How Writing Fiction Shapes My Spiritual Life

I published my first novel, Transdimensional Crossing, in May of 2018 because I sensed that fiction would allow me to express ideas I deeply believed in but was still too hesitant to present directly as nonfiction. Fiction gave me a certain freedom. I could explore the multidimensional nature of reality while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability about what I actually believed.

At the time I made a commitment to write ten novels. Transdimensional Time Travel is my seventh.

As the novels accumulated, I began to notice an interesting pattern. My nonfiction writing was always an attempt to articulate spiritual experiences I had already lived. Fiction was different. It allowed me to imagine spiritual possibilities that I believed might exist but had not yet experienced myself.

Then something unexpected began to happen. Experiences I first imagined in fiction started appearing in my own life.

At first I dismissed them as curious coincidences, but as the years passed there were simply too many of them to ignore.

Insights I had given to fictional characters became my own realizations. Encounters I had imagined began taking shape in my lived experience. Even people entered my life who reminded me uncannily of characters I had written years earlier. Eventually I realized I needed to understand what was happening.

That exploration became the basis for my book The Path of Mythopoetic Awakening. In it I suggested that fiction may be capable of doing more than expressing our imagination. Perhaps it also reveals something waiting to emerge within us.

At the time I published that book, I had no idea that an even more striking experience was about to unfold.

In Transdimensional Time Travel, one of the main characters, Jason, encounters the Buddhist goddess Guanyin, who becomes his guide and teacher. Two months ago, during a plant medicine ceremony, I experienced an encounter with a goddess who has continued to guide my own spiritual life ever since. The experience was profoundly transformative.

My first instinct afterward was that I could not speak publicly about it. It felt like something that belonged only in fiction and I immediately began imagining how I might weave it into a future novel.

But the experience proved too alive to remain inside a story.

I began sharing it with a small group of people in The Mystery School. Those conversations became deeply meaningful. Rather than trying to explain the experience away or turn it into a fixed belief, we explored it together. As time passed, I found myself speaking about it more openly.

Looking back now, I find myself wondering whether Transdimensional Time Travel somehow prefigured what would later unfold in my own life. When I wrote about Jason meeting a goddess, I wasn't consciously hoping for that experience myself. It simply served the story and helped illuminate the spiritual cosmology I wanted to explore. Only afterward did I begin to wonder whether the story had been pointing toward something my conscious mind did not yet know.

This raises fascinating questions for me.

Did the novel reveal an unconscious knowledge already present within me—a glimpse of a spiritual destiny that found expression through fiction before it appeared in my life? Or did the very act of imagining and writing these experiences participate in bringing them into being? Could storytelling itself initiate an energetic current that helps shape the future?

Perhaps both are true.

Maybe imagination is more than creativity. Maybe it is one of the ways reality reveals what is trying to emerge through us.

These are not questions I feel any urgency to answer quickly. They are questions I want to live with.

That, more than anything else, has become one of the greatest gifts of The Mystery School for me. It is a place where profound experiences are not reduced to simple explanations, nor dismissed because they challenge our ordinary understanding of reality. Instead, they become the beginning of a shared exploration.

Together we ask difficult questions. We compare experiences. We test ideas against practice. We allow mystery to deepen rather than rushing toward certainty.

For me, that is what spiritual community is truly for.