The inner space where experience, imagination and magick are made

The room we never left

Close your eyes for a moment. Do not try to meditate. Just look.

There is a space in front of you. It has no walls. A memory appears in it, then a worry, then a face, then a judgement about that face. You did not order any of this. It arrives, takes shape, colours your mood and leaves. Somewhere behind your eyes a whole theatre is running, and it was running long before you decided to look.

Where does all of this happen? Psychology calls it the mind. Religion calls it the soul. The magical traditions gave it many names: the astral plane, the imaginal world, the pleroma, the subtle body. Each name comes with a metaphysics attached, and each metaphysics asks you to believe something before you have looked.

In my recent work I needed a word that does not ask for belief. A word for the space itself, described as it shows up from the inside, without first deciding what it ultimately is. I call it the Ultrasubjective Hyperspace, or USH.

The term has grown over a series of papers, two books and many hours of practice. This essay brings the threads together. What the USH is. How it relates to older ideas. And why I see it as the space in which magick is made, for better and for worse.

What the USH is

The Ultrasubjective Hyperspace is the interior field in which all inner content takes form and becomes experientially real. Images, voices, presences, symbols, elemental qualities, fears, wishes and convictions all appear there. It is ultrasubjective because it is more than private opinion or mood. It is the field in which subjectivity itself becomes something you can work with. It is a hyperspace because it behaves like a space without the limits of physical space: no edges, no fixed scale, no fixed number of dimensions.

Everyone has one, and it is always running

The most important point is also the most ordinary one. The USH is not a reward for advanced meditators. Every human being lives in it, all day long.

From early childhood it fills with content. The child afraid of the dark meets the USH populated with threatening forms. The adolescent in love meets it populated with an idealised figure. The adult who holds a grudge for twenty years meets it populated with a figure charged with wrongdoing. None of them would say they inhabit an inner hyperspace. Yet that is where these figures live, and where they gain their power.

Milton put it precisely: the mind within itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. The untrained USH is a factory of both, running on automatic. Most people are not living their inner life. They are being lived by it.

So the question is never whether you are in the USH. The question is whether you know you are in it, and whether you have built anything capable of working there, instead of simply being worked by it.

Three moments

With practice the USH shows a structure. I describe it in three moments.

1. The populated field. An apparently infinite interior space, filled with projections, intentions, images and presences. This is where visions occur, where inner figures speak, and where our own beliefs gain experiential density. The field does not reflect passively. It amplifies and elaborates whatever is put into it with enough attention and desire.
2. The recognition. At a certain depth the practitioner stops filling the space and notices the space itself. The content dissolves. Not because it was illusion, but because attention has moved to a more basic level of the same territory.
3. The ground. What remains is dimensionless awareness, neither light nor darkness, without boundary or location. It is not achieved. It is recognised as what was always already the case.

The first moment is where life, therapy and magick mostly take place. The third is where the contemplative traditions point. They are not two worlds. They are depths of one field.

Formal, not doctrinal

The USH is defined by its formal properties, not by its contents. Apparent infinity, the space has no bounderies. The capacity to hold images and intentions with an autonomy that ordinary waking thought does not have. And at its deepest, a ground prior to all content. A Kabbalist working with a Shem haMephorash seal, a Hermetic student of Bardon, a chaos magician charging a sigil, a Christian contemplative in prayer: when their work succeeds, they are all working in this same structural terrain. Their traditions describe it differently and above all prepare for it differently. The terrain itself can be compared.

Relatives and ancestors

The USH is a new term, not a new discovery. Many thinkers have circled the same territory. What the term adds is a neutral, first-person description that lets their insights be compared without first settling their metaphysics.

Husserl taught us to suspend the natural attitude, the automatic belief that what appears simply is what it seems. His epoché is the basic gesture of USH work: bracket the question of ultimate reality and describe precisely what appears and how. I call this phenomenological agnosticism. An inner figure is real as an experience. Whether it is also real in some other sense is a separate question, to be asked later and carefully.

William James described consciousness as a stream with a fringe, and insisted that religious experience be studied by its fruits. The USH takes over his empiricism. It also takes over his warning: the fruits matter more than the fireworks.

Henry Corbin, following Ibn Arabi, spoke of the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. He drew a sharp line between the imaginal, a real intermediate realm, and the merely imaginary. The USH agrees that inner images can have weight, autonomy and a lawful structure. It differs in one respect. Corbin treated the imaginal as an objective world that the visionary enters. The USH model begins with the fact that the field is already populated by our own material. Before you can meet what comes from depth, you must learn to recognise what you put there yourself.

C.G. Jung practised active imagination and met figures like Philemon who seemed to know more than he did. His Red Book is perhaps the most thorough modern record of a person working consciously in the USH. Jung explained these figures through the collective unconscious and the archetypes. The USH description stays one step earlier: it records the encounter and its effects, and leaves the theory open.

James Hillman took Jung further and said that the image comes first, that soul is made by staying with images. In USH terms: the populated field is not noise to be cleared away on the road to stillness. It is a place of real work.

Franz Bardon gave the most practical map. His training starts with the soul mirror, an honest inventory of one’s own qualities, and only later moves to evocation. He also described the larva, an inner entity fed and kept alive by repeated emotional attention. I find this concept indispensable. Much of what people experience as fate, obsession or a haunting presence behaves exactly like a larva in the USH.

Gurdjieff and Jeanne de Salzmann spoke of mechanical man, a person to whom everything happens. Their self-remembering is the counter-movement: being present inside one’s own life. In the language of the Inner Laboratory this is the witness becoming active.

Rudolf Steiner offers a useful contrast. In his model higher worlds are closed until training opens them. In the USH model the field is already open and already full. Training does not grant access. It creates transparency within what was always there.

The contemplative traditions point to the third moment, the ground: rigpa in Dzogchen, Eckhart’s Godhead beyond God, Ramana’s natural state. And contemporary scholars of esotericism, among them Wouter Hanegraaff and Jeffrey Kripal, have made it respectable again to take altered states and inner experience seriously as data, not just as belief. Neuroscience adds its own piece: the brain predicts more than it perceives, and expectation shapes experience, as placebo and nocebo show every day in the clinic. The USH is where those predictions take on colour and form.

Thinker or tradition	Their name for the territory	What the USH keeps	Where the USH differs
Husserl	Field of intentional experience	Epoché, careful description	Adds operative practice, not only description
Corbin, Ibn Arabi	Mundus imaginalis	Images can be real and autonomous	Starts from our own projections, not an objective world
Jung	Collective unconscious, active imagination	Dialogue with inner figures	Leaves the archetype theory open
Bardon	Astral plane, akasha	Soul mirror, larva, staged training	Drops the cosmology as a precondition
Gurdjieff, de Salzmann	Mechanical life, self-remembering	Being lived versus living	Places self-remembering inside one field
Steiner	Higher worlds	Training as the key	Field is already open, not closed
Dzogchen, Eckhart, Ramana	Rigpa, Godhead, natural state	The ground as always already	Treats it as one depth of the same field

The workshop of magick

Here is the step that makes the USH more than a psychological label. If the field amplifies whatever is put into it with enough attention and desire, then it can be worked deliberately. That deliberate work is what the traditions called magick.

I use a sober definition. Magick is the trained, intentional shaping of content in the USH, using charged symbols, words, gestures and images, so that this content acts back on the practitioner’s experience and conduct, and possibly beyond. The last two words are a claim on a higher rung of the ladder. I return to that below.

Everyone already does magick

Seen this way, magick is not exotic. It is going on all the time, mostly without anyone at the controls. A fear that is fed every night grows a face. A resentment repeated for years becomes a presence that enters the room before its object does. Bardon called such self-made, self-feeding entities larvae. Most larvae are created by accident. They are magick without a magician.

The placebo and nocebo effects belong here too. A pill without active substance can relieve pain because an expectation, charged with trust, takes form in the USH and acts on the body. The same mechanism works in the opposite direction. As a pharmacologist I have spent decades watching this. It is the most measurable trace the USH leaves in the outside world.

Sigils: charged operators

The sigil is the clearest example of deliberate work. A sigil is a graphic form that is charged, through concentrated attention and intention, until it acts as an operator in the inner field. Its effect does not depend on its pedigree, its age or the beauty of its lines. It depends on the person who charges it. In the Inner Laboratory we put it simply: a sigil does not need to be believed, it needs to work.

What decides whether it works are three capacities of the practitioner. Access: entering the field deliberately, not only through fever, crisis or a substance. Stability: staying present there without being swept away. Discrimination: telling apart what you have placed in the field from what arrives from depth. A confused practitioner creates confused operators. A clear and ethically coherent practitioner creates operators that act more cleanly.

Encounter before evocation

In my own practice one rule has proved essential: encounter before evocation. Before calling anything into the field, learn to meet what is already there. The populated field must be known first, otherwise every evocation becomes an evocation of one’s own unexamined material, dressed up as revelation.

My Abraxas working of 2024, documented in Abraxas Revived, was an attempt to follow this rule step by step: a sigil, an altar, power words, a ritual space, trance work, and then a series of first-person sermons. Looking back with source-critical eyes, I can separate what came from historical sources, what I adapted, what I constructed, and what I later interpreted. What remains is an imaginal presence that was made, and that nonetheless behaved with a recognisable character of its own. That is exactly the double status the USH concept is designed to hold.

The land as a door

The same field opens outdoors. At the stone oval on Monte Pocilgais, the local legends speak of the moura encantada, the enchanted woman who lives in the rock. I do not read the moura as a soul trapped in stone. The stone does not contain the USH. It opens it. A charged place, approached with trained attention, becomes a door into the field, and what appears there carries the character of the place. This is the practical basis of Landscape Magick: inner calibration first, outer contact second.

Theurgy and goeteia

The late antique philosopher Iamblichus distinguished theurgy, work that purifies and raises the practitioner, from goeteia, work that manipulates for private gain. In USH terms the distinction is structural, not only moral. The field amplifies what the practitioner brings. Greed, fear and the hunger for special status are amplified as faithfully as clarity and love. A confused operator does not find the depths of the USH. He finds his own confusion in luminous form. That is why purification is not an optional piety. It is a technical requirement.

Working in the field without getting lost

A field that amplifies everything is powerful. It is also dangerous. History is full of people who mistook their own projections for divine guidance, their fears for prophecy, their need for status for initiation. A closed symbolic system can move into the USH and furnish it so completely that no room is left to doubt. So how do we work here without getting lost?

The witness and the operator

The Inner Laboratory trains two capacities.

The witness notices what is happening in the field without going along with it. “There is fear.” “There is that figure again.” With that small step back, the content is seen instead of obeyed. When the witness becomes active and continuous, it is what Gurdjieff called self-remembering.

The operator directs and holds attention. Where the witness sees, the operator steers. It is the inner structure that makes discrimination and stability possible, and it is the one who charges a sigil, holds an image or ends a working.

Training does not create the USH. It creates transparency within it. Bardon’s soul mirror, de Salzmann’s continuous attention and the graded experiments of the Inner Laboratory all serve this one aim: to inhabit one’s own field with awareness instead of being inhabited by it.

Epoché and the claim ladder

The second safeguard is intellectual honesty. I describe first and interpret later. An inner figure is real as an experience. That statement is safe. Every step beyond it raises the burden of proof. A simple version of the ladder I use:

1. It appeared. A faithful description of what showed up in the field.
2. It changed me. Effects on mood, insight or conduct that I can observe over time.
3. Others see it too. Comparable findings among other trained practitioners, or changes that people around me notice.
4. It acted outside me. Effects in the world that cannot easily be traced back to my own behaviour.
5. It exists independently. A claim about what the presence ultimately is.

Most good work stays on the lower rungs, and that is no weakness. Each rung must be earned before the next is taken. One rule from the Inner Laboratory applies throughout: an experience is not yet a change. Only what is repeated and tested counts.

A final word of care. Deliberate work in the USH is not for everyone at every moment. People in acute crisis, with a history of psychosis, or under heavy psychological strain should first seek proper care. The field is not going anywhere. It will still be there when the ground under your feet is steady.

From audience to author

The Ultrasubjective Hyperspace is not a place you travel to. It is the place you are already in. It is where heaven and hell are made, where placebo heals and nocebo harms, where fears grow faces and prayers find form. The mystics found its ground. The magicians learned to work its surface. Most of us simply live in it, as an audience watching a play we did not know we were writing.

The work is to change that position. Not by escaping the field, and not by flooding it with ever more spectacular content, but by becoming present in it. First the witness, then the operator, then careful work, honestly reported. The theatre stays. What changes is that someone is finally awake in it.

A five-minute experiment

1. Sit with your eyes closed. Let whatever appears, appear.
2. For two minutes, only name what shows up: “image”, “memory”, “worry”, “voice”. Do not follow any of it. This is the witness.
3. Now notice the space in which these things appear. How big is it? Does it have an edge? Stay with the space, not with the contents.
4. Choose one simple image, for instance a small flame. Place it in that space and hold it steady for ten breaths. This is the operator.
5. Let the image go. Open your eyes and write one sentence about what you noticed. Repeat daily for a week and compare your notes.

That is all. You have just worked, very gently, in the field where magick is made.

Further reading

• Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, Het Innerlijke Laboratorium (paperback and e-book): amazon.nl/dp/B0HLHWK44V
• Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, Abraxas Revived: Ritual, Gnosis and the Making of an Imaginal Presence ((paperback and e-book): amazon.com/dp/B0HKDPS81P
• Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, Landscape Magick
• Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, papers in the Authentic Spirituality series on PhilArchive and ResearchGate, including the USH paper and the sigil taxonomy
• Franz Bardon, Initiation into Hermetics and The Practice of Magical Evocation
• Corbin H. Mundus imaginalis or the imaginary and the imaginal. Originally published in French in 1964; English translation in Spring, 1972. Read alongside Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.
• C.G. Jung, The Red Book
• Edmund Husserl, Ideas I
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination
  https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127936