In fitness and bodybuilding, a “fake natty” is a “fake natural.” It’s someone who got a very fit / muscular body via steroids, and then uses that body to sell courses or supplements, while never telling the public that they’re using steroids.
The fake natty implies “if you buy my supplement / course and train a bit, you’ll look like me.” But that’s a lie, because they only got that body by using steroids.
Fake natties are an absolute plague in the fitness and bodybuilding industry, because average people will look around and see three types of teachers:
- “Real natties”: these are people who look good but not exceptional, and they say that even looking good but not exceptional will take a whole lot of work. And if your genetics suck, it will take even more work. Obviously, this is not an appealing message.
- “Fake natties”: these people look exceptional, and they say that if you just buy their supplement / course, then you can look like them without that much work. This is a very appealing message. Most people who look at a fake natty don’t realize they’re fake natties.
- “Honest steroid users”: these people look exceptional, and they’re openly saying they’re on steroids, and that you’ll never look like them unless you take steroids as well. But of course, steroids are illegal and have a lot of very unhealthy effects. This is not an appealing message either.
Obviously, the fake natty has by far the most appealing pitch. Indeed, fake natties make the most money and have the most followers.
It’s easy to say “just avoid the fake natties and listen to a real natty” but obviously the fake natties don’t market themselves as fake natties. They market themselves as fitness experts who have cracked the code and who have an exceptionally good training approach
And because there are so many fake natties, steroid bodies just start looking like “the body someone has if they hit the gym for a few years.” The public’s perception gets completely warped.
Nowadays real natties don’t even look impressive anymore. Real natties look like idiots who don’t know how to train, because there’s a sea of fake natties out there who all look much better and who are all saying they got their bodies by training hard and by eating rice, broccoli and chicken breast.
At this point some readers will think “fit and reasonably muscular bodies are nice, but I don’t think steroid bodies are appealing.” However what you picture as a fit and reasonably muscular body most likely IS a steroid body. That’s how normalized they’ve become.
After all, if you go to a modern blockbuster, there’s probably a scene where a male lead takes his shirt off, and he looks really good. Well, that’s most likely a steroid body. Yes I know that doesn’t look like “a steroid body”, but it actually is a steroid body. It’s just a body on a medium level of steroids, as opposed to a body on a crazy high level of steroids (which is what leads to “the steroids look”).
This illustrates my point that the public’s perception has become completely warped by fake natties. What people think of as “a great, non-steroid body” is actually “a body on a medium level of steroids.”
This also makes it nearly impossible to reach a wide audience as a real natty fitness teacher, because your pitch is “work hard and you’ll look like me, i.e. good but not great.” Whereas twenty other fake natties all look better than you, all pretend to be natural too, and they all promise better rewards for less work. And you can’t prove they’re fake natties.
So to most people, the fake natties look like normal, solid teachers. Whereas the one real natty looks like an idiot who doesn’t know how to train.
There’s no great conspiracy here. It’s just that “real natty” fitness coaches probably can’t pay rent (unless they work a normal job too). While fake natties can easily pay rent. Obviously everyone chooses the “able to pay rent” option.
Steroids are unhealthy, but there’s also no real reputational downside to being a fake natty. If someone says “I bought your supplement / course but I still don’t look that good”, the fake natty can just say “well obviously you’re not training hard enough, go work harder.” Or “your genetics suck.” Or the fake natty can say “ah, clearly you need this second supplement that I’m also selling, THEN you’ll look like me” and make even more money.
These exact same mechanics apply to the spiritual community too.
An honest steroid user is someone who says: “you can use steroids, i.e. pretend that you’re hyper-spiritual, and suppress / hide negative emotions, and focus on feeling good. You can package that as ‘keeping your vibration high.’ If you do, you’ll feel a bit better in the short term and you’ll look spiritually advanced to others. You need to do this to make any money in the spiritual field. However you’ll still suffer. Plus suppression of your negative feelings quickly becomes living in a narcissistic bubble, and it quickly becomes spiritual bypassing, which really isn’t healthy long-term.”
A fake natty uses steroids, i.e. in public they pretend they’re hyper-spiritual. In public (and perhaps also at home) they suppress negative emotions and never show anything “bad” and they call that “keeping my vibrations high” or “raising the reader’s vibrations.” Spiritual fake natties always put on a happy face and never share that they’re anxious or depressed or craving some luxury good. They intentionally dress spiritually, intentionally use spiritual terms and speak softly and gently.
And of course they don’t tell people they’re using steroids i.e. they don’t say “I’m often miserable and only seem happy because I’m putting on a spiritual front and suppressing / just not sharing my painful emotions.” Instead they imply that they really are happy and really have a dream life, and if you do what they say, then so will you. Sure maybe they don’t outright say these things, but then again fitness fake natties also just put on a good front and let the public conclude “oh, he / she must be a master who’s genuinely figured it out.”
Spiritual fake natties say: “do this technique and you can manifest anything you want. Do this practice daily and you’ll never suffer again. Keep a high vibration and bad things simply can’t enter your field. Do this visualization and you’ll become a vibrational match to good things. Here’s how you can ascend / reach 5D. You already are love and always have been.”
The spiritual fake natty may simply promise every few months that some kind of liberation or ascension is now right around the corner, not caring that’s what they’ve said five times already.
Some things that spiritual fake natties say do work to a small extent, but they don’t work nearly as well as advertised, and they don’t end suffering. Or things that spiritual fake natties say may genuinely happen in the future, but they also might not and focusing too much on that just robs you of the present moment. And besides, the fake natties are probably financially incentivized to keep you reading / watching their stuff.
What I’m describing now are the vast majority of people in the spiritual space, hence my title: “Fake natties are misleading 99% of spiritual people”. Of course some are worse than others, but practically everyone is putting on a front that quietly implies that they’re masters who have found a way to happiness, or at least a way to a good life.
I’ve also written some “spiritual fake natty” articles myself -- for that I apologize.
And for the sake of completeness: if you met me in real life, you wouldn’t be impressed by me or by the life I have. I have several habits that spiritual seekers, modern psychologists and myself would all agree aren’t very good.
Whereas a real natty is someone who says: “maybe extraterrestrials will land or a solar flash will happen, but there’s no guarantee that’ll happen in the near term, and you have no control over that. The only way you have to end suffering is to dissolve the self. It takes a whole lot of uncomfortable spiritual practice and even then you may not succeed. If you succeed, you won’t be there to enjoy the benefits. But you were never the pilot of the body, hence your organism will still function. Your organism will still have back aches, it will still have to pay taxes, it still can’t manifest anything at will, it may not have magical or psychic powers, and almost no one will even recognize it as enlightened.”
Of these... of course the spiritual fake natty has by far the most appealing story.
He’s the one who gets a following. He’s the one who’ll be able to pay rent.
If the followers of the spiritual fake natty don’t achieve results, the fake natty can always say “don’t worry, keep at it and one day you’ll get there” or “well obviously you have a lot of stuff you need to work through” or “you need this additional teaching / course from me, then you’ll get there.” It’s a foolproof system.
Plus some spiritual fake natties genuinely have achieved a more-functional-than-average state (at least in the short term). So they may genuinely think their techniques work. Plus they may have internalized the whole idea that “if you think negative thoughts, you’ll manifest / become a match to bad things” and so they may have banished everything unpleasant to their subconscious, which may convince them: “my painful thoughts are gone, my techniques work.”
The tragedy is that well-meaning spiritual seekers just get misled into chasing something that doesn’t work / doesn’t exist by these spiritual fake natties. And as a result, a decade later people often still don’t have a good life, and often still haven’t contributed nearly as much to society as they could have.
Plus a lot of genuinely dedicated spiritual seekers just aren’t pleasant people to interact with, after they spent years listening to spiritual fake natties.
The sheer number of spiritual fake natties has made the real natty message utterly unappealing. No one is striving for enlightenment anymore, as it actually is (namely self-dissolution which ends suffering). The few people who are working towards enlightenment are working towards a fantasy version of it that doesn’t exist (”if I keep my vibrations high enough for long enough, I’ll basically become a walking demigod”).
And at this point people might say “okay, I indeed want the real thing.” But the tragedy is that people’s perception of “real spirituality” has become so skewed by the fake natties that maybe this message convinces people to start avoiding the obviously absurd “you can manifest literally anything you want” messages, but then people will fall for the “slightly less absurd but still fake-natty” messages instead.
After all, spiritual fake natties are so numerous that the still-fake-but-less-extreme among them now just look like “normal, competent spiritual teachers.” While real natties are so rare that they look like the weird / incompetent ones who aren’t advanced enough that they can just prescribe a short spiritual practice that will make their followers high-vibration / abundant / etc.
I get that the real natty position of “dissolve yourself to end suffering” sounds very unappealing, but then again, of course it does: you’ve spent years listening to fake natties.
You’ve likely spent years listening to people implying “read my articles and perhaps do these exercises and you’ll stop suffering, you’ll manifest the life of your dreams and you may get to quasi-paradise.” Well then of course the pitch “dissolve yourself to end suffering” sounds horrible. But the thing is, the fake natty pitch was never real in the first place.
Probably you’ve read several book’s worth of fake natty material and your mental model is a jumbled pile of feel-good spiritual statements that aren’t really unified. Well it’s not your fault that you’re not really grasping it: the fake natty pitch just isn’t pointing to something real. Hence writers just keep adding complexity, and at some point spiritual seekers confuse their library of knowledge with actual wisdom.
Conversely, actual reality is very straightforward. Here’s the full and complete “real natty” teaching:
You are / your self is a neural loop that generates craving and anxiety, in order to drive the organism towards biologically useful behavior.
Dissolving you / dissolving this self ends “second arrow” suffering, it “frees up RAM” and it makes the organism enlightened.
Dissolving you is how love can pour forth unimpeded. You’re not the source of love -- love is the organism’s base state. You and the craving and anxiety you produce is the impediment to love.
You were never the pilot, so your organism will keep functioning fine without you.
If you want to dissolve yourself, here’s one possible way you can do it:
First meditate every day, for at least five minutes per day. Do this for six months. If you miss a day, no big deal, just get back to meditation tomorrow. Or if you were already meditating for 6+ months before you read this essay, you can skip this step.
After those six months of meditation, add this practice on top of your meditation: whenever you have a thought anywhere during the day, you just constantly bring your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness (i.e., that you exist and are present).
This is sometimes called the “I am” instruction, but it’s not “I am” as some kind of declaration that you are one with the universe or one with some “greater” being. In fact, you’re not even thinking the words “I am.” Instead you’re bringing your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness.
So for example, if a thought arises such as “I am hungry” or “hopefully my presentation next week goes well”, you just bring your attention back to your wordless sense of beingness. Keep doing this constantly over a period of years, and you may eventually reach enlightenment.
You’re not fighting or disagreeing with your thoughts. You’re just constantly bringing your attention back to your sense of beingness, and that is all.
That’s it. That’s the full and complete teaching. The rest are details, or alternative paths to the same goal.
If you think that “you’re not the pilot of the body; dissolve yourself” is some weird idea I made up, it plus love is actually what teachers from all around the world have been saying for millennia:
Sri Ramakrishna used the metaphor of a salt doll who steps into the water and dissolves. Which sounds vaguely romantic, but remember that the salt doll is a metaphor for you.
One Sufi master used the metaphor of the Moth and the Flame: when the moth flies fully into the flame, enlightenment is attained and there’s literally no more moth.
Islamic Sufism talks about “die before you die”.
Zen Buddhism talked about “die while you are alive, and be thoroughly dead. Then do what you will, and all is good.”
Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart talked about “un-becoming.”
Taoist Chuang Tzu described a master practitioner as someone whose “body is like dry wood, and whose mind is like dead ashes.”
Chuang Tzu also said “The perfect man has no self”
Taoism’s Wu Wei is “action without a self.” (Contrary to the rest of this list, here I’m taking some translation liberty. There’s a Telephone / Chinese whispers game going on where the teachings from enlightened people have reached you via multiple unenlightened people, who aren’t going to transmit “action without a self” faithfully. Hence enlightenment concepts get sanded down into something that unenlightened people do like such as “Wu Wei means effortless action.”)
Bhagavad Gita 3.27 said: “All actions are performed by the modes of material nature. But the fool, deluded by the-I-maker [ahankara], thinks ‘I am the doer’”.
Bhagavad Gita 5.8 said: “The wise who knows the truth thinks: “I do nothing at all””
Bhagavad Gita 11.32 said: “Even without you acting, these [enemies] arrayed and battle-ready before you will surely and without exception no longer exist.”
Bhagavad Gita 18.59 said: “If, taking shelter in the-I-maker [ahankara], you think ‘I will not fight,’ your resolve is useless. Nature will compel you to act anyway.”
Also, the Bible, Matthew 16:24 has Jesus saying: “Deny / disown yourself”
Bible, Galatians 2:20 said: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
Bible, Matthew 16:25 said: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
Bible, John 3:30 said: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Bible, John 12:24 said: “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (”Very truly I tell you” indicates insistence and emphasis. It means that what’s going to follow is counterintuitive but also true and critical to understand.)
Bible, Galatians 6:3 said: “If anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”
The Buddha talked about extinguishing [nirvana], so that you reach no-self [anatta].
You give a machine (a self) an unsolvable riddle to crash it (dissolve it), and indeed, koans are unsolveable riddles. Whereas you’d never give a machine an unsolveable riddle if you wanted to upgrade it.
And modern science is also on board with all this: enlightened person Gary Weber has near-zero baseline activity in the self-referential nodes of the Default Mode Network.
Plus modern neuro-science has found that decisions are made subconsciously first, and only after that do you consciously “make the decision.” In other words, you’re not the pilot.
So all these traditions point to love plus “you’re not the pilot, dissolve yourself.” All these traditions are one unified whole, pointing to the same unified truth.
Doesn’t it make sense that enlightened masters Jesus and the Buddha were ultimately both pointing to the same thing? Indeed they were, as we just saw.
Whereas under the conventional perspective, all these traditions and masters say different things, and you’re left with a pile of pretty-sounding but unrelated and unworkable spiritual statements.
And indeed, modern spiritual people working under that conventional view almost never reach enlightenment or otherwise become great teachers / masters.
For example, take the Bible, John 5:19: “Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.”“ (Again, note the “very truly I tell you” emphasis and insistence.)
Compare that to Bhagavad Gita’s “All actions are performed by the modes of material nature. But the fool, deluded by the-I-maker [ahankara], thinks ‘I am the doer’”.
These are clearly two completely different cultures with completely different worldviews expressing the same fundamental love + “you’re not the pilot” truth. And Taoism’s Wu Wei and modern neuroscience point in that same direction too. Do you really think that’s all just coincidence?
If “keep your vibrations high” really was the key to becoming a spiritual master who doesn’t suffer anymore, then why are all these traditions talking about “you’re not the pilot, dissolve yourself”?
The quotes we just looked at seem crazy excessive if keeping your vibration high suffices.
But then again, “keep your vibrations high and you’ll become a spiritual master who doesn’t suffer anymore” was always the fake natty pitch.
Here’s the Buddha talking to the fake natties of his day in Dhammapada 394: “What is the use of your matted hair, O foolish man? What is the use of your antelope-skin garment? Within you, there is a dense jungle of craving, but on the outside, you make a show of beauty.”
Here’s Jesus talking to the fake natties of his day in Matthew 23:27: “For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”
Note that Jesus and Buddha here are denouncing people who are “keeping their vibrations high.”
In fact, recall John 5:19: “Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.”“
Combine that with Jesus’s statement in Matthew 7:21-23: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Combine those two and Jesus is saying: “you’re not the pilot. Even if you’re doing good deeds: if you have a narrative that you are the one doing them, then you’re still delusionally thinking that you are the pilot. In this case, there’s no shared reality between us: I never knew you. And if you think you’re the pilot, then you’re producing lawlessness even if you’re doing good deeds.”
Indeed, there are endless people who think they’re doing good while actually being selfish. That’s what happens when people have a self: they’re self-ish. Everyone knows that being self-ish is a bad thing and being self-less is a good thing, right?
Some people at this point might argue “Jesus never said that.” But you don’t know that.
Also if that’s your position, you have to start making ad-hoc excuses for everything. Okay suppose Jesus never said that. But then what about all the other bible quotes I shared earlier? They’re made up too? Okay. Then what about the Bhagavad Gita’s repeated insistence that you’re not the pilot? Simply wrong? Then how come Wu Wei and neuroscience also point to “you’re not the pilot”? Just coincidences? And why are all these traditions saying that you need to die / dissolve / have no self / un-become?
If you go that route, you leave this one unified spirituality / religion that has many faces and many ways of explaining one fundamental same truth (love + “you’re not the pilot, dissolve yourself”). And instead you’re back to a situation where every tradition and every master said something different, and you need a separate explanation for everything, and ultimately you won’t get anywhere and you’ll keep suffering.
And if you’re not convinced: are you accounting for the fact that of course you’re biased against the message “you’re not the pilot, dissolve yourself”?
Am I not making logical sense, or do you simply emotionally and existentially dislike the statement “you’re not the pilot, dissolve yourself”?
So. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish via spirituality?
And is what you’re hoping to accomplish something that actually exists? Or is it just a story that fake natties are spinning?
I know what you want is what the fake natties promise, but that was simply never real in the first place.
You’ve been misled. I’m sorry.
With all my love,
