Even in the Astral, the Spiritual Colonizer Wants Spirits — Non-Humanoids Included — to Smile Back; Otherwise It Feels Threatened

Across much of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Indigenous societies, the unseen has never been “fringe.”
Ancestors, dreams, spirits, omens, non-human intelligences — all of it lives comfortably inside daily life.
People don’t need psychedelics, TED Talks, or a weekend retreat to believe the world is more than matter.
It’s cultural memory, not counterculture.

By contrast, European and white-majority societies spent centuries outlawing, mocking, or medicalizing anything mystical. Enlightenment rationalism made “spirit” first a crime, then a punchline. What survived was pushed underground: secret societies, occult pockets, quiet practices. Even now, their mainstream culture insists on the empirical, the measurable, the peer-reviewed. So when white Westerners seek “the unseen,” they often do it privately — a kind of spiritual rebellion staged in the shadows of their own rationalism.

But because their public identity is built on control — scientific, emotional, environmental — their spiritual search becomes strangely sanitized. They want transcendence without surrender, magic without mystery, the astral as a research site rather than a realm with its own sovereignty. Hence the familiar complaint:
“The being didn’t smile back. It felt cold.”

That one detail exposes an entire cultural reflex. In many white social settings, friendliness — smiling, softness, constant emotional availability — is the default code for “safe.” Anything neutral reads as unfriendly; anything self-contained becomes “hostile.” When that expectation is projected onto a spirit, ancestor, or non-humanoid intelligence, the old pattern reappears: others must perform comfort. Even in the astral, the colonizer expects emotional service.

And here the logic deepens.
Western seekers often approach the mystical the way their ancestors approached land: discover it, name it, organize it, brand it, curate it.
Meanwhile, the cosmologies they quietly borrow from — Yoruba, Indigenous, Caribbean, Asian — were never lost; they were simply unacknowledged by European authority. Yet rather than respect those systems, whiteness tends to repackage the unseen in its own idiom: “energy healing,” “biohacking consciousness,” “quantum spirituality,” “non-hostile entities.”
It becomes colonization of meaning rather than territory.

This doesn’t mean white people are biologically unreal — of course they’re human. But whiteness, as a cultural formation, often behaves like something spiritually ungrounded. Publicly it denies the unseen; privately it craves it. It mocks what it secretly consumes. It demands reassurance from beings that owe it nothing.

And so the irony stands:
The cultures that carried spiritual knowledge openly are told they’re “superstitious,”
while the culture that tried to extinguish the mystical now chases spirits that refuse to smile back.

Different emotional grammars create different cosmologies.
For many Black, Indigenous, and POC traditions, the unseen is inherited, communal, integrated, and unashamed. A spirit can be neutral, fierce, silent, or utterly alien — respect is the point, not comfort.
For many white Western seekers, the unseen becomes a private laboratory — something to test, optimize, or consume, so long as it feels psychologically safe. When it doesn’t, it’s labeled “dark,” “cold,” or “negative.”

The result is a spiritual tension that mirrors a historical one:
two very different ways of meeting the unknown.

One enters with humility.
The other enters with expectations.

And so, even in the astral, the old habits echo:
the spiritual colonizer still wants spirits — neutral, ancient, or non-humanoid — to smile back.
Because without that smile, the illusion of control shatters.