People sometimes ask me, “Would you introduce yourself? Who are you, really, and what exactly do you do?” So, here it is.

When I introduce myself, I do not really begin with my work, my titles, or everything I have built over the years. First and foremost, I am the father of a beautiful daughter whom I love deeply with all my heart. She is one of the most important people in my life, and she has also taught me to look at love, responsibility, presence, and life itself in a very different way. In the end, you can gather tremendous amounts of knowledge, have extraordinary experiences, and walk many different paths, but it is often through the most human connections that you discover the most about yourself.

I am also an esoteric teacher, occultist, and mentor. My fascination with spirituality, magic, mysticism, and consciousness was already present from a very young age. There was always something within me that wanted to look beyond what was merely visible, tangible, and explainable. I was drawn to the unknown, to the hidden layers of existence, and to questions that do not always have simple answers. More than 35 years ago, that fascination became much more serious and profound. What began as a personal search for answers slowly grew into a way of life.

I always wanted to understand what lies behind visible reality. Why are we who we are? What determines our consciousness? Why do people keep repeating the same patterns? What really happens during spiritual and mystical experiences? What is consciousness, fundamentally? And how much of what we call reality do we perceive only through the filters of our own psyche?

Those questions eventually took me across a large part of the world. My education was never confined to the Netherlands or to books alone. Over the years, I gained experience and knowledge in places including India, Nepal, Tibet, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, and other parts of South America. There I met and worked with shamans, mystics, magicians, Aghori, and various spiritual teachers. Every tradition showed me something different. Some taught me about consciousness, meditation, and the nature of the mind. Others taught me about energy, ritual, and magic. Others confronted me with death, ancestors, shadow, fear, power, and the deeper layers of the human psyche.

Some lessons came through direct teaching, while others came through direct experience. It was precisely that combination that shaped the way I see and work today. I learned that certain knowledge can be gained from books, but other knowledge can only truly be understood when you go through it yourself. You can read about initiation, mysticism, magic, or transformation, but there is a profound difference between understanding something intellectually and actually experiencing, integrating, and embodying it.

That diversity has shaped me deeply. Someone once told me that eventually you have to choose one path. But I have never experienced or felt it that way. To me, development does not mean locking yourself into one tradition, one system, or one way of seeing reality. You can walk different paths, genuinely come to know what lives within them, understand their essence, and ultimately make what truly resonates your own. Not by superficially mixing everything together, but by going deep enough to understand what has real value, what actually works, and what truly shapes you.

Because of that, I have never become someone who believes that one tradition holds all the answers. Over the years, I became increasingly interested in what remains the same behind different traditions. When you look deeply enough, you begin to see that cultures may use completely different words, deities, symbols, and rituals, while on a deeper level they are often working with similar human and consciousness processes. For me, there is also an important form of freedom in this: being able to walk different roads, learn from them, truly live them, and then not simply copy someone else’s path, but allow your own unique path to emerge from everything you have experienced. A path that does not arise from dogma or from an obligation to remain loyal to one system, but from direct experience, discernment, and what you have genuinely learned to embody.

My own work has therefore increasingly been shaped by years of experience with Western magic, Eastern mysticism, shamanic traditions, Latin and Mesoamerican currents, and Afro-Caribbean spirituality. Not from a desire to simply combine everything, but from the wish to understand the principles that lie beneath these systems and how different traditions work with consciousness, energy, and the human psyche at a deeper level.

An important part of my specialization is understanding the archetypal structures of the human psyche through an esoteric and occult approach. I am interested in the forces beneath our everyday behavior. What truly moves a person? Where do certain fears, desires, projections, and power dynamics come from? How much of our identity is consciously chosen, and how much arises from conditioning, family patterns, culture, and deeper psychic structures?

Within this work, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life play an important role. For me, these are not systems that are merely studied intellectually. They are paths that can be walked in an occult way, understood through direct experience, and ultimately made your own and embodied. At that point, knowledge is no longer theory, but becomes a real inner journey in which increasingly deeper layers of the psyche and consciousness are touched.

This is also where my way of working with the shadow comes from. I sometimes call it Shadow Work 10.0. By that I mean work that goes far beyond simply recognizing that you have a certain pattern or understanding where something in your past originated. It is about truly learning to see which forces are operating behind behavior, fear, desire, projection, power, identity, and conditioning. Not to fight or suppress those parts of yourself, but to know them, understand them, and integrate them, so they no longer unconsciously control you.

Yet this is only one part of my work. Ultimately, my work is about the total development of the human being. Consciousness, inner power, energetic development, self-knowledge, mysticism, magic, initiation, and the cultivation of ever greater inner freedom and authority. I am interested in what happens when a person stops merely collecting knowledge and begins to truly understand themselves. When you discover which beliefs are genuinely yours, which ones you have inherited, which parts of yourself you have suppressed, and what potential lies hidden behind them.

As my own path deepened, I increasingly began to pass on my knowledge and experience to others. From this, Lotusjoy Esoteric School first emerged, followed later by One Consciousness Academy. But my own development did not stop there. As I continued to evolve, my work evolved with me. New insights emerged, certain forms no longer fit, and other aspects of my work demanded greater depth and their own direction.

From that further development ultimately emerged Casa de los Santos, Mara Palumbra, and Esoteric Mastery, where my main focus is now increasingly directed. Within Esoteric Mastery, a large part of my many years of experience comes together through trainings, intensives, personal guidance, and in-depth esoteric development. Casa de los Santos forms an important part of my spiritual and initiatory work. Within Mara Palumbra, the esoteric system that has developed through years of study, initiation, practice, travel, and direct experience continues to take shape and deepen.

What still drives me after all these years is the understanding that knowledge only gains real value when it is lived. You can read hundreds of books on magic and still barely know yourself. You can meditate for years and continue repeating the same patterns. You can receive many initiations without anything fundamentally changing in the way you live, think, feel, or act. For me, the real path begins when knowledge becomes experience, and experience ultimately becomes embodiment.

That is also what I want to pass on through my work. Not that people should believe what I believe. Not that people should follow me or surrender their own discernment. Quite the opposite. I want people to learn to investigate, experience, perceive, discern, and know themselves more deeply. A good teacher should not make someone more dependent, but should help bring them closer and closer to their own inner authority.

After more than 35 years of working intensively with this material, I still do not see myself as someone who has arrived. My fascination began when I was very young, and my journey continues to unfold to this day. The more I have learned, seen, and experienced, the clearer it has become to me that there are always deeper layers to discover. In many ways, my life has become one long journey of investigating, experiencing, learning, dismantling, rebuilding, and repeatedly being willing to look beyond what I believed to be true yesterday.

Perhaps that ultimately describes me best: father, esoteric teacher, occultist, mentor, and explorer of consciousness, but above all someone who has dedicated his life to investigating both the visible and invisible layers of human existence. Someone who has walked different paths without allowing himself to be confined by only one, and who has shaped his own unique path through all of those experiences.

And after all these years, the same fundamental questions are still alive within me: what truly lies behind what we call reality, who are we beneath everything we have been taught, and what is a human being capable of when they truly come to know themselves?