That last thing got me thinking: how can a person know whether what I’m saying is actually genuine stuff or I’m full of shit; assuming they are unable to personally verify crucial parts, and assuming that dying, ending in front of a Judge of Karma and being told the exact truth isn’t a currently available option.

Tl;dr: you can’t. Sorry. It’s theoretically impossible to verify things if your actual ability to verify them is defined as insufficient, as a premise. You can believe this or that, for all the good it will do you.

Long version:

You can work with probabilities. For instance, if someone is fake, they are generally fake everywhere, not in just one thing. So, if you can’t verify a certain part of someone’s claims, you can verify everything around it. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than nothing, I guess. For instance, if someone does reliably rational and good stuff at every point you can check, it’s reasonable to assume that the trend continues in places where you can’t check. Unfortunately, that’s also something an expert deceiver would think of, so you can only rule out the possibility of one being an incompetent, mentally ill person. A deliberate rational fake will do his homework, lay out all kinds of evidence in spheres you can verify, and use that to sell you something really dangerous in spheres you can’t verify. What’s important to know is that this absolutely rules out a crazy person. A crazy person will be too crazy to do any of this. In order for someone to plant deceptions decades in advance and do this kind of complex trickery, the only two options you have is genuine and expert deceiver. Crazy is not an option. You can eliminate crazy quite easily by testing in this manner. You can’t eliminate malicious or evil.

There’s a possibility that one is not crazy, but merely deluded, and then works hard on sharing their delusion. That’s true, and I’ve seen it, but it’s kind of always obvious, for the following reasons. If we’re talking about spiritual things, one way of checking for authenticity is checking for overlap with existing spiritual revelations. We are here assuming that a certain percentage of those are authentic. Something that’s authentic will need to have overlap with other authentic stuff, unless we’re dealing with a situation that everything else is 100% wrong and just this one thing is 100% right. This is very unlikely, for all kinds of reasons that I think don’t require a detailed explanation. For instance, it would mean that the level of difficulty is so great, that probability of success for everybody else would be 0, and then it suddenly jumps to 1 in only one instance. Albeit not theoretically impossible, that’s usually not how things work in practice. In practice, someone gets something right, and others make improvements upon this based on things that work in practice, and at some point you get a working theory, which makes predictions and so on. Even in things like alchemy, you had things that worked, such as distillation, precise measurements and so on. Based on this, actual chemistry was made. It didn’t just happen out of thin air, after alchemy being 100% wrong. You can have theory that’s wrong, but you have reliable ways of funnelling gases and weighing compounds, purifying compounds, making non-reactive dishes and so on. Astronomy existed in form of very precise measurements before it had a solid theory, and those measurements were in fact incredibly precise, precise enough for Newton to have used them in making his theoretical system of mechanics. He didn’t just work with thin air, he worked with precise measurements of planetary positions by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Tycho Brahe didn’t know how planets moved, but he measured their positions with extreme accuracy. So, it was all based on some kind of reality, regardless of the fact that the theory they came up with was usually flawed. Everything is always flawed in this world. It wasn’t all pulled from someone’s arse, and that’s what matters. They thought Sun revolved around Earth, but they knew the position of Venus on every day of the year with such precision you wouldn’t believe. So, when someone came up with a better theory, they could re-use the measurements with complete confidence, because it was spot on.

That’s what I mean by overlap with existing stuff. The interpretation might differ wildly, but there’s some serious common ground in most authentic cases. The way Hindus put this, there must be alignment of Shastra, Guru and Sadhu. They go too far with this, because they assume their scripture to be far more than it actually is, but the idea is that scripture, your guru and the genuine spiritual people will be in alignment and will all teach you the same stuff, which is how you can tell it’s true. If your guru is telling you stuff no other spiritual person is talking about, and there’s nothing about it in the scriptures, the possibilities are that the guru is either fake, or he’s a point of revelation of higher reality than anything else up to that point. Since the latter is something that would literally be a unique point in history, the former is more likely to be true. There are, however, such points of revelation, and they do happen every few thousand years, so it’s not impossible. It’s just that they don’t happen every Tuesday, and if you’re dealing with such a person it would be accompanied by serious indications which would increase the probability of it being true. For instance, miracles, visions and spiritual experiences by others etc. would be likely to lend credibility to such a person, but if you’re unable to personally verify any of it, it becomes a recursive issue of faith – basically, you would need to believe that a person b had a valid spiritual experience regarding person a, in order to accept validity of person a. If you’re unable to verify, you can only default to faith, choosing one way or another depending on your personal character and attitude.

So, if your ability to verify is zero, you need to default to faith, and in that case you are also going to be unlikely to resort to faith either, so you are likely to reject the whole thing. However, if your ability to verify is non-zero, but incomplete, you will still have to ultimately resort to faith, but this faith will be based on something not wholly insubstantial. If that is of any comfort, even I resort to faith when I’m not in a state where I’m directly experiencing something. After a few days or weeks at most, a spiritual experience becomes a mere thing in memory, and you need to believe that what you experienced was this and not that, because you’re no longer there and no longer able to verify it directly. Essentially, if you’ve been to the Moon, a day after you landed back on Earth it’s a mere memory. Twenty years later it’s an old, faded memory, and even for you it’s a matter of faith to believe that the memory is accurate and represents what it seems to represent. So, you can never really avoid resorting to faith in this world. It’s a matter of faith for you to believe that you can drive a car once you’re not actually driving it, let alone anything else. But if you have something you can verify, your faith will be more established and stronger. For instance, if you had visions of angels or Gods telling you things about me, you can still be sensitive to doubt regarding your experience, but you’ll be in a better position than someone who didn’t have any such experience and can only believe this or that based on emotions and thoughts. This is a very weak basis for faith and I wouldn’t actually recommend it. The way I would personally verify things is try the stuff they teach and see if it’s useful. If it produces a genuine spiritual experience, it’s still not perfect evidence, but it’s good enough to assume there’s some serious shit going on there. However, evidence of supernatural is not evidence of the Divine, and one needs to be extra careful with that difference. Eventually, the only solid way to know whether one is a genuine spiritual person or not is to be one yourself. The closer you are to that, the easier it is for you to verify. The more distant you are, the harder everything is. That’s why I personally don’t actually care much about convincing people of anything regarding myself. I mostly tell them how yoga works and how to practice it. If they manage to become genuine spiritual persons, my job there is done, and I still wouldn’t care much whether they know who I am or not, because that’s actually so demanding that even I don’t actually remember who I am most of the time, and when I do it’s not the most pleasant thing, since I need to be separated from it for the duration of this life. So, the entire thing about people wanting to know who I actually am and how authentic I am is a pastime for idiots, beginners and people otherwise completely unqualified for verifying anything in spiritual spheres. You can know that I’m smart, and you can reliably establish that I’m not crazy, but whether I’m some kind of a super-Devil who is here to deceive you, or a yogi who attained some spiritual experience he’s probably exaggerating, a yogi who attained spiritual experience he’s genuinely reporting, or a God who manifested a tulku here in order to do some things unique in history, you can’t actually know for sure, and relying much on faith in these matters isn’t actually productive. Faith is good when you experienced or did something and you remember it a month later, and you believe it’s all true. In such a case, it’s hard faith, because it’s based on your own experience and facts. Having that kind of faith is essential. However, having faith that’s based on weak foundations, on mere belief without actual experience and facts, it’s not actually something I would recommend having, and it’s better to work on establishing better foundations for your beliefs, than to rely too much on feeble nonsense.

So, that’s that. If you’re not sure who I am, and want to be, I would recommend against mere belief, one way or another. I would recommend learning more, having more actual experience, developing a stronger spiritual core, attaining spiritual transformations and initiations, attaining darshan of God, not once but many times, and learning about reality from that. As a corollary of great knowledge, you will understand more about me without actually bothering to know more about me, which is as it should be.

But without that, if the difference between what I am and what you are is too great, you wont be able to know or verify anything, and that’s not even your actual problem. Your actual problem is that if you knew anything about God, you wouldn’t have that problem.

It’s interesting how fallen souls always resort to similar language in order to present their fallen state as something enviable and, in some cases, an ultimate achievement.

Either it’s compassion – but for the low and fallen beings, while resentment and criticism is reserved for the high ones, who are of God. Or it is some quasi-religion, like the false interpretation of Buddhism which embraces something they call Emptiness, which due to imperfections of human language can be misconstrued to resemble what Buddha was talking about.

Essentially, there are two things on the polar opposite of spiritual experience, that can both be called Emptiness. First is the state in which a rock exists. It is empty of spirit, mind and feeling. It is also immune to karma – if a rock kills, it cannot be punished, because it lacks positive substance that would incur karmic retribution, and you can also not conceivably degrade it further. You can argue that the state of a rock is equivalent to this “Emptiness” that false spiritual people teach of. The thing is, you would need to be really pathetic and desperate in order to aspire to this condition. Achieving the state that’s natural to rocks isn’t a worthy achievement. Rather, it’s the lowest point to which you can fall as a spiritual being; it’s a point from which every way is up. Also, we have a local, traditional term for this state; the Latin word for it is “vanitas, -tis, f”. It is translated as either vanity, or emptiness, lack of Divine being. You can mockingly call it “nirvanitas” and accurately describe this falsely spiritual mockery of a teaching. You need to be rather stupid to embrace this idea, since it brings you literally nothing of substance, but stupid people are dime a dozen so it’s not hard to imagine how such nonsense can take hold and spread. The interesting thing is that claiming ultimate spiritual attainment can give you an ego boost even if it’s literally about being too spiritually degraded to be punishable for sin. Preach baseline state of non-differentiation of ego as the ultimate goal. Yay, you’re the great Buddha. The problem: every rock is your peer.

It’s a problem with human language, because there is an extreme state of spiritual ecstasy and fulfilment in the presence of God that can be described as Emptiness, because it’s emptiness of thought, of desire, of wish for any change, or for anything at all other than to remain in His holy presence forever. However, the Isha Upanishad speaks of this differently, using the word “purna”, fullness. Lord is the fullness that remains full even after infinity of infinities emanates from it. Also, it’s the emptiness of motive after everything has been achieved, emptiness of desire after everything worth desiring has been achieved, emptiness of thought because you rest in the totality of bliss, consciousness and truth. Fullness of being is also emptiness of all human nonsense. The same word can be used for the opposite sides of the spiritual spectrum – for God and for a rock. But of course, the confusion is intentionally spread by the quasi-spiritual fakes and deceivers on an ego-trip.

It’s similar to being wordless because you experience a fullness of meaning that exceeds your ability to put it into words without choking up, and being wordless because you are dumber than dirt. Opposite things, but somehow can be described with the same words, especially if your intent is to deceive. If it is not, you will make sure to avoid using deceptive language and speak very clearly of the Lord and His infinite abundance of fullness.

People have a very interesting penchant for not understanding subtlety. For instance, children regularly tend to think that the evil queen from the Snow White is ugly, because she is evil and cruel, and threatened by the Snow White’s beauty. In fact, she’s not only not ugly, she’s the second most beautiful woman in the world, who is vain enough to mind not being the first enough to resort to murder.

Likewise, people tend to imagine Devil as a horrible, scary person.

How can someone appear horrible and scary if their fundamental role is that of a deceiver and a liar? It’s incredibly silly. It’s obvious from the Bible that Devil can appear as whatever is most useful for him in his lies and deceptions. He can fake appearances with no problem at all. What he can’t fake is the essence. He can fake whatever you think would be the appearance of God, but he can’t fake the feeling one has in God’s presence, because that’s about the substance.

Devil is, or should I correctly say “was”, because he happened to have one of those accidents that make one unavailable for all further appearances, not scary in the sense that he has horns, hooves and tail, and essentially looks like the Balrog from the LOTR movies. The scary part is not his appearance, because he would carefully avoid that; it was the feeling of ominous warning from somewhere that you would feel in his presence. You suddenly feel the need to be careful, to mind your every thought, word and action, to observe things with your inner eye and watch carefully, for you are in danger. There is never anything obvious about it, nothing you can point your finger at, and the only threat seemingly comes from having to oppose the reasonable arguments of Satan with those of faith and inner feeling, for which you have no direct evidence, nothing firm you can hold on to, while it is obvious that you will be laughed at or suffer other consequences if you choose faith over “reason and evidence”. And yet, only faith can save you.

The thing is, you don’t have to know how everything works. You don’t have to provide evidence for why you feel something is so. After all, the concept of having to back everything with reason and evidence is a modern folly. Despite all the nonsense about reason and evidence, people still have no idea how three quarks glued together bend spacetime and thus cause gravity. They can tell you in great detail what gravity does and how it behaves once it’s there, but nobody actually knows what it is and how it came to be. Souls exist despite science having no idea about them. Gods likewise exist despite the ignorance of science. You don’t need to understand how the presence of God influences the soul in order to experience it. I didn’t need to know how my yogic techniques actually work in order for them to work; I figured out the mechanics of it decades later. Trusting your inner feeling is much more important than having evidence to back it up. Every thief and deceiver will try to get you to trust reason and evidence over your feeling. They will try to get you to trust your eyes, so that they can pull a fast one on you. Devil is merely the ultimate expression of that principle. He’s not scary in a sense of being a red goat-man with fire in his eyes, he’s scary in a sense of being a calm, reasonable man who is trying to use reasonable arguments to convince you of something absolutely fatal and false, and you can point to nothing concrete to disprove it despite feeling a deep need to oppose it, and the only salvation for you is to resort to blind faith in order to reject everything you see and seem to know to be “fact”.

The scary part of Satan’s presence is that it forces you to dive blindly into the abyss of faith, rejecting the apparent salvation offered in form of reason and evidence, saying “I don’t actually have to know how something works in order to see that it’s evil, because I see the moral character of the fruits”. Satan forces you away from your comfort zone, forces you to resort desperately to the aid of God whom you can’t see, while the reasonable and logical gentleman offers you apparently rock-solid evidence, from the direction of which you can smell fire and brimstone and doom. That’s why he’s dangerous and terrible – because you can save yourself from him only by the most desperate of means.