deeply?

It's such a simple question, but how simple is the answer?

My cousin, Brandie Freely—a writer who frames personal questions like she’s drafting a deposition for the soul—recently cornered me with a heavy one. It was the kind of question that usually requires a research grant, plenty of footnotes, and an existential audit to answer: “What do you believe?” She asked. “Deeply? About life, art, God, the whole sprawling mess? What is the one thing you could never grow tired of exploring?”

Once she asked, I immediately started crafting my answer—I always have an answer—but nothing came. I found myself staring into the middle distance like I’d walked into the kitchen and forgotten why I was there.

What a terrifying prompt. I thought I had an embarrassment of riches, a surplus of profound insights, but my mind was merely a cluttered attic of maybes.

This simple question revealed the lopsided nature of the modern mind . . . the lopsided nature of my modern mind. In a fraction of a moment, like life flashing before death, I realized I have ready-made, borderline militant opinions on everything from the correct way to air-fry leftover pizza to a non-negotiable hierarchy of 90s one-hit wonders, yet when asked about the deep stuff, I started buffering. My internal processor just hummed with a hollow, metallic ring.

This was uncharted territory for me—an odd realization. I spend so much of my time colonizing the various wonders of being a conscious creature. I adore those wonders; in fact, this Substack is the digital paper trail of my obsession over those wonders. Yet, when the question was posed with such surgical precision—asking what I believe so deeply that the well never runs dry—I found myself grasping at smoke.

After the mental inventory-taking finally ceased, and the cerebral dust settled, the actual answer stepped forward, looking entirely unsurprised to see me. It is a recurring irony of the human condition that the most profound truths often wait for us to stop looking for them, sitting there with the quiet patience of a misplaced set of keys.

I’ve spent forty years navigating this world—migrating from the rhythmic, hand-fanned heat of my childhood church pews to the polished, footnoted corridors of an academic career I was told I was too smart to refuse, and eventually to a corporate life where I hit every financial milestone while my spirit felt like a printer with a permanent paper jam. But now, in this season, the static has finally settled. Beneath the CVs, the retired Sunday suits, and the lanyard-bound ID badges, a pulse remains. I do have an answer. I do believe something, deeply.

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Believing is not the same as Believing in.

So often we treat “believing in” things more like a curated collection of specialty marmalades—lovely to look at on the shelf, perhaps a bit sticky if we open them, but mostly there for aesthetic cohesion. We believe in Love as if it’s a benevolent ghost; we believe in Karma like it’s a cosmic HR department keeping a spreadsheet of our transgressions; we believe in Destiny as the ultimate GPS that will reroute us around our own bad decisions. These are great, but really they’re intellectual safety nets—comforting, certainly, but they remain at arm’s length, theoretical and shimmering like a desert mirage. They are the decorative pillows of the soul: stylish for the look, but often too stiff to actually sleep on.

In this writer’s opinion, there is a massive, slightly embarrassing distance between believing in something almost like a spiritual accessory and actually believing something as a cellular fact. Today, believing in Love, Karma, or Destiny can be just a high-end form of intellectual window shopping; we admire the mannequin from the sidewalk, appreciating the drape of the fabric without ever having to actually wear the thing. It becomes a merit badge of the soul that we pin to our social identities to signal that we are, indeed, the kind of people who value the profound.

But a true belief is hardwired into the basement of the brain—it’s the operating system that doesn’t ask for permission, the kind of conviction that governs your breathing and the way you instinctively lean toward the light. It took me a moment, actually it took much longer than a moment, but once I stopped treating my convictions like a subscription service and started treating them like the air in my lungs, the world stopped being a problem to be solved and started being a reality to be inhabited. It’s a subtle pivot, but it turned my cluttered attic of maybes into a sunlit room where I finally saw where the light switch is.

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So what do I believe, deeply?

It isn’t a particularly special answer, but it is the only thing that makes the chaos of the evening news and the frantic absurdity of a Monday morning sync up.

My answer is this: I believe, deeply, that we are not humans having a spiritual experience through living. We are consciousness—soul, spirit, awareness, or whatever you want to call the boundless, internal pilot in each of us. We are eternal and only temporarily experiencing human existence. We aren’t the roles we play or the names on our mail; we are the awareness that stands just behind them, watching the story unfold. We are the universe trying on these bespoke, made-to-order human suits, curious to see how the world feels when viewed through our specific, singular vantage point.

I believe the entire point of this whole, breathless “being alive” business is to peel back the layers of our conditioning until we recognize that we are all just different apertures through which the same underlying essence is staring back at itself. I believe this with a quiet, stubborn certainty, and I find the exercise of expressing and exploring it to be the only work that truly satisfies all of me.

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Why do I believe this, deeply?

I believe this because it’s the only lens that makes the world’s cruelty and beauty make sense simultaneously. If we are all part of the same consciousness that existed before the Big Bang, then loving your neighbor isn’t a moral suggestion—it’s a biological and metaphysical reality. You’re just loving another version of yourself that happened to grow up in a different zip code.

I could explore this forever because it is the ultimate unified theory. It explains why the billionaire is miserable, why stories about humans who “walked with God” exist in every culture, and why you feel that weird, expansive ache in your chest when you see a particularly beautiful sunset.

We are the universe looking at itself through a temporary pair of eyes. The form is the costume; the consciousness is the actor. And when the play is over, the actor doesn’t cease to exist—they just take off the mask and head to the next production.

I’ve never been more certain that the nothing is actually the everything. I’ve realized that the conditioning of our lives—our names, our careers, our traumas, our political affiliations—is designed to keep us from the point. It’s all just static on the radio.

But then, there are the moments where the static breaks.

In Zen, it is called, satori. I call it the moment the “me” gets out of the way. You’ve felt it before. It’s that split second when you’re staring at a newborn baby and you don’t see a relative, you see the sheer, terrifying miracle of life—you see the entire universe. It’s when you’re in a park and you catch the sun hitting a pond just right, and for an instant, you aren’t a person with a mortgage and a bad back—you are just the witnessing of that light.

It’s a feeling of being plugged in. In those moments, I feel more connected to the person sitting across from me on the subway than I do to my own ego. I believe we are meant to feel that way always. We just get talked out of it by our bills and our brains.

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What do you believe, deeply?

There is a quiet, startling dignity in possessing a conviction that functions less like a theory and more like a nervous system. Most of us navigate the world with a pocketful of abstract affirmations, yet we rarely pause to feel the gravitational pull of a truth that actually anchors the room. To hold a deep belief is to finally stop bracing for impact. It is the transition from observing the ocean to actually floating in it, where the buoyancy isn’t a hope but a reality. When a concept moves from the head to the bones, the world begins to feel like a destination finally reached.

Consider the landscape of your own quiet certainties. What is the one truth that remains when the noise of the day finally retreats? Forget the slogans and the borrowed philosophies; look for the thing that makes your breath catch with a sense of sudden, sharp recognition. It is a profound delight to discover a reality so sturdy that it doesn’t require your defense to remain true. You are invited to inhabit that space—to find the thing you know with such startling clarity that it turns the mundane into a masterpiece. There is a shimmering freedom waiting in that realization, a chance to see the world as a wonder that has already been decided.

What do you believe, deeply?