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I posed the same question to my captive translucents about movies as I had about music. The nominations for the most translucent film went to Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, the Matrix trilogy, Life is Beautiful, Powder, and American Beauty. What is it about these films, or indeed about certain books or works of art, that brings us back to ourselves, that allows us to feel a bigger love than mere sentimentality? There are no unicorns or rainbows in these films, not even Hollywood happy endings. One is about disconnection in the suburbs and ends with the protagonist’s murder. One is about a lifelong struggle with mental illness. And one devotes more than half of its plot to a concentration camp and also ends with the main character’s meaningless death. But according to the many people I surveyed, these are nonetheless the top candidates for translucent cinema, these are the films that “take us there,” that let us feel the divine all the way down to our little toes.

How do we recognize the difference between mere excitement or entertainment and the real deal? What distinguishes a good movie, or song, or sculpture, for example, from one that has some mysterious additional ingredient that transforms it into a spiritual event? I took these questions to writers, filmmakers, critics, musicians, and the UPS delivery guy. There was a surprising convergence of conclusions.

Translucent art happens when three factors occur simultaneously. Each of these three elements can exist by themselves, and often do. When they come together, they create a magic that transports us beyond ourselves, and we enter the realm of sacred art.

The first, indispensable to the rest, is basic technical skill. Leonard Cohen spent years working on the lyrics for Ten New Songs. He’s been writing novels and songs since before I was born. Alan Ball had already made his mark as a New York playwright, and worked on several network sitcoms, before writing the screenplay for American Beauty. Steven Halpern may hear melodies spontaneously while driving on the back roads in Marin, but he has decades of mileage on his Roland piano to help him download those melodies onto tape. Even the most inspired translucent artists need discipline and technique to transpose the gift from beyond themselves, down and through their medium. The artist may have to hang in there, through days and nights of not-quite-right, through Iago’s discouraging whisper, till ah … the shoes fits perfectly.

The second factor, which may exist independently of the other two, is an artistic honesty, a relaxed willingness to face the full spectrum of human experience, without flinching from any of it. The work then reflects the artist’s integrity: allowing reality to be just as it is, which may require the courage to face and feel great pain. If we lean just a little too much into favoring the light, we are lost in the land of lightweight network soaps, or N.A.M., which soothe us from the need to face reality, like a sedative. We may feel entertained, uplifted, but rarely whole. If we lean too far on the other side, we get lost in the dark side, the land of violence and destruction. Bloodbath movies, punk rock, or heavy metal music exude a destructive quality with which we can all sometimes find a resonance. They allow us to experience our own anger, our hatred, and because it is being acted out on such an extreme scale, we experience catharsis, we feel alive again. We may temporarily drain the reservoir of resentment, but neither punk rock nor gratuitously violent movies generally allow us to feel deeply connected. Artistic honesty walks right down the middle of the tightrope, without leaning too far one way or the other. It discovers a humor and a stillness in the midst of the chaos of opposites.

The last, most mysterious ingredient of translucent art concerns the artist’s state of consciousness: how translucent she can be when the art is flowing. This is where art itself becomes a translucent spiritual practice, as effective as meditation or yoga. As we have seen from great art throughout the ages, this quality has less to do with the artists’ individual personalities in day-to-day life than is does with their capacity to get out of the way, to poke a hole in the usual continuum of daily preoccupations, allowing something deeper to have its way. This deeper quality infuses the content with an invisible flavor, a perfume. When this third ingredient is added to the mix, we can feel it, independent of the content. We feel it while reading a poem, gazing at a painting, watching a show, or listening to a symphony.

David Lynch brings decades of translucent practice to his filmmaking. His movies are frequently praised by translucents I interviewed. But they are a far cry from expressions of sweetness and light. Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive both dance around murders, weaving in bizarre twists and characters. Many of us love Lynch’s films, even his darker Blue Velvet, not only because of a fascination with the twisted, but also because of how the material is presented. We are not only experiencing the story but also receiving a transmission of the openness of consciousness that created the film. We are, for a period, seeing the world as David Lynch sees it; in this case it expands our capacity to embrace the full spectrum from darkness to light, from the bizarre to the absurd, and to say yes to all of it.

We can feel it when all these ingredients come together. We have a visceral response. Alex Grey shared with me a powerful experience he had when he first saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in Rome:

I was watching it for two hours, and it felt like just a moment. I felt caught up in the swirls of flesh Michelangelo had laid down, these huge ripples of flesh, the convulsion of tumbling figures, and the tapestry that is the skin. Christ was the center, the hub, the divine light in the very middle of this swirl of flesh. He was at peace. Everyone else was agitated. The painting says to me, “Be the hub of reality, the heart which is the still small point around which the universe turns.” Christ was that. Rather than being the damning judge whom we always fear, he was benign, like a Taoist master in a qi gong posture.