It is hard to write about the mystical realm for a mainstream magazine. If you are writing a personal essay, you are writing with a certain kind of knowledge about experiences that many other humans have shared. If you are writing journalism, you are writing about the observed world. In this second case, you are reassured that when you hand in your assignment, it’s going to be given to a fact-checker. This fact-checker will ask for sources to confirm facts, and these will be either be confirmed or disproven, like a mathematical proof. You are always vulnerable when you stand before the world as a writer, but you’re a little less vulnerable when you’re standing behind an article that’s been fact-checked. But the safety is not only that: your article is snug in a context that makes it make sense. The context of the magazine itself anchors it down. The article is buttressed by other, similar, magazine articles. Immediately the reader knows what to expect: an article about architecture in an architectural journal, or maybe a piece with a certain high-minded and witty tone, educated, left leaning, knowing, if you’re writing for a place like The New Yorker. A magazine won’t publish something that does not belong in the magazine. That is one thing that the editorial process is for: to make your article blend in. I worked at a magazine in my early twenties. I was an assistant editor there. I learned that the voice of the writer was one thing, an important thing, but equally important was the voice of the magazine, and that a published article was some concoction of these two voices together.

Last year I was working on an article for Harper’s about a book called A Course in Miracles, which had been published in the mid 1970s and was said to have been “channeled” by a woman named Helen Schucman during a years-long process in which she heard the voice of Jesus. I wasn’t sure how to take this account. Does Jesus speak through people? How the hell am I supposed to know? But because I was the author of the article, I had to make sense of it. Because I was writing for the respectable Harper’s and not in an email to friends, I felt compelled to have some opinion about it, to come down on the side of belief or disbelief. This wasn’t something my editor pressured me to do. I just didn’t want to seem like a ninny. In the context of Harper’s, I felt I would seem like a ninny if I said I wasn’t sure whether the spirit of Jesus could speak through people and write a book — or even worse, if I said He could.

This is a minor problem, but multiplied to all the writers in the world, it maybe becomes a big one. How are we supposed to speak — to a wide audience — about the spiritual realm, or about things unknown, which can’t be fact-checked, or can’t be checked against the reader’s experiences, without seeming like fools? Better not to write about these things at all, one begins to think. So many times, I wanted to throw away my Course in Miracles essay because I just didn’t know what tone to take, and because I didn’t want my article not to belong.

Around the end of my struggle with my piece, Tao Lin published an essay titled “My Spiritual Evolution” on the Granta website. “My Spiritual Evolution” is a really good title, and Tao Lin’s confidence in saying all the things I was unconfident in saying made me jealous in the best way: it made me wish I had written it and made me send it to all my friends. Tao Lin had solved the problem, it seemed to me, of how to write about ineffable things, in the form of an article that would be offered to readers who like to think critically. How had he done this? For starters, he had begun his article by defining “materialism” as “the theory that only matter exists,” and then calling this worldview “dogmatic” and critiquing it for “dismissing the older spiritual ontologies — which assert the existence of an immaterial reality that is more fundamental than the material one — as superstitious and unscientific.” He defined himself as an American who, born in the 1980s, came into a materialistic framework, and then steadily charts materialism’s effects on his well-being; believing that death is the end, not encountering anything “soul-related” during childhood. He grows into a man who is dissatisfied with life, who is finally motivated to search for “a deeper, more enchanting reality.” It isn’t until he starts taking his drug experiences seriously that he finds the enchantment he was looking for, “evidence for the existence of the higher-dimensional reality that cultures throughout history have centered in their worldviews.”

His essay made me see why drugs (the essay focuses specifically on DMT) are such a good way into the subject of the otherworldly, for the mystical drug trip begins with a material act — a person ingests a drug. From that action, a story unfolds. Even if the story it is unfolding is magical and mystical, there is cause and effect at play. Materialist thinkers, magazine editors, readers of non-fiction, even those who love simple stories, are crazy for cause and effect. Cause and effect is reassuring. It means that nothing happens for no reason. It means that the reason that something happened can be figured out, and shared with the magazine’s readers.

This is where I got stuck in writing my Harper’s article: what was the cause that allowed Helen Schucman to write (or “scribe,” as she prefers to say) her book? Did Jesus really come to her? If not, why did she think He had? If she didn’t think it, why did she lie? As I started to search for the cause of the effect — to find the “drug-taking moment” — this inability increasingly became the centre of my piece, and a very dissatisfying one for me, because the cause of this book was shrouded in increasing layers of mystery: maybe the book was CIA psy-op? Maybe it was genuine revelation? Maybe the cause was a mental illness? Maybe she wrote the book to get closer to a man? Maybe she was drugged? The why was the great unknown, it could not be fact-checked, and it could barely be related to on the level of personal experience. (How many of us are in love with our bosses who are secret operatives for the CIA?) I have a secret doubt that there can ever be a solid why for the most important questions in our life: Why do I like writing? Why did I fall in love with that man? Why are we still living together after fifteen years? I felt completely underwater for the year and a half I was researching and writing my article. I still think I could turn it into a book, since the cause of Helen’s book, the “drug-taking moment,” could also have been a dozen other things, and of the half dozen theories I put forth, each one of them could have been elaborated more.

My point is this: when one is writing non-fiction for a magazine, one is always telling a story. But the mystical realm exists outside of story. Maybe that is actually a good way of defining the difference between the mystical realm and the material realm: the former, taking place in eternal time, has no cause, no beginning or end, no outline, it penetrates everything, it is the future and the past and the present in one undying moment, it is the opposite of story. The material realm, in which things are constantly being born and dying, is the essential plane of story: life itself is a story, beginning with birth. But the soul? One cannot tell a story about the soul, not only because we cannot see it, touch it, argue for it or against it, but because whatever we think we can know about it exists in a frame of time that we can’t even fathom, that could never map cleanly onto our own, clock-time.

How to write about the ineffable for magazines — for readers who want to encounter a story? Beyond the difficulty of it, beyond the seeming-like-a-ninny of it, is the fact that a magazine outlines a specific, material-based world. That is one of its purposes: to create a subreality of the world, where certain articles can live in its pages, and certain articles cannot. A magazine gets its identity from having a strict sense of what defines it, and what defines it is wrapped up with what it believes reality is. A magazine gets its authority from showing in every article, its layout, its choice of writers and its design that reality is this. For Vanity Fair, reality is celebrities, the Kennedys, Annie Leibowitz, ingenues, mansions, all the most glamorous cities in the world, corruption, scandal, politics, gossip. For New York magazine, reality is New York.

There could be so much more transformative thinking in the pages of magazines, and so much more delirious speculation, if the editor of New York wasn’t so certain what New York was; if the editor of Good Housekeeping was sort of confused about what constitutes good housekeeping; if the editor of Vogue was a little bit baffled about what was in vogue. Of course, there are magazines specifically about the metaphysical, but I am thinking about what it would look like to have fact-driven reportage side-by-side with articles that simmer in the unknown. Or what if the traditional journalist embraced those synchronous, unbelievable and uncanny events which truly make life life, which everyone encounters, which journalists must encounter constantly in the course of their reporting, details and tangents they have been trained, and trained themselves, to leave out?

Tao Lin writes of coming down from a very intense DMT high in which he experienced his disembodied soul as something that only wore the robes of Tao Lin, saying “Compared to where I’d been [high], the universe [newly sober] seemed limited and somehow artificial. Despite its complexity, it felt suspiciously simple, like an extremely advanced multiplayer online role-playing game… In the days that followed, I came to feel that I was hiding here in the physical world, like a child who hides in a computer game to escape a more consequential reality. But I also felt that I wasn’t really hiding, that hiding was just how I was playfully terming my situation, which actually had a more mature and mysterious purpose.”

He goes on to propose that this purpose is learning, or a very high form of aesthetic experience, or entertainment, or transformative engagement—the same purpose we, as conscious beings, might be experiencing when we decide to read a book (or article): it’s to learn, or to entertain ourselves, or to travel in some way beyond our own experiences and the limits of our bodies, in order to bring something new back to our daily living. For his disembodied soul, being released from having to wear the cloak of “Tao Lin,” being released into the expansiveness of eternity, can be expressed by the writer Tao Lin as the same difference that exists between living through something in daily life, and reading an account of someone living through that same thing. For most of us, the images that books or articles summon in our minds are less vivid, less real, and less important than whatever we encounter as we move through our bodily lives. One can just imagine the vividness and importance of the “higher order” reality that a DMT-drugged Tao Lin encountered, if to come down from his high felt like moving from fighting with one’s lover, to reading about a couple arguing in a book.

The whole time I was writing my Harper’s article, what I really wanted to be doing was something closer to channeling Jesus, to be living the way Helen Schucman had lived. I thought that by thinking about her situation in a thorough, logical, story-driven way I could somehow learn how she had channelled her book, and that this learning would lead to my own similar channelling. Of course, it did not. Thinking something logically through does not lead, in any way, to doing it. Thinking and doing are in some ways opposites. The year of writing my article ended up being what I should have known it would always end up being: a year of writing an article. Only after I was done, back in the mystical, inexplicable world of my own freedom, away from the demands of articulating a journalistic, fact-driven story, did I feel close again to the mystery that Helen had experienced, and that is the soul of writing, where inspirations come through you that have no beginning or ending, that don’t map onto story structures as we are accustomed to them, that might never make sense in a magazine, that barely even make sense to me.

Am I dreaming of a magazine filled with mystical propositions, next to reports of genocides, airplane crashes, the rise and fall of the almighty dollar? It could be great. It might even make everything make more sense.