Two of the final Wallis pages converge on one diagnostic. "You are God," correctly understood, deflates the persona — it says the bundle of traits you call yourself is a fleeting thought in an infinite awareness, not that the bundle is divine. The narcissistic misreading inflates it. And the spiritual-bypass misread uses "you're already whole" to skip the painful work. Both counterfeits share a signature: they make the persona feel better — more important, more finished, more excused. The genuine article costs the persona something — its specialness, its grievance, its right to skip the grief. So the test isn't the teaching's content; it's the direction of the cost: a high teaching that leaves you feeling enlarged is the counterfeit; one that leaves you lighter and less interested in your own story is the real thing.
Extends "You Are God" Is Not Narcissism and Spiritual Bypassing and Integration. Connects to behavioral-mechanics (flattery and the ego-hook — why neo-spiritual marketing keeps the flattering payload and drops the corrective). The "direction of the cost" is a portable test for any self-improvement or wisdom claim.
Essay seed: "If It Flatters You, It's the Counterfeit" — a piece arguing that the reliable test for spiritual teaching (and most self-help) is whether it costs the ego or feeds it, and that the entire market is selecting for the feeding kind because the costing kind doesn't sell.
Collision candidate: pulls against any vault page that frames awakening as gaining something (a state, a power, an identity). The recognition-not-acquisition material (Utpaladeva) is the ally; acquisition-framed practice is the tension.
[ ] A second source frames the cost-direction test independently (Kalsched's "the false self resists the very healing it asks for"; bypassing literature) [ ] Has survived two sessions without weakening [ ] The third wire (self-application to my own enjoyment of teachings) still stings