Where people "Dance with the Devil"
In the world of alternative spirituality, broken people with unhealed trauma build huge followings to feed their insatiable hunger for validation.
This article is the first in a series where I seek to expose the influence of false light on our lives. “False light” is a term that denotes a Luciferian deception; radiant and beautiful on the surface, yet dark and malevolent at its essence.
A few days ago, I overheard a woman recount her experience as a member of a spiritual “empowerment” community.
She painted a picture of a time with brainwashing, oppression, control and dysfunction; it felt to her like “dancing with the devil”.
What she described resembles what I’ve seen in far too many “spiritual communities” over my more than 2 decades of practice (and now faith), and it inspired me to write this piece.
Over the years, I have encountered many charismatic teachers with big followings, and have seen and heard things that would have been totally unacceptable outside the context of “spirituality”.
Based on what I’ve seen, I now think of these leaders as false light teachers, and find that they are actively disinterested in relationships between peers; theirs is a world of being on top, and only on top.
While I’m intimately familiar with the struggles and temptations of leadership after leading groups for more than a decade, it doesn’t excuse the kind of abuse this woman described.
My hope is that this article will help you identify false light teachers, and stay well clear of them in this time of escalating spiritual warfare.
As spirituality points to an experience “beyond ego”, it can easily be misconstrued as an invitation to move beyond our wounds and straight for transcendence.
The promise of such a path is seductive, especially when mixed up with Eastern esoteric teachings, where concepts such as “crazy wisdom” tempt broken Westerners to reframe their traumas and relationship dysfunction as “enlightenment”.
Crazy wisdom may have been a genuine phenomenon in some distant past, though in this day and age, crazy wisdom has lost all the wisdom and kept all the crazy.
Wildly dysregulated, narcissistic people who prefer living in a fantasy over doing serious inner work can misappropriate such teachings so successfully that they end up as celebrated spiritual teachers.
Though how the heck can it be that this keeps happening in 2025?
Well, consider this…
Most people don’t want to take responsibility for their lives. This is self-evident from the success of the authoritarian indoctrination campaign over Covid 19. Over that period, people expressed enormous willingness – even desire – to be ruled over, thus avoiding taking responsibility for their lives and choices.
The energy contained in childhood trauma is enormous, and can be leveraged by the person who carries it. Instead of healing the trauma, a whole spiritual identity can be built on top of it, as the false self (and worse) feeds on the energy of the trauma for personal gain.
These two patterns often collude, and invariably produce cults.
Back when I ran my popular men’s initiation Reclaim your Inner Throne, one of my core teachings to the men was about demonic attachments to innocence.
I explained to the men that there is a well-established association between innocence and horror movies, and that it exists for a reason.
I’m sure you have watched a horror movie where the camera pans across the face of a doll, whose eyes suddenly open to scare the crap out of you. I’m sure you have also seen horror movies where little children are possessed by demons, or even the devil.
Why do these images carry such power?
I believe it is because evil preys on innocence.
That is its very purpose.
A young child is the most perfect representation of God’s love in this human realm, and so it threatens evil. In Christian theology, the embrace of innocence is painted as instrumental in God’s plan for humanity.
Not only was Jesus Messiah born a helpless child (and killed a sacrificial lamb) but he taught things such as Matthew 18:3:
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Abusive false light spiritual teachers tend to attack and demonize innocence, and some also enter into contract with a demonic entity that is given permission to feed on their innocence on the premise that the host receives gifts and talents that they wouldn’t otherwise possess.
This may sound like a mythic narrative, but it is as real as your pinky toe.
And when you understand that the powers of such false light gurus may well be derived from pimping out their wounded inner child(ren) to demonic entities, you can understand why they get so aggressive when you relate to them as a peer: Being humble means they lose control, and then their secret can be exposed.
And the price of being found out – and starting a path of genuine healing – is the end of their demonic contract and the loss of their business empire.
Whether you believe demons are real or not, you will undoubtedly recognize what I speak of if you have ever experienced such a teacher.
It is likely that you recognize that what pulled you in in the first place was the game of seduction that most false light spiritual teachers master.
Their method involves teasing some treasure at the end of the rainbow that you can only have once you have spent more time with them.
The treasure which is dangled in front of you is typically a version of more money, more power, more pleasure, and you are kept hungry through deliberately implanted FOMO.
Does the teacher offer adequate guidance for you to actually achieve this goal?
Maybe, but typically not. (They tend to leave things out of their teachings to keep you hooked for as long as possible)
The teacher’s main agenda is to receive your attention and adoration. Since they have exiled their inner child – and likely surrendered it to a demonic entity – they compensate by seeking fake love from adoring followers.
The more broken the teacher, the more validation they tend to need. Mix such a need with Eastern esoteric practices such as guru yoga and you have a broken person telling other people to worship them. It can get ugly.
Until we are healed, our need for validation is a bottomless hole, and so a spiritual movement can end up existing for the sole purpose of feeding validation to a teacher who never did the requisite healing work.
Such teachers install students into a sort of extended nervous system that lets the teacher continue running their patterns of dysfunction.
Whenever a student breaks out of their assigned role as a worshipful disciple, the teacher experiences that as dysregulation in their nervous system, at which point the demonization begins so that they can get back in control and stabilize.
Knowing all of this, I encourage you to take the Bible’s recommendations seriously: Have no other gods before me, don’t worship idols, don’t follow false teachers.
As they are themselves food for demons, false light teachers are typically very hungry, and your role is simply to feed them.
As my focus as a coach is to support men in leading their families towards thriving and sovereignty in these dark times, I will do what I can to outline traps that may compromise this mission.
The Bible speaks of false light teachers as a feature of the “end times”, and we are at the end of something. The world we have known is over. What we have come to know is fading away, and the narrow path to the coming kingdom of God is opening up.
There is a light growing, and an invitation is opening up for you to transcend the realm of human drama and the deceptive theatres of the beast system.
And while my professional focus is to support you men in becoming the unbreakable heroes you need to be for your wife, your kids, your loved ones in a time like this, I believe we must all stop dancing with the devil, and now come home to God.
Finally, if this piece resonates with you, I encourage you to share it with others to help them avoid or leave the communities of false light spiritual teachers.
⚠️ If you are interested in the Unbreakable membership, reach out to Eivind today.