Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, MD, MSc, PhD
Something has gone wrong with spirituality. Not with the real thing, but with what most people are being sold as the real thing.
Walk into any bookshop. Scroll through Instagram for five minutes. Browse the retreat listings online. You will find awakening weekends, chakra activations, kundalini intensives, breathwork certifications, past-life regressions, consciousness apps, and teachers who promise you transformation in a weekend for the price of a good dinner. The market for spiritual experience has never been bigger. And yet, if you have ever sat quietly for a long time, or practiced seriously in a real tradition, you will have noticed something: most of what is on offer does not actually change people. Not deeply. Not lastingly. The noise is enormous. The substance is thin.
This bothers me. It has bothered me for decades.Therefore I started already with a seperate channel where me and my friend Victor bring all kind of aspect of true experience: https://www.youtube.com/@Vedicvibesorg
I am a physician. I am also a biologist, a philosopher, and someone who has practiced in yogic, Vedantic and Tantric traditions for more than forty years. I have sat with teachers who were the real thing, and I have sat with teachers who were not. I have experienced the inner lights and the deep silences that genuine meditation can open, and I have watched those same experiences be packaged and sold as a product. I live and teach at Quinta Quixote, our farm and meditation centre in the Algarve, where I see every day what practice actually does to people over time, and what it does not do when it is imitation.
So I have decided to do something about it.
What I Am Doing
Together with my research partner, I am writing a series of essays for PhilArchive, one of the most respected open-access philosophy archives in the world. The series is called Authentic Spirituality. The first essay is called Authentic Spirituality in an Age of Simulation: Instructions for a Critical Phenomenology of Contemplative Life, and it is available now.
This is not a series of self-help articles. It is serious philosophical and historical work. But it is written in a way that any thoughtful person can follow, whether you have a university degree or not. Because the questions it asks are not academic questions. They are the most human questions there are.
What is real inner transformation, and how do you recognize it?
What makes a spiritual teacher genuine, and what makes one a fraud?
Why do the same inner light experiences appear in Tibetan Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Vedantic yoga, and neuroscience research, and what does that tell us?
Why did Patanjali warn his students not to get attached to the extraordinary powers that arise in deep meditation? Why did Meister Eckhart say that if you love God as a spiritual experience, you have already lost the thread? Why did John of the Cross spend hundreds of pages describing exactly how the imagination colonizes the spiritual senses and makes people believe they are progressing when they are not?
These are old questions. They have brilliant, careful, hard-won answers. And almost nobody is paying attention to them anymore, because the market for spiritual experience is not interested in careful answers. It is interested in selling you the feeling of awakening, not the thing itself.
The Three Questions We Apply to Everything
In the opening essay, I propose three simple tests for any spiritual claim, any teacher, any practice, any tradition. You do not need a philosophy degree to understand them.
The first is: does this correspond to what the tradition actually teaches, not what someone wants it to teach or what is easiest to sell?
The second is: does this produce a lasting, deepening change in how a person sees and lives, not just an intense experience that fades?
The third is: does this leave a recognizable mark on how the practitioner actually behaves toward others, animals, the world around them?
Jeanne de Salzmann, the closest student of the great teacher Gurdjieff, spent her whole life insisting on exactly this point. The measure of real practice is not what you experience in the meditation room. It is the quality of your attention in ordinary moments. Whether you are genuinely present with the person in front of you, with the animal that needs care, with the tree, with the silence of the morning. That is the test. And it is the one most spiritual marketing fails completely.
Why Now
We live in a particular moment. Information about every spiritual tradition in the world is available to anyone with a phone. That is extraordinary. But information without discernment is not wisdom. It is noise. And the noise is getting louder.
At the same time, more and more people are genuinely hungry. They sense that something is missing. They have tried therapy, mindfulness apps, yoga classes, retreats, and still feel a gap between who they are and who they could be. That hunger is real and it deserves a real answer, not a product.
The serious contemplative traditions, the Christian mystics, the Vedantic and Tantric lineages, the Buddhist meditators, the teachers of the Fourth Way, have real answers. But those answers require something uncomfortable: they require honesty about what you are actually experiencing, patience with slow and unglamorous transformation, and willingness to have your assumptions dismantled. None of that is easy to sell.
So the people who actually know something tend to stay quiet. And the people who have something to sell tend to talk loudly. The result is that the public conversation about spirituality is dominated by the wrong voices.
This series is an attempt to change that, one careful essay at a time.
The Papers
The essays are published on PhilArchive, freely available to anyone. Alongside the series introduction, you can also read my earlier research on the inner light phenomena that appear across all these traditions, what I call phosphene phenomenology. These papers are the scientific and philosophical foundation for much of what the series will explore. Here are just 2 examples of articles I wrote.
The Rainbow Body and the Inner Light: Phosphenes in Tibetan Mysticism. A Phenomenological Inquiry into Vision, Light, and Consciousness in the Dzogchen Tradition How the inner light teachings of Tibetan Dzogchen relate to the physiology of contemplative vision, and why this matters for understanding what meditation can actually do. [Read it here: https://philpapers.org/rec/KEPTRB-2]
The Brain’s Secret Light: How Meditation Makes Us See the Divine. From Phosphene Forms to Luminous Awareness: A Neurophenomenological Taxonomy A systematic map of the inner light experiences that meditators across traditions report, from the first flickerings to the deepest states of luminous awareness. [Read it here: https://philpapers.org/rec/KEPTBS]
And the opening essay of the series itself:
Authentic Spirituality in an Age of Simulation: Instructions for a Critical Phenomenology of Contemplative Life The manifesto and framework for everything that follows. [Series: Authentic Spirituality | PhilArchive]
All other recent articles you can find here.
An Invitation
You do not have to be an academic to read these essays. You do not have to agree with everything in them. What you do need is what you probably already have if you have read this far: a genuine interest in what is real, and a healthy skepticism toward what is not.
The series will be long. It will cover kundalini, samadhi, the dark night of the soul, the inner light, what makes a real teacher, how contemplation changes ethics, and what, if anything, the great traditions actually have in common beneath their very different surfaces.
It will not promise you awakening. It will not sell you a technique. It will try, as honestly as possible, to say what is true about one of the most important and most abused domains of human experience.
That is enough of a reason to start.
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