by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
NPC Spirituality & Why So Many “Awakenings” Are Just Ego in Fancy Robes
Every generation creates its own version of rebellion which means that people reject the mainstream and run to a counterculture of some kind:
For some people these days this might look like escape into productivity hacks as a way to find the ultimate ‘hustle’ that will help them leave the Matrix of mainstream culture. For others, it might mean turning to esoteric political ideas or theories.
Others – the type that this article is about – join the ever-growing group of people who abandon ordinary life for what they call “spirituality” – a shiny world of chakras, crystals, cosmic downloads, quantum jumps and promises of instant ‘enlightenment’.
On the surface, this seems harmless enough – maybe even encouraging, even:
After all, who doesn’t want to wake up to a deeper truth?
Unfortunately, there’s a problem and it’s a pretty BIG ONE because a huge chunk of modern ‘spirituality‘ – the kind that dominates Instagram reels, YouTube recommendations, and all of those “high-vibe” WhatsApp groups – isn’t actually spirituality at all.
It’s just the ego wearing more colourful robes which leads to attachment to identity dressed up as enlightenment and resistance disguised as awakening.
It’s what I call NPC Spirituality.
And if you’ve ever wondered why so many “spiritually awakened” people still seem fragmented, anxious, reactive, and oddly obsessed with validation, this explains it – they’re not free, they’re not present, and they’re not whole or growing towards wholeness.
They’re just following another unreal script.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
NPC Spirituality: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- NPC Spirituality & Why So Many “Awakenings” Are Just Ego in Fancy Robes
- NPC Spirituality is the Spirituality People Choose When They Don’t Want to Think for Themselves
- My Own Journey Through the “NPC Spirituality” Phase
- NPCs: Scripted Characters That Feel Alive But Aren’t
- What Real Spirituality Actually Is
- How NPC Spirituality Keeps You Stuck
- Mainstream Conditioning vs Spiritual Conditioning
- NPC Spirituality Is Just Shame Bypassing
- The Dark Side: When NPC Spirituality Becomes Narcissism
- Common Symptoms of NPC Spirituality
- The Only Real Alternative to NPC Spirituality: REALNESS
- NPC Spirituality: The Final Word
NPC Spirituality is the Spirituality People Choose When They Don’t Want to Think for Themselves
There’s a particular flavour of spirituality that people gravitate towards purely as a reaction to mainstream culture:
They hate the 9-to-5 world, distrust institutions, and see themselves as the ones who have “broken free” from society’s illusions but instead of genuinely thinking for themselves, they simply swap one set of unreal beliefs for another.
People lost to this kind of NPC Spirituality trade mainstream programming for spiritual programming and replace the herd mentality with the “high-vibe tribe mentality” (where they have to follow a different herd but with a constant smile on their faces).
Once they’ve done this, they convince themselves they’re ‘awake’ while still outsourcing every ounce of their thinking and intuition.
They haven’t escaped conditioning – they’ve just switched brands.
This ‘branding’ is exactly what makes NPC Spirituality so seductive because it allows it to feels like awakening despite it actually being another layer of egoic illusion.
It keeps people fragmented, disconnected from their shadow self, and totally out of contact with the reality of themselves and their own lives.
The bottom line is that real spirituality asks you to dissolve shame instead of hiding from and then being driven by it but NPC spirituality just wallpapers over it with fancy talking points about “vibrations” and “manifestation”.
My Own Journey Through the “NPC Spirituality” Phase
I remember this phase vividly because it kinda SUCKED:
Before life kicked my arse properly – before I even learned what spirituality actually is – I thought that becoming ‘spiritual’ meant unlocking some sort of superpower and so I expected omniscience, omnipotence, and a level of control over the universe that basically turned me into some kind of cosmic superhero.
In other words, because of my own underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (almost always the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma), I thought spirituality was about becoming special.
Thankfully, time and experience revealed the truth:
This fantasy is nothing more than the ego’s desperate attempt to create safety as a reaction to the shame we feel about our own realness.
The ego hates being limited, vulnerable, or uncertain and so it tries to make itself godlike by projecting fantasies of infinite knowledge and power to hide the shame sitting at its core (less shame, less ego).
If you’re all-knowing and all-powerful – omniscient and omnipotent – you never have to feel the difficult but very REAL things in your shadow self that wait for you on the other side of your shame.
NPC Spirituality grows from that same root: unresolved shame.
Shame is the original fragmentation and arises the moment we disconnect from truth and invent an identity to compensate.
NPC Spirituality is the opposite of real spirituality because it doesn’t dissolve shame; it inflates it and causes us to be stuck on the hamster wheel of being driven by it. All it does is give the ego more tools, more vocabulary, and more illusions to hide behind.
In other words, it only makes the trap prettier and keeps us locked in a gilded cage.
NPCs: Scripted Characters That Feel Alive But Aren’t
If you don’t know (and you probably do), then the term NPC – Non-Playable Character – comes from video games and refers to the simulated characters in game environments that ‘live’ there according to scripts and programming.
NPC Spirituality refers back to this idea because NPCs look like they’re doing things but they’re not acting consciously – instead, they’re following scripts, they’re programmed, and they have no real input of their own.
They look alive in some ways but they’re not awake – even though the lights might be on, there’s definitely nobody home.
A Playable Character, by contrast, borrows the consciousness and presence of the player and so they can respond, adapt, and be present to some degree.
NPC Spirituality is exactly the same as the NPCS in a game in the sense that the people following it:
- Don’t question their beliefs, scripts, and programming.
- Don’t confront their inner fragmentation.
- Never actually grow real.
They’re LITERALLY INCAPABLE of doing these things because they’re simply follow the programming they’ve picked up from:
- Shame-driven ego programming: The internal scripts created to avoid vulnerability, truth, and emotional responsibility.
- Social spiritual programming: Not mainstream programming but the spiritual bullsh*ttery, trends, and tropes that circulate in online communities but keep people away from reality itself.
Both forms of programming keep people from presence and truth whilst maintaining the ego and its beliefs in its current form.
The ultimate tragedy of NPC Spirituality is that these people genuinely believe they are expanding consciousness but in reality they’re just reinforcing the barrier between themselves and realness.
What Real Spirituality Actually Is
Real spirituality doesn’t need to be chased and it definitely doesn’t require rituals, identity badges, or a subscription to a high-vibe lifestyle.
Real spirituality finds you and can be experienced directly at any time.
It finds you when you keep:
- Uncovering the truth.
- Living the truth.
- Repeating that spiral again and again.
As you go through these spirals, the truth invites you deeper into yourself and life, shame dissolves, your fragmentation heals, and your life becomes more whole, more integrated, more real.
Real spirituality is quiet, simple, and grounded but NPC spirituality is noisy, dramatic, and desperate; real spirituality reconnects you to reality but NPC spirituality disconnects you from it by replacing one illusion with another.
How NPC Spirituality Keeps You Stuck
NPC Spirituality blocks your real growth in two main ways:
1. Shame Programs You to Avoid Truth
Because unhealed shame fuels the ego, NPC spirituality keeps people trapped in rigid ego identities and performance over presence (they can’t be present, because presence would reveal the shadows they’re terrified to face).
2. Social Spiritual Programming Gives You Scripts to Follow
Instead of meeting life directly, followers of NPC Spirituality outsource their capacity to face the truth to:
- Crystals
- Gurus
- Psychedelic escapism
- Endless books and courses
- Astrological forecasts
- Energy readings
- “Downloads from the universe”
- Vision boards and manifestation rituals without taking action
All of these can be used meaningfully with grounded intention, but NPC spirituality uses them to avoid actual change which makes it feel like the “inner work” is being done even though nothing is actually happening.
Mainstream Conditioning vs Spiritual Conditioning
People trapped in NPC spirituality don’t realise that they are experiencing the exact same psychological patterns as the people following mainstream conditioning:
- Outsourcing their thinking
- Chasing identity and ego
- Seeking validation
- Avoiding the shadow
- Resisting the truth
- Staying stuck in dysregulated nervous systems
- Taking no meaningful real action
- Replacing responsibility with magical thinking
The only difference is the vocabulary and so Mainstream NPCs talk about politics and productivity where Spiritual NPCs talk about vibrations and timelines.
It’s the exact same programming wearing a different costume.
NPC Spirituality Is Just Shame Bypassing
In almost every case, NPC spirituality is a way to bypass deep emotional pain which is why so many NPC Spiritualists end up painting over their trauma responses with spiritual jargon:
They use rituals and positivity as a way to avoid feeling their actual feelings.
They don’t regulate their nervous system, so real emotions feel like a ‘threat’.
They stay fragmented but convince themselves they’re ‘ascending’ (or whatever).
All of this is why they often cling to spiritual identity – it’s the perfect mask.
The Dark Side: When NPC Spirituality Becomes Narcissism
At its most extreme, NPC spirituality morphs into spiritual narcissism which is a state where shame and ego merge into a false sense of superiority.
These people:
- Believe they have special gifts or powers and will use these ‘powers’ to try and control others.
- Sell their fantasies as ‘prophecies’ that must be followed by others (usually as a form of projection).
- Interpret their trauma responses as intuition (and so won’t take real action etc. because their intuition says so when really it’s just lingering fear and freeze).
- Look down on the “unenlightened” rest of us (especially if we disagree with them).
- Conflate their beliefs with universal truth and cling rigidly to the POV their ego needs to be true to survive.
- Become defensive and even explode when challenged (which is definitely not very “spiritually enlightened”).
The irony is that the more spiritually “advanced” they claim to be, the more disconnected from reality they actually are.
A good general rule is that the higher the vibration talk, the lower the levels groundedness.
Common Symptoms of NPC Spirituality
In short, then, NPC Spirituality is always shame-driven and you can spot NPC spirituality by the behaviour you see:
- Using spiritual jargon without any lived embodiment (“Vibration”, “Ascension”, “5D Consciousness”).
- Performative enlightenment (“Look how spiritual I am”, “Please clap for my shadow work journey”, “I’m a victim and enlightened at the same time”, etc.)
- Avoiding pain and bypassing emotional responsibility.
- Claiming high consciousness while still living in stress, fear, and dysregulation.
- Mistaking trauma responses for intuition and never taking action.
- Becoming addicted to knowledge without ever taking action.
- Trying to “manifest” instead of making decisions and moving towards goals through real action.
- Using spirituality to stay passive instead of empowered.
These people live in a fantasy version of reality because real reality feels too confronting (which it is because reality is always the opposite of ego).
Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re ready to go deeper into your realness instead of the ego.
The Only Real Alternative to NPC Spirituality: REALNESS
NPC spirituality dissolves and stops holding you back from your actual, real life when you stop chasing identity and return to truth.
This happens through learning to cultivate your REALNESS – a natural process that is always unfolding when the ego doesn’t get in the way.
This unfolding goes through three stages (which are a spiral, again, so you can keep going deeper):
1. Awareness – Deconstruct Ego
See the scripts you’re following, see the shame that fuels them, and see where your ‘spirituality is actually just ego resistance and avoidance.
Awareness breaks the illusion.
2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow Self
Meet the parts of you that feel unworthy, afraid, or ashamed, feel them instead of bypassing them, and integrate them instead of exiling them.
Acceptance reconnects you to your real self.
3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life
Move towards your real potential, stop planning your life around avoidance, and start taking real steps in the real world.
Action builds trust in reality and in yourself.
NPC Spirituality: The Final Word
In the end, spirituality isn’t about becoming ‘special’ to hide from shame – it’s about becoming real and seeing that shame only arises as a disconnection from the truth.
NPC spirituality convinces people they are chosen, gifted, and superior but real spirituality removes all of that by showing people that spirituality isn’t about becoming special – it’s about becoming real and stepping into your nature.
It’s about stripping everything artificial away until you see who you are in reality, not fantasy.
When you become real, you stop chasing identity, you stop needing protection, and you stop bypassing your shadow.
You stop fearing truth, stop performing life, and start participating in it – in other words, you become whole again.
Spirituality isn’t a costume or an escape.
Nor is it a brand or a vibe.
It’s a return:
A return to truth, a return to presence, and a return to realness and – when you return to realness – you finally stop being an NPC in your own life and you start playing the game consciously.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’ve become lost and started following NPC Spirituality but you’re ready to wake up to your realness then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you move in a real way.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.
