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What's up, guys? Clark. Welcome back to the channel here. Hey, this is a bit of a different video. Kind of resisting making it. It's been outlined for months. And I was talking to my buddy the other day. He was like, "Dude, that
Clark Kegley shares why he quit new age thought, exposing its flaws and promoting honest self-growth beyond manifestation and law of attraction.
Key Takeaways
- New age thought can be appealing but often lacks scientific backing and practical effectiveness.
- Viral content success does not equal truth or long-term value in personal development.
- Ignoring negative emotions and core personal issues can lead to self-sabotage and stagnation.
- Spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity are harmful and prevent genuine healing.
- Changing your mind publicly and critically evaluating beliefs is a spiritual strength.
What the video covers
- Clark Kegley discusses his journey from hustle culture to embracing new age thought like manifestation and law of attraction.
- He experienced viral success with new age content but grew disillusioned with its lack of evidence and practical results.
- Clark highlights how new age teachings often oversimplify complex personal growth and can trap people in unproductive loops.
- He shares encounters with top new age gurus who exhibited narcissistic behavior, deepening his skepticism.
- Clark made a major career decision to delete millions of views worth of videos that no longer aligned with his values.
- He critiques toxic positivity and the idea that focusing only on positive thoughts can solve problems, explaining this can worsen mental health.
- Clark warns against spiritual bypassing, where people avoid facing real emotions and responsibilities by using spiritual language.
- He emphasizes the importance of honesty, self-awareness, and addressing core issues rather than ignoring negativity.
- Clark acknowledges some valid new age concepts like detachment and letting go but urges critical thinking and evidence-based approaches.
- The video aims to help seekers question new age beliefs and consider healthier, more grounded paths to personal growth.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and personal journey with new age thought
- 00:59Transition from hustle culture to new age content
- 02:04Viral success and initial excitement with manifestation videos
- 03:07Embarrassment and questioning content authenticity
- 04:14Coaching experiences and flaws in law of attraction followers
- 05:19Encountering gurus and deciding to delete viral videos
- 07:19Critique of new age techniques and toxic positivity
- 10:07Spiritual bypassing and importance of honest self-reflection
- 13:11Philosophical context and valid new age concepts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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that is the video you got to make." We're talking about new age thoughts and how I got so bought into it and was teaching it and then fell away from it, got disillusioned, saw a lot of things behind the scenes, and changed my mind
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on it. My goal with this is not to approach this from a religious angle or to judge you or to push upon my personal beliefs. Everything I say is from my own experience, but it's to hopefully plant a little seed if maybe
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you're a seeker and you kind of found this camp and you have a lot of questions like, is this useful to me? Maybe I've outgrown this. Do I really buy into this? So, I want to share three things with you. First, my
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personal journey so you can see yourself in it. Second, the major flaws I found with new age thoughts and thinking. And third, some things that aren't BS.
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So rewind. A while ago, I was coming out of a decade plus of being on hustle culture. You ever have a time in your life where you work yourself so hard you got nothing left? Well, that was me trying to build
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a business and create content online. And so, I find this new age thought getting put on my algorithm. Things like manifestation, law of attraction, attract and receive was the message. I'm like, this is completely opposite of hustling and grinding. And so it was
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fresh and it felt exciting. It's like, you know, when you go from this camp to this camp, the pendulum swings the other way and all of a sudden, you know, it's a big dopamine hit when you're learning.
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And me as a content creator, when I get excited about something, I want to share it. And I started posting content around that time, experimenting with new age topics. And now imagine yourself, you're the content creator, okay? And up until
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this point, like you'd been posting all that hustle culture, just grind, grind, grind, and nothing has really hit. I mean, you know, you've had some success, but nothing crazy, nothing viral. But then this is what happened to me. You
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start talking about things like law of attraction or the secrets or manifestation and it's like anytime you mention it, a video goes viral. It is the craziest thing. And that's what happened. Million views on TikTok, you
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know, 5 million views. YouTube 100,000 views, 200,000 views. And that's intoxicating. It's all moving so fast. I didn't really have time to pause and be like, "Okay, do I actually believe this? And is it backed by research or
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does it just make for good content?" That's the piece no gurus or content creators will tell you is that a lot of people don't choose their niche. It chooses them. This is kind of an embarrassing but funny story. So, we're
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at dinner, bunch of entrepreneurs I respect, going around doing table introductions, the whole what do you do?
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It gets to me and my buddy Brian sort of throws me under the bus. He's like, "Uh, Clark, you're not just a YouTuber. You got a video going viral. Tell him about the video." I'm sitting there like, "No, not that video. Please, not
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that video, dude. Don't tell him about it." The whole table leans in expecting something profound. Oh, what what's your video about? I'm like choking on a burger halfway through. I'm like, it's actually on how to manifest a text.
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I laugh about it now because it's cringe. But I remember thinking at the time in my head like, really, dude? This is what your career is about is helping people magically get a guy to text them back. And I couldn't
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shake that thought. I'm like, do I want to be embarrassed by my own content? And this misalignment started showing up in other places too. I noticed like I was questioning a lot of the teachings that I was sharing. And this again this is a
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long time ago but essentially law of attraction teaches don't focus on negative thoughts or you'll get more of them or don't focus on what you don't want. Focus on what you want. And every thought you think is controlling your
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reality. But that's completely backwards. When you look at the roots of self-sabotage it's a pattern playing out. And if you never look at the negative parts or your core stories, you can never fix it. I started up a
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coaching program and the people who came in from videos that was just very like straight up and here's how to change your life, like the stuff we've been doing for the last 5 years, they would get results. But then the people who
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found some of those fringe law of attraction videos, they were super stuck and their life was in this loop. And I noticed a direct correlation between the people I'd meet whose life was a wreck and you wouldn't switch places with
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those people consumed the most new age thought content and the most fringe spirituality more than what they were consuming. It's the amount they were consuming. It's like these people would consume I I mean I spoke to a woman who
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was trying to build a business and she spent 40 hours a week consuming videos on attracting things. I remember being like, "Don't you think if you spent that same 40 hours on the business, you know, you'd you'd be ahead?" I think she hung
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up the phone. And I think it's this. When you make something so simple yet so confusing at the same time, people think that if they don't understand it, they're dumb. But really, the person over complicating it with a giant word
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salad, saying something in 3,000 words that could be summed up in one sentence, is the dumb one. You're like at first principles, this is so basic, they're not really saying anything. And also too, around this time, I met some of the
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behind the scenes gurus who were kind of at the top and totally got cringed out like harder than I was cringing eating my burger at my own content. I was like, "Oh, nice manifestation technique." They're like, "Yeah, I made that one up.
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I don't even do it." My buddy who met one of these big guys said he got like the most narcissistic vibes and within 30 seconds, like, "Hi, nice to meet you." He pulls out his phone. He's like showing him his cars
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and bank accounts. I'll get into the problems later specifically, but I didn't want anything to do with it. And so I made one of the biggest line in the sand moments of my career and I deleted 10 million views worth of videos. Things
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that I had put months of my life into and that were making good money, right?
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Passively. Didn't have to do anything. Could have kept them up. I'm like, I don't like I created these for algorithms. I don't want to stand by this. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because I believe one of the
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most spiritual things you can do is give yourself the ability to change your mind, even if that means in public.
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Because the more I went looking for proof on teaching things like manifestation and law of attraction, the less proof I found and the more disillusioned with it I got. If you are starting to see a few cracks in it or
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you are starting to get burnt out with the same circular thinking and loops and it's not useful, then maybe the next part of this video where I go into some of the key issues will be useful to you.
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[Music] All right, so what are the issues I found? The law of attraction is a Trojan horse. New age thought looks love and light on the outside, but I think deeper in there's a few core beliefs that'll damage you.
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So, you hear stories online, I did this technique and I got this result, right?
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How I manifested a $10,000 a month job. How I manifested my dream physique, my dream body, how I manifested my dream apartment. And techniques will be shared and you think, okay, if I just do that one technique, then it'll come to me and
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I can get the result. But here's the issue. If you read behind the thing, oftentimes it's I manifested my dream body. Oh yeah, and I did change my diet and hire a personal trainer.
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$10,000 a month by ah yeah, I did get a new job in sales and oh yeah, I was grinding for 40 hours a week. And when you hear I had this magical technique, well, people start to think it's the
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technique doing it, not the behavior change. I share the story all the time of me uh drumming and getting picked up touring around the world with one of my favorite bands. The part I also share that people skip over is that I posted
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videos without knowing what would happen. And it was a couple years of posting videos like that before anything took off. And had I never took the steps, the action, that would have never happened. So I think visualization and
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manifestation that can work internally and change your emotions and feelings. And yeah, okay, that can motivate you to take the actions to do the thing, but externally, I don't know if I buy into I did this technique and this thing came
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to me. And I saw people time and time again who wanted to manifest $10,000 a month. And if they get caught in this loop, they'll wait years trying to do that when in the years they could have gone back to a trade school, learned a
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trade, and in a couple years be making 10 grand a month. People want to manifest a relationship. So they do all these techniques, but if you never get to the root of why your last relationships failed, oh, I'm still
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blocked from that previous one. I'm not over. Even if you get a relationship, you're going to self-sabotage it. So I think if you had to choose between the law of attraction and the law of action, law of action beats it every time
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because it's behavior change, which is the real thing we should credit when change happens. But most people want to credit the wrong thing. Okay, the next big bone to pick with this is toxic positivity. Now, this one is a belief
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that you should always stay positive and avoid low vibes even when things genuinely suck. Hey, you lose your job.
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Well, everything happens for a reason. You just got to stay in a good vibe.
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Loss of a loved one, don't cry. You're going to attract more sadness. Now, the problem I have is that you have up to 60,000 thoughts a day. How are you going to control 60,000 thoughts a day? You actually can't. And there's such a
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massive psychological pressure that you will put on yourself if you think that every thought you need to control.
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There's something actually called thought action fusion. You can look this up. the belief that every thought is merged with actions and they're fused together. That's directly linked to anxiety depression and obsessivecompulsive disorder, OCD, and other mental illnesses. Here's a
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personal observation. I noticed that every major breakthrough I had only came after I admitted something harsh about myself or my life. Can you relate to that? Every single major breakthrough I've had, it came from when I stopped like lying to myself and saying
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everything was great. It was like, dude, this sucks, right? I don't want to be in my mom's basement 30 grand in debt.
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Like, what needs to change? And I changed it. Get out of there. Admitting what isn't working, not deliluding yourself with like, no, no, no, not listening. That's the first step in making any change. But perhaps the biggest one and the third trap here with
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all of new age, but specifically law of attraction because it's the gateway, spiritual bypassing.
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This is using spiritual language or practices to avoid uncomfortable emotions, responsibility or healing. You know, you feel resentment, don't address it. Just send them love and light. In debt and struggling? Well, hey, money is just an energy. And you know, you don't
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need to look at finances. You just got to raise your vibe. you feel trauma or something that still hurts and you're like, you know, I'm above that. I've transcended my ego. I've done enough inner work to not think about it. But
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that's also the same behavior that leads to destructive habits. Like when I drank all the time, it was a way I coped cuz I didn't want to face the uncomfortable emotions. So, I would drink and then I feel totally fine like I don't have
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problems in my business or relationships. When that wears off, the problems are still there. That's the same thing that happens with spirituality is it can become this temporary high or you raise your vibration and then when you come back
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all your problems are still there. So the solution isn't to have toxic positivity and just never think negative thoughts like law of attraction's telling you to do. The solution isn't to be constantly love and light and I must
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stay like this aura of performative spirituality that new age has. The solution is to be honest and real with yourself. You know what things aren't good right now. You know what? This thing does still hurt. You know what? I
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am being I do feel negative right now. It's like if you have a headache, the only way for you to fix that headache is to first admit, dude, my head doesn't feel right. And then you can come up
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with the solutions and fix it. But if you never admit that, hey, this thing is painful. I, you know, I'm not feeling myself. You don't just say, okay, ignore, ignore, ignore, cuz I'm going to attract more headache. Yeah. So, not
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using labels or practices to hide what we still need to work on. because if we do that, we're putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.
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A good sign that an idea is worth looking into and basing like your philosophy and how you live life on is if there's serious people debating and defending it, even if you don't agree with it, okay? But they like take a
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stand and they're out there, you know, promoting it and defending that idea. So things like philosophy, I mean there's debates for thousands of years on um things like religion, so Christianity, Islam, uh even atheism, you can find debates backing up all those ideas and
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people who are very smart standing by what they believe and defending it. But with law of attraction, you have to ask what I ask. I'm like, okay, where are the intellectuals? Is the best we got, guys, some celebrity saying this thing
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works? Great. We got a Jim Carrey quote and a let me pull from Ancient Aliens and some dude on a podcast. And one of the things you got to be careful with is if there's no one challenging ideas
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publicly, it pushes people into echo chambers and where you're only in this group of people who are true believers with you. And that's how cults start.
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And I don't think I even need to talk about that. It's been so well documented with new age. There comes like gurus and cult culture. And yeah, it comes from that echo chambers and not having to publicly defend any ideas. This next
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critique is an opinion I noticed and this is something I fell into as well.
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New age thought can give you sort of an ego 2.0 by working so hard to dissolve your ego and raise your vibration. It now creates this hierarchy of where you're above people that are lower vibe than you. Oh, I've done more inner work
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or shadow work than that person. or oh when you take iawasa and these psychedelics that I have and that person's not enlightened. That's the opposite of what should happen. I've always admired that aspect of religion is that it preaches humility. But with
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new age, there's a fair critique that it can make you self-absorbed. If all your focus is just going to you and your life and your problems and your goals, really the root of suffering is being obsessed with yourself. And one of the fastest
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ways to feel better, taking the focus off of yourself. When you're focused on someone else, you don't actually think about yourself. And I think being too self-absorbed, too self-centered, having the ego 2.0 from New Age spirituality can create a lot of suffering. The
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people who say they don't have a shadow or an ego, I found have the biggest ones. It's worth mentioning here, I, you know, I said this wasn't going to have a religious angle, and I hope I'm not coming off as Bible thumping youth
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pastor energy when I say this. I did start to feel an oultism and darkness towards the end of the the the rabbit holes of new age. It's there. It exists.
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It's a entry point to things like witchcraft, other occultism. I have a complicated relationship with religion.
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I've definitely read more scripture in the last couple years than I had in the last 10 for sure. When I got out of it, I was starting to feel more called back to God and away from new age and like
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occultism. [Music] So, now for part three briefly, I know this video is getting a little long. I want to talk about things that I would recommend as someone who's gone through that whole arc and had issues, but like
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I still think these are legit. And if you're someone like, okay, what what should I look into? These are better in my opinion. Detachment and letting go, I think these are still very valid and useful. I'm in no way knocking them. In
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fact, a lot of Zen Buddhism, I think, is, you know, philosophically pretty grounded. Shadow work and inner work legit comes from psychology. And whether that means you're doing it with yourself in a journal or you're working with a
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therapist, therapy is great. I think the new age can kind of like poo poo therapy. But yeah, that's I've had good results with uh the right kind of therapy and coaches as well. Meditation and mindfulness again, well researched,
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well backed. If that serves you, I think there's a lot of validity in it. And then I'll also say here to give credit where credit is due, spirituality in the new age does a great job influencing health. Um you know, I think that's one
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of the pipelines people get into it with is health and nutrition. Some of the cleanest, physically healthy people you will meet will be in the kind of spiritual new age camp for sure. All right, guys. That is a deep dive. I am
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fully pitted out from just focusing. What's your story? I want to know in the comments down below. What did you see that kind of ruined the mirage, so to speak? Post it in the comments below. I love hearing your stories. Let's flood
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it so other people can learn as well. Like the video. Thanks so much for watching. Stop, settle, start living.
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Peace.
Topics:Clark Kegleynew age thoughtlaw of attractionmanifestationtoxic positivityspiritual bypassingpersonal growthself-awarenesshustle culturecontent creator
