I have just published a new paper on PhilPapers: Authentic Spirituality and the Colonisation of Inner Space: Closed Symbolic Systems, Dark Magick, and Yoga as Liberation.

You can find it here:
https://philpapers.org/rec/KEPASA-2

This paper is part of a new series I am developing under the title Authentic Spirituality. The name may sound ambitious, but the basic question is simple: what remains real when we look through spiritual language, impressive teachers, beautiful symbols, esoteric systems, medical hype, and all the theatre that so often surrounds health and spirituality?

That question runs through much of my work. On VedicVibes I explore meditation, consciousness, phosphenes, inner light, yoga, and direct experience. On Breath4Balance I write about health, spirituality, and critical reflection. On PhilPapers I develop the more formal philosophical and phenomenological side of this work. In Medisch Contact I write in Dutch, often critically, about medical and alternative medical claims. My older scientific publications are indexed in PubMed. Quinta Quixote, our farm and meditation centre in the Algarve, is the physical place where much of this comes together, in nature, silence, animals, practice, experiment, and reflection.

The red thread is always the same: do not stop at the surface. Do not accept a system just because it sounds spiritual. Do not confuse intensity with truth, complexity with depth, or fascination with freedom.

The new paper is about what I call the colonisation of inner space. That may sound abstract, but many people will recognise the mechanism. Sometimes a spiritual or therapeutic system does not make you freer. It gives you a language for everything. Every emotion, doubt, resistance, bodily sensation, dream, fear, or inner movement receives an explanation. At first this can feel helpful, even liberating. Finally there is a map. Finally everything has meaning. Finally someone seems to know what is happening.

But slowly something else can happen. You no longer see directly. You begin to see through the system. Your inner space, which should be open, silent, and alive, becomes occupied by concepts, images, interpretations, and expectations.

That is the danger I wanted to analyse.

A real spiritual path opens space. A false or closed system occupies space. The paper explores this through two old French books about sorcery and dark magick. One describes the historical case of a priest accused of sorcery. The system around him had already decided what he was. Whatever he said could be used against him. Denial became proof. Confession became proof. Silence became proof. The living person disappeared behind the template.

This is not only a story about the past. It shows how a closed system works. It already knows what it wants to find, and then it reorganises reality until reality confirms the system.

The second book was written by Jules Bois, who studied Satanism and dark magick in nineteenth century Paris. He was not the victim of a trial. He was the investigator, the writer, the one who wanted to understand. But that is precisely the point. A system can also absorb the observer. When you look too long into a symbolic world without enough inner emptiness, that world starts looking back through you. You think you are studying it, but slowly it begins to shape the way you see.

So the paper compares two positions. The accused is absorbed from outside, the investigator from inside. The positions differ, but the deeper mechanism is the same.

And that mechanism is not limited to witch trials or occult books. We see it in guru systems where every doubt is called ego, in spiritual groups where every experience must confirm the teaching, in therapeutic movements where every human feeling is turned into a trauma story, in esoteric systems where every image becomes a cosmic sign, in social media where every reaction becomes identity, and in medical hype where one fashionable concept suddenly explains everything.

We also see it in ourselves whenever we give away our direct perception to a system that promises certainty.

This is why I bring yoga into the argument. Not yoga as stretching, lifestyle, or Instagram posture, but yoga in the deeper sense, as the capacity to remain open. To see without immediately explaining. To feel without immediately labelling. To observe an image without being captured by it. To allow an experience to arise and disappear without forcing it into a ready made story.

That, for me, is real yoga.

It is also close to what Gurdjieff called identification. We become identified with our thoughts, emotions, roles, fears, beliefs, and spiritual stories. Jeanne de Salzmann described the way out as presence, a quality of attention that can be with experience without being swallowed by it.

This is also central to the Yoga of the Inner Light. In deep meditation, the mind can become empty enough for the inner light to appear. Phosphenes, luminous forms, colours, mandalas, and inner visual fields may arise. But even these beautiful phenomena should not become a prison. The light points beyond itself. The image points beyond itself. The symbol points beyond itself. If it does not, it becomes another occupation of inner space.

Authentic spirituality is therefore not about collecting more images, concepts, rituals, initiations, or explanations. It is about becoming free enough to see, to feel, and not to be captured.

That is the question I want to keep asking in this series. What opens reality, and what merely occupies the mind?

Spirituality can liberate, but it can also become a beautiful prison. It can open the inner sky, or it can fill that sky with someone else’s images.

The final sentence of the paper is: Magick without yoga closes inner space. Yoga restores it.

Perhaps that is the simplest summary. Symbols, traditions, rituals, and images are not the problem. The problem begins when they no longer open the way. The problem begins when they occupy the very space they were meant to reveal.