How does one know if a person is truly enlightened, or fake?

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Too much ink is spilled on ‘fake’ enlightened gurus. I’d like to introduce you to someone. Meet Curtis Howe Springer.

Is he enlightened? Of course not. But what kind of harm was he doing? The sorts of people who just loathe seeing a man like Springer be successful shut him down. It doesn’t matter whether what Springer said is true, that he offered to give it back to the government and they didn’t take it. They let him run that place for decades, then suddenly shut it down.

The female anchor in the end said it all when lamented, “so we can’t go to Zzyzx anymore.”

What do you want out of an enlightened guru? I submit that there’s only one thing you should want from them, that they should make you think and push you to do more. Too many people mistake enlightenment for what I call ‘moral superheroism.’ Doing good deeds does not make you enlightened. I’ve studied enlightenment and consciousness for years. There is only a very, very small number of people that will ever be able to actually reach enlightenment who wouldn’t do it without a teacher.

If you’re not actually going to reach enlightenment, then you might as well go play PuBG with your time. Or anything that you like to do, take walks, read books, whatever you want. Because you don’t need to do anything special to grow your consciousness, and you’re not going to be any more conscious after you get enlightened than you were before.

Nonduality is just a way of perceiving the world. I think quite a few people have managed to incorporate nonduality into their lives, even right here on Quora. It doesn’t give you magic powers, and it doesn’t make you any better at teaching spiritual principles than you were before.

If you do want to reach enlightenment, then you need to reach what I would characterize as a “tipping point.” You realize, to the core of your being, that enlightenment is reached by surrender, and you have to surrender everything. Then you go and do it. Block out a few weeks, stay home. Spend all day surrendering. You want nothing to interfere with your task. It’s a long, arduous process. The ego does not give itself up lightly.

I know a young kid who tried. He tried and tried and tried. Earnestly and intensely. Never got there. His personality was the same before and after. He had formed identification around the intensity of his path and thought enlightenment would bring about more intensity. He didn’t quite grasp what surrender was. Maybe when he gets older he’ll finally get the trick of it.

If you’re conscious enough and enlightenment is a big part of your being, then you’ll find it yourself. You’ll discover spirituality and you’ll discover surrender and one day it’ll feel right and you’ll just go all the way. There’s nothing special or mystical or complicated about the path, it’s very simple. Difficult, but simple. So simple that it’s nearly always misrepresented.

Don’t worry about fake gurus. Meditate on what it means to surrender.