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.