Two-Part Reflection — Part II
This text continues my earlier reflection on Mevlevi heritage, representation, and authority. While Part I focused on questions of distinction and legitimacy in the public field, this second part turns inward: toward what these questions have meant in my own life and practice.
Fifteen years after stepping away from a Sufi organization, I found myself unexpectedly confronted with what once had been. What began as administrative housekeeping became a moment of reflection on letting go, maturation, and returning to simplicity.
Recently I received a message from the authorities: a foundation I had left behind fifteen years ago formally still existed. Dormant, but not legally dissolved.
That meant searching through old minutes, locating board decisions, opening archives.
I began an administrative task. I ended up in an inner confrontation.
Among old folders and digital files I found correspondence from a period when I was actively involved in a Sufi organization. Letters I once wrote out of dedication, responsibility, and a sincere desire to serve something that felt larger than myself.
What struck me when rereading them was not shame, but clarity. I recognized my idealism. I recognized my willingness to carry responsibility. And I also saw something else: how easily inner work and organizational power had become intertwined.
I read myself as someone trying to preserve harmony, soften tensions, hold people together. At the same time I now see how spiritual language was often used to reframe structural problems. When there was ambiguity about roles, hierarchy, or responsibility, the conversation shifted toward “inner process.” When friction arose, it was quickly interpreted as ego, projection, or lack of surrender.
Self-inquiry is valuable. But not everything that feels uncomfortable is an inner deficiency. Sometimes a system itself is what is out of balance.
Already then I wrote that I had given my time and energy “freely and with joy” for many years, yet felt that something needed to change. I spoke of lack of support. Of unspoken tensions. Of the entanglement of charisma and organization. I tried to articulate something I could not yet fully name.
In retrospect I see it more clearly. I was standing at a fault line:
between inspiration and institutionalization,
between spiritual intimacy and administrative distance,
between service and self-erasure.
What I increasingly notice — also in contemporary initiatives — is how spirituality presents itself today. Through recognizable styles, carefully constructed networks of “important teachers,” aesthetics, branding. Not only content matters, but also packaging.
Authority is increasingly created through association: who one knows, who one quotes, who one invites. This gradually replaces the question of inner maturation. I recognize patterns here that I once experienced from within and now observe from the outside.
I see this shift as well in popular publications on Sufism. The mystical tradition is made accessible to a Western audience — which can be valuable — yet at the same time often stripped of its more demanding aspects: discipline, inner solitude, the uncomfortable work of dismantling the self.
Many spiritual movements function well as long as they remain small, warm, and idealistic. But once money, status, titles, and loyalty enter the picture, other forces emerge. Power slips in through the back door of devotion. Community can subtly become a form of social control. Freedom slowly shifts into dependency.
My departure was not dramatic. It was a gradual letting go. Not a rejection of Sufi thought, not a settling of accounts with mysticism or poetry — but a farewell to the idea that inner deepening must be tied to organizational form.
Yet my departure was not acknowledged in those terms. Instead, my teacher reframed my criticism and withdrawal as a spiritual decline — as if questioning the structure meant losing inner clarity. In this reframing, my substantive concerns vanished from view. What I had raised as organizational and ethical questions was quietly relocated into the realm of personal deficiency. Only later did I recognize this pattern: how structural tensions can be redirected into inner diagnoses — and how powerfully this mechanism serves to preserve authority.
And now, years later, even the formal remainder has been resolved. The authorities confirmed that the foundation has been definitively dissolved. What we once regarded as a non-profit initiative turned out, in the eyes of the tax authorities, to be an enterprise. That contrast touched me. As if two realities briefly crossed paths: the language of ideals and the language of systems. Administratively the file is now closed. Inwardly it had been closed for much longer.
What this renewed encounter with the past has taught me above all is this: maturation does not mean losing the sacred. It means becoming less willing to hand it over.
My family history book has now been completed. After a relative silence of thirteen years, I am currently working on a new project: a book with stories from the Masnavi. No program. No movement. No platform. Only text, attention, and listening.
I also play the lavta. There too something simple and essential happens: tuning, repetition, deepening. No audience required to be touched.
And yet: the path does not have to be lonely. Saki and I have decided that in the coming year we will occasionally bring together a circle of lovers at the Sufi center in The Hague. Not as an organization, not as a method, not as a new structure. Just people who wish to listen together, sing, read, remain silent. Music, poetry, stories, and meditation — as shared presence.
Rumi writes: Step out of the circle of time into the circle of love.
Perhaps that is what is quietly emerging here: not a new structure, but a space in which presence matters more than form.
Perhaps this is my quiet dissolution:
not the excitement of beginnings,
but the calm of remaining.
Not the closing of a door,
but the opening of a room without walls.